Russia's Sberbank financial institution reported that two weeks ago it faced a major DDoS attack , the most powerful in its history.
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a form of cyberattack that aims to disrupt the services of a system or website, making it inaccessible to users. In essence, this attack causes an overload of the system's resources, making it unable to respond to user requests. Attackers in a DDoS attack typically use a network, known as a botnet, consisting of many computers. The attacker uses these computers to send a large volume of requests to the system they wish to “hit”.
See also: Cloudflare: Sees increase in hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks
Sberbank is a majority state-owned banking and financial services that owns about a third of all assets in the country. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the bank faced international blockades and sanctions and was repeatedly targeted by hacktivists defending Western interests.
Russian news agency Interfax reports that the recent DDoS attack on Sberbank reached one million requests per second (RPS), which according to the organization was about four times the size of the most powerful DDoS attackSberbank had experienced up to that point.
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“We noticed that these are some new hackers. They are not known to us. That is, some new, highly skilled criminals appeared on the market and began to systematically attack the largest Russian resources,” the head of Sberbank said.
One million RPS is clearly significant, but it doesn’t compare to DDoS attacks using the new “HTTP/2 Rapid Reset” technique. Attacks using this technique can have an impact a hundred times greater than what Sberbank experienced.
In late August, Amazon encountered a DDoS attack that peaked at 155 million RPS. Cloudflare had faced a 201 million RPS attack, while Google faced a DDoS attack that peaked at 398 million requests per second.
See also: Australia: Home Affairs Service hit by DDoS attack
Sberbank: Previous attacks
In May 2022, Sberbank announced that it was the target of various attacks, including DDoS attacks, targeting its online customer service services
The bank had said it managed to fend off a 450GB/sec DDoS attack, which was launched by a botnet of 27,000 compromised devices.
Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com
