Russia’s VTB bank hit by largest DDoS attack

Russia’s second-largest bank VTB Bank has suffered the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in its history. The attack affected its customers’ mobile app and banking website access.

The pro-Ukraine collective IT Army of Ukraine, a volunteer cyberwarfare organization created in 2022 to fight against the digital intrusion of Ukrainian information and cyberspace after the beginning of the Russian invasion, has claimed responsibility for the attacks against the bank.

According to a statement by the Russian bank, an unprecedented foreign cyber attack is being made against the bank’s technological infrastructure. The biggest throughout the bank’s existence, not just this year. The bank further stated that the attack did not compromise any customer data.

VTB acknowledged that although most attacks originated from abroad, some traffic was coming from Russian IP addresses. As a result, the bank will inform law enforcement of all discovered Russian IP addresses.

Customers were assured that their data had been safe by bank representatives, according to the sources. The state-owned bank was attempting to thwart the DDoS attack, which is a hacker attempt to overwhelm a network with unusually high volumes of traffic to render it unusable.

Notably, after the invasion of Ukraine started, the number of cyberattacks against the infrastructure of government and private Russian entities has skyrocketed considerably. Most attacks are carried out by hacktivists who support Ukraine, while pro-Russian organizations like the Killnet collective target international organizations and governments that back Kyiv.