The Kremlin has reportedly been hit by what they have described as a “very powerful” distributed denial of service attack – also known as a DDoS attack. The attack is reported to have targeted the nation’s electoral commission.
A similar attack was made on Sunday, which targeted the official website of Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
As many as 50,000 requests per minute were made in the attacks, according to Vladimir Churov, chairman of Russia’s electoral commission. Churov also announced that the attack was based in the United States, saying that a company in San Francisco has already been identified as the source of the attack.
DDoS attacks work by flooding a network with requests, resultantly bringing applications or websites down as they are unable to cope with the heavy traffic. Additionally, experts such as Dave Larson, CTO at Corero Network Security, have said in the past that DDoS attacks can mask other nefarious activities such as network profiling, aiding hackers in their next attack.
