Attackers use hacked home routers to hit 5 Russian banks

Botnets made up of hacked home routers were used to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against the five largest financial organizations in Russia.

The attacks occurred on Monday, Dec. 5, and were detected and mitigated by Rostelecom, Russia's state-owned telecommunications company. The attacks peaked at 3.2 million packets per second (Mpps) and the longest attack lasted for over two hours, Rostelecom reported Friday.

The company did not provide a bandwidth measurement for the attacks, but 3.2Mpps is not that much. DDoS mitigation providers regularly see attacks that exceed 100 Mpps and a very large September attack against the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs peaked at 665Gbps and 143Mpps.

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