Russia’s World Cup Infrastructure Suffers 25 Million Cyber-attacks On It

Russian president Vladimir Putin said there were 25 million attempted cyber-attacks targeting the country’s “information infrastructure” linked to the World Cup.

“During the World Cup almost 25 million cyberattacks and other criminal attempts on Russia’s information infrastructure, connected in one way or another to the running of the football World Cup, were neutralized,” the president is quoted in a transcript of a meeting with security forces published Monday.

Sean Sullivan, security advisor at F-Secure emailed SC Media UK to put those big numbers into perspective, commenting: “Clearly there weren’t 25 million “cyber-attacks”. (Which would be physically destructive if properly defined.) And what about DDoS attacks? Unlikely. What then? IP addresses and other related activity? Probably. I have no doubt that threat monitoring would have generated 25 million suspicious data points during the World Cup.

“So, it would be more accurate to say something such as unauthorised network scans and DDoS attempts were monitored and successfully mitigated on an impressive scale, requiring tens of millions of data points to be processed. Well done to Russia’s security teams. But that doesn’t sound as impressive, politically speaking, does it?”