At least five top Russian banks were hit by a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber strikes on Tuesday, characterized for being made possible by a network of compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices from 30 different nations, known as the Mirai botnet. The Russian security firm Kaspersky said that as many as 24,000 computer systems were used by the cyber criminals to knock the websites offline.
These Cyber Strikes Could Even Bring Down Internet Worldwide
Regarding this event, senior cyber threat intelligence manager at Fujitsu, Paul McEvatt, told Newsweek that these cyber strikes represent the delicate situation that many organizations are facing right now, considering that IoT device manufacturers are struggling to find an effective way to solidify security controls from the outset.
By his part, cyber security expert, John McAffe believes that the cyber strikes could even increase, since there many devices that have been added to Mirai´s network. He also explained that this situation is so dangerous that these cyber criminals could even bring down the internet. In fact, this kind of cyber strikes has been made recently, as it was known last month that major websites as Twitter, Reddit, Netflix Spotify or GitHub, also went offline.
Customers Funds Weren't Compromised After All
According to the International Business Times, Sberbank, the largest state-controlled bank in Russia, alongside with Alfa Bank, Moscow Exchange, Rosebank and Moscow bank confirmed that all of them suffered the cyber strikes, but assure that no customers funds were compromised. Apparently, the DDoS cyber strikes use hijacked networks across India, Taiwan, U.S., and Israel, accumulating roughly 660,000 requests that were sent per second.
In the case of Sberbank, which was able to dodge the cyber strikes without getting its main website operations impacted, this represents one of the biggest attacks that the firm has faced, considering that it has encountered 68 situations of this kind last year. Although the banks are trying to improve its security, Kaspersky also explained that these cyber strikes are impossible to contain with the standard tools.
