The referendum in Crimea turned into a cyber war between supporters of the Russian and Ukrainian status of the peninsula
Kyiv - Moscow, March 17 (Navigator, Alisa Filatova) - A number of websites of Russian ministries were subject to DDoS attacks by opponents of the referendum in Crimea. This is the official page of the President of Russia, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central Bank, as well as Channel One, the Vedomosti newspaper writes today.
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As it turned out, the attack began the week before last. Back on March 7, the media holding "Expert" reported about DDoS attacks that "turned off" the websites of its magazines "Expert" and "Russian Reporter", and "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" - about the hacking of the site by Ukrainian hackers from Cybersotny, who left a corresponding message on its main page page.
According to its owners, the Crimean referendum website referendum2014.org.ua survived several DDoS attacks. He was also blocked twice by the Ukrainian authorities - and eventually moved to RuNet at referendum2014.ru. The latest victim in a series of DDoS attacks were three NATO sites, including the main one. They did not work on the night from Saturday to Sunday, and only in the afternoon, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lugnescu said that the work of the main services of the sites had been restored.
“The cyber war showed that no one on the RuNet was ready for it: neither telecom operators, nor hosting providers, nor media sites,” Qrator Labs CEO Alexander Lyamin told Vedomosti. According to his estimates, more than 90% of Russian Internet providers do not have the means to filter requests from fake IP addresses, which make DDoS attacks possible by clogging the communication channels of hosting providers.
Lyamin says that filtering costs virtually nothing - these are purely organizational measures described in the 10-year-old recommendations of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). According to him, in Russia, among the large providers, only Rostelecom follows them. However, for example, MTS claims that it has been implementing IETF recommendations for several years, VimpelCom has developed and is testing a hybrid solution to counter DDoS attacks, and Megafon provides its clients with countermeasures against DDoS attacks.