VTB Bank Was Hit by the Biggest DDoS Attack in History In Russia

Bank VTB Russia was hit by a DDoS attack. (photo: twitter @vtb)

JAKARTA – The second largest bank in Russia, Bank VTB was hit by the biggest cyber attack in its history. This was stated by a source at the bank Tuesday, December 6 who warned of temporary difficulties in accessing its mobile application and website. But VTB assures customers that their data remains safe.

VTB, Russia's state-owned bank, said it was successfully repelling a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers attempt to flood a network with extremely high volumes of data traffic to disable it.

"The bank's technological infrastructure is under unprecedented cyber attack from abroad," VTB said in a statement, quoted by Reuters. "The biggest is not just this year, but the entire time the bank has been operating."

These Russian government entities and state-owned companies have been targeted for events in Ukraine, along with Kremlin websites, flagship airline Aeroflot and lender Sberbank which have also experienced temporary outages or access problems.

Hackers also delayed the start of a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin at Russia's flagship economic forum earlier this year.

Pro-Russian hackers, meanwhile, have claimed responsibility or attacks on websites and infrastructure in other countries such as Lithuania, Norway and the United States this year.

VTB said most of the attacks came from abroad, mainly related to traffic from Russian IP addresses. VTB will turn over all Russian IP addresses identified in the attack to law enforcement.