Russia has recorded a record botnet attack on government agencies

Russia has neutralized the largest botnet attack on government agencies and public organizations in recent years, which included the activities of 4.6 million IP addresses. This was reported to Izvestia by the cybersecurity company Curator. We are talking about the attack that took place on May 16.

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The targets of the attackers were telecom, the financial sector and government organizations.

With such an attack on unprotected or poorly protected resources, a DDoS botnet of this size can generate tens of millions of requests per second and disable the attacked servers.

"For comparison, the largest DDoS botnet identified in 2023 consisted of 136 thousand devices, and the largest DDoS botnet discovered in 2024 consisted of 227 thousand devices," the company's press service explained.

In particular, approximately 1.37 million IP addresses blocked during the attack (30% of the total botnet) were registered in Brazil, 555 thousand devices were from the USA, 362 thousand from Vietnam, 135 thousand from India and 127 thousand from Argentina.

"Earlier this year, we had already encountered this botnet — then we blocked 1.33 million IP addresses. At the same time, we observed a more than threefold increase in the number of devices involved in the attack, which may indicate the active development of the botnet by its organizers," said Dmitry Tkachev, CEO of Curator.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

Intelligence failure: the largest bot attack on government agencies in the Russian Federation was stopped