Cyberattack on telecom giant Rostelecom disrupts internet services across Russia

A “large-scale” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeted the network of Russian state-run telecom giant Rostelecom on Monday evening, temporarily disrupting online banking, government platforms and other digital services across dozens of cities.

Rostelecom told state-owned media the attack was quickly contained, adding the disruption to internet services was a consequence of emergency filtering introduced to mitigate the attack. DDoS attacks overwhelm websites and online services with large volumes of junk traffic, making them temporarily unavailable to legitimate users.

Users in roughly 30 Russian cities reported problems with Rostelecom’s home internet service on Monday evening. Several major services became unreachable, including the gaming platform Steam, the government services portal Gosuslugi, the video platform Rutube and banking services.

Some users told local media they were only able to access websites included on so-called “whitelists” — government-approved lists of services that remain accessible during internet disruptions.

As of Tuesday, internet users in Russia continued to report problems accessing some government websites, according to local internet monitoring services.

Russia has been gradually tightening control over its domestic internet ecosystem as part of its efforts to develop a sovereign internet infrastructure known as the “Runet,” designed to allow the country’s network to function independently from the global web.

The latest disruption follows a separate outage last week that knocked out banking applications and payment systems across Russia for several hours, leaving customers in several regions, including Moscow, unable to pay by card, withdraw cash or access mobile banking services.

The cause of that incident remains unclear. Some Russian media outlets suggested it was linked to government attempts to block internet resources, including the filtering of IP addresses used by banking infrastructure. Other reports pointed to a possible internal failure at Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender.