MOSCOW, August 4 (RIA Novosti) - Rossiya Segodnya News Agency, including its flagship website ria.ru and the project on Ukraine, continues to thwart mass cyber-attacks for the second day in a row, the company's IT official said late on Monday.
"Throughout the day today, the attacking side was using various attack vectors, switching between websites. From time to time, the attacks would stop and resume in a new direction an hour or two later. Many resources got hit, including the 'Ukraine' website. Our specialists discovered the changes in the attack direction as quickly as was possible and blocked them together with the providers," the official said.
Hackers initially attempted to break into the system on Sunday, which is a typical time for cyber-attacks. A DDoS attack on the main website and its InoSMI (foreign-language media) project was successfully repelled, the Rossiya Segodnya IT service said.
One day later, the attacks resumed with new force.
"The attacks are getting stronger. New botnet members keep joining the attackers. Some attacks involved up to 90,000 botnet members. The highest fixed traffic flow in an attempt to penetrate our security system was 70 gigabit," the IT expert said.
The Rossiya Segodnya flagship website suffered several hacker attacks in the past. Attacks from some 2,500 IP-addresses hit the site in May 2012. Last July, the site got up to 150,000 requests per minute at the peak of a massive attack.
The current attack differs from the ones in the past, due to a wider range of methods used, the IT specialist said.
