In St. Petersburg, at the site of the House of Journalists, Telesputnik, together with its partners, held a round table on DDoS attacks.

On March 31, at the site of the House of Journalists in St. Petersburg, Telesputnik, together with the official publication of the Government of St. Petersburg, Petersburg Diary, held a round table on the topic "How to protect business and government services from DDoS attacks. Development of digital services in St. Petersburg". During the event, government and business representatives discussed the issue of DDoS attacks, which have become more frequent in recent years. Increasingly, attackers are targeting financial institutions, the public sector, and the telecom market.

The event was attended by:

- Oksana Novoslugina, Deputy Director for Information Security at SPb IAC, representative of the St. Petersburg Government Committee on Digitalization;

- Victoria Korzhuk, Associate Professor at the ITMO Faculty of Information Technology Security;

- Ruslan Kirichek, Rector of M.A. Bonch-Bruevich St. Petersburg State University;

- Cybersecurity expert, Product Development Specialist at EdTechLab (Positive Technologies) Makar Lyakhnov;

- Cybersecurity expert, Head of the Internet Search company Igor Bederov;

- Sergey Polunin, Head of the IT Solutions Infrastructure Protection Group at Gazinformservice;

- Sergey Zlotnikov, Deputy Head of the 1st Department of the UBK of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region.

The event began with a discussion on the resilience of urban online services to DDoS attacks. According to Oksana Novoslugina, a representative of the relevant committee, large-scale DDoS attacks have been recorded since 2022. At first, they led to certain difficulties and interruptions in the operation of services, but the systems have been upgraded.

"One of the longest-running attacks was in 2022. The continuous load on the services went on for three days, but we survived. There was no service failure. We observed a slowdown in his work, but in general we coped," she explained.

During the round table, the guests paid special attention to the topic of cooperation between universities, the regional government and business in the field of information security.

According to ITMO representative Victoria Korzhuk, today the university implements many research and educational projects of cooperation with both government authorities and industrial partners. It is not uncommon for students to pay attention specifically to the issue of DDoS attacks.

"DDoS attacks are an interesting area. Despite the fact that they appeared a long time ago, new methods of detecting and stopping them are being created. At the same time, there is no absolute guarantee that we will definitely be able to do this. By themselves, these are fairly easy-to-implement attacks that take place at different levels of inter-network interaction. This explains their popularity. Due to the fact that they are not very difficult to implement, there are many ideas on how to level them. And our students regularly write final qualifying papers and submit projects on detecting and countering DDoS attacks," explained Victoria Korzhuk.

As a result of the round table, the participants outlined ways to possibly combat DDoS attacks, voiced the risks of such threats to businesses and government agencies, and discussed the prospects for further meetings. More details will be available soon, in the materials on the Telesputnik website.