Yandex says it's facing the biggest DDoS attack in history

Russian internet giant Yandex is reportedly grappling with the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Russian-language community on the internet and websites collectively known as Runet.

The news comes courtesy of Russian-language publication Vedomosti who claim the scale of the attack was confirmed by Cloudflare.

According to BleepingComputer, Runet was conceptualized to function independently of the world wide web, and maintain unified country-wide communication infrastructure in the event of a cyber attack by a foreign adversary.

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A machine translated version of the Vedomosti article quotes a Yandex official who confirmed the information about the attack, while playing down its scale.

“Yandex did indeed undergo a DDoS attack, which was repelled by our network infrastructure and system for filtering unwanted requests. The attack did not affect the operation of the services, user data was not affected,” the unnamed official told the publication.

Record scale?

Citing Yandex sources, Vedomosti claims that the DDoS attack started over the weekend and that Yandex is facing a hard time to repeal the malicious campaign, which is still ongoing.

The Russian report says that both Yandex and Cloudflare didn’t directly quantify the scale of the campaign, owing to an ongoing internal audit according to an anonymous Yandex source. However, the source reportedly claims the incident represents “a threat to infrastructure on a national scale.”

There are no details about the type of DDoS or its size but the Russian publication is saying that Cloudflare web infrastructure security company confirmed the “record scale of the cyberattack.”

While the official sources are tight-lipped about the campaign, the report speaks to Alexander Lyamin, CEO of Qrator Labs, a DDoS-filtering service, who seems to think that Yandex is being attacked by a new botnet that “is built on the network equipment of a very popular vendor from the Baltic States. It spreads through a vulnerability in firmware and already numbers up to hundreds of thousands of infected devices."

Yandex didn’t immediately respond to TechRadar Pro’s message seeking more details about the campaign.