Russian brokers faced most powerful series of DDoS attacks in history

Russian brokerage companies were subjected to a wave of the most powerful DDoS-attacks in history, which caused technical problems in the operation of their websites and deprived users of access to their services for several hours, company StormWall reported.

According to the company's experts, in the past there were registered only isolated cases of attacks on brokers, and only with the purpose of extortion. This time there were really powerful series of attacks on several companies at once, including BCS, Finam and Otkrytie investments. It is most likely that politically motivated hackers were behind the attacks: earlier calls for such attacks were heard in the Telegram channel of the Ukrainian IT Army, which currently has over 200,000 members. The peak of the attacks came at the end of October 2022.

Most of the attacks lasted 5-7 hours, but some lasted up to 10 hours.

According to StormWall, as a result of attacks hackers managed to damage key services of brokerage companies (websites were unavailable for several hours, there were technical crashes in personal accounts, users could not use brokerage services), but more serious consequences were avoided due to the use of modern DDoS-attack protection systems by these companies.

What is a DDoS-attack?

A DDoS attack is a hacker attack that results in the failure or disruption of various types of infrastructures in a website or client service.

Typically, web servers have limits on the number of requests they can serve at one time. There are also bandwidth limitations on the channel that connects the server to the Internet.

When the number of requests received begins to exceed the performance of any infrastructure component, it can lead to a complete shutdown of the web resource - a "denial-of-service" or DoS (Denial-of-service).