19.07 RIA Novosti website suffers this year�s largest DDoS attack

MOSCOW, July 19 (RIA Novosti) � RIA Novosti's website www.ria.ru was hit by a DDos attack on Thursday, this year�s largest attack so far, which was registered by specialists of both the news agency�s internal services and the external traffic filtering system.

The monitoring system went off at 5:39 p.m. Moscow time, warning of the start of the attack, Anatoly Stoyanovsky, head of RIA Novosti�s Software Development Directorate, said.

�Our on-duty services immediately responded to the emergency. Automatic filtering mechanisms were activated as planned,� Stoyanovsky said.

The main amount of bots was located in Ukraine and Belarus, he added.

��We saw the peak number of requests per minute reaching some 150,000, but within several minutes, malicious traffic was blocked,� the head of the directorate emphasized.

In May 2012, the RIA Novosti website was hit by a DDos attack from some 2,500 IP-addresses, and the light version of the site had to be temporary put online.

A DDos attck is a type of web attack where multiple infected computers send requests to the website, creating massive false traffic that leads to the site getting slowed down or becoming unavailable.