MTS RED, a subsidiary of MTS in the field of cybersecurity, repelled over 6,200 DDoS attacks on customer web resources in the first quarter of 2024. This is 1.5 more than for the entire second half of 2023. Ryazan, among a number of other cities in Central Russia, was in second place in the number of cyber attacks since the beginning of the year.
DDoS or denial of service attacks are aimed at making a company’s website or infrastructure unavailable to users. This can lead to financial losses from business downtime and long-term customer churn, as well as damage to the company’s reputation. Attackers carried out the largest number of DDoS attacks on company websites in March – this month accounted for 43% of incidents. Also in March, the longest DDoS attack was carried out: for 21 hours, hackers tried to bring down the website of a company that produces unmanned aerial vehicles.
In addition, in the first quarter of 2024, the power record was broken among all attacks on customer web resources previously repelled by MTS RED specialists. The most intense attack was 207 Gigabits per second, which is twice the intensity of the previous most powerful incident recorded in December 2023. The target of a record attack was a company in the Central Federal District.
“Recently, we have noted an increase not only in the duration and intensity of DDoS attacks, but also in the technical savvy of their organizers. For example, when carrying out the most powerful attack in March, the attackers did not target arbitrary company servers, but rather the router, in order to cut off Internet access for the maximum number of resources at once. Therefore, reliable protection against DDoS attacks is already a hygienic minimum of protection for a company of any size,” emphasized Andrey Dugin, head of the MTS RED cybersecurity services center.
The leading region in the number of attacks in the first quarter of 2024 was the Volga region (Orenburg, Perm, Izhevsk, Neftekamsk, etc.): 38.5% of all attacks were carried out on the websites of organizations located here. Second place was taken by the Central Federal District (Tver, Voronezh, Ryazan, Orel, Naro-Fominsk, etc.) – 27.8% of incidents. Siberia (Krasnoyarsk, Angarsk, etc.) closes the top three with 12.5% of attacks. Hackers least often attacked the websites of organizations in the North Caucasus (0.2% of incidents).
“The most common targets for DDoS attacks were IT companies and telecoms – they accounted for almost 40% of all repelled attacks. The public sector was in second place – about a third of all attacks carried out, and industrial enterprises were in third place. Less often, attackers tried to attack the resources of financial organizations. The attacks were detected and repelled, the operation of systems and services in the Ryazan region was not disrupted,” said Alexander Lyak, director of the MTS branch in the Ryazan region.
MTS RED is an ecosystem of technologies, services and cybersecurity services that solves the full range of customer problems in terms of reducing cyber risks. The MTS RED product portfolio includes services from the center for monitoring and responding to cyber attacks MTS RED SOC, services for analyzing the security of IT infrastructure and developed applications, assessing practical information security, services for encrypting communication channels (GOST VPN), protecting against DDoS attacks, protecting web applications ( WAF), increasing employee cyber literacy (Security Awareness), multi-factor authentication (MFA).
