Understand the impact of the Ukraine conflict from a cross-sector perspective with the Global Data Executive Briefing: Ukraine Conflict
Russian banking major VTB has confirmed that its technical infrastructure has been hit by a cyberattack and called the largest in its history.
Go deeper with GlobalData
In a statement released to Russian media houses, the bank said: “The bank’s technological infrastructure is under an unprecedented cyberattack from abroad.”
“The largest not only this year, but in the whole time the bank has operated,” the statement added.
The bank said specialists are taking all required steps to counter the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The bank assured that the customer data is safe from the attack. However, it warned that due to the countermeasures, customers may face difficulty in accessing the bank’s services.
According to VTB’s analysis, the large-scale DDoS attack was planned.
In a DDoS attack, perpetrators try to overload a network using high volumes of data traffic to interfere with its services.
While some malicious traffic has also come from Russian IP addresses, most requests for bank services during the attack have come from abroad, VTB noted.
The bank said it will hand over all confirmed Russian IP addresses to law enforcement agencies.
Following Moscow’s decision to invade Ukraine, the websites of the Kremlin, Aeroflot, and Sberbank, are among the state-owned businesses and government agencies in Russia that have faced cyber-attack.
In a separate development, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev has said that VTB will acquire Otkritie Bank’s assets before the end of this year, Reuters reported.
Speaking to journalists, Moiseev said the deal is expected to close in December and “the necessary processes are underway”.
