Russian banks attacked by IoT devices

Five major Russian banks (Sberbank, Alfa Bank, the Bank of Moscow, Rosbank, and the Moscow Exchange) were targeted by a botnet comprised of 24,000 computer and IoT devices from 30 countries, including the United States, India, and Taiwan. The attack was a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) which sent millions of requests to servers, taking them offline. The banks have denied any customer information has been stolen. It took two days for the systems to normalize. According to Kaspersky Labs, the peak the botnet was sending, was around 660,000 requests per second. Most of the data deluges lasted about 60 minutes but the most persistent attack went on for about 12 hours, the security firm added. The attack was similar to what took down Twitter, Netflix and others, although not at the same scale. "These are complex attacks that are virtually impossible to stop with standard tools available to communications providers," said Kaspersky Lab. Botnets are starting to become a major problem, as more IoT devices come online with poor security credentials from their owners. The surge of these devices has provided hackers with a lot of connected devices that can be compromised easily. The U.S. government issued warnings to the makers of these devices, and planned to publish guidelines for how they should encrypt and secure the devices. The last DDoS attack on this scale against Russian banks happened in October 2015, when eight major institutions were targeted.