This week, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova leveled yet another explosive claim against the United States. When asked about the Russian Foreign ministry being hacked recently, Zakharova said “the ministry’s website regularly comes under attack from IP addresses registered in the US”.
As per mid.ru:
I would like to remind you that for months Russia has been accused of using hackers to interfere in the internal affairs of the US and other western countries, but not a scrap of conclusive evidence has been presented either to us or to anybody else. All of these allegations follow the form of UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s remark that they have no evidence but are sure the Russians have the capability to meddle. Unlike our western colleagues, we do have something to show.
I would like to say that this is quite a sensational story. Today I will tell you about what our agency and just one website regularly run up against, although there are a lot of sites that regularly come under attack. I believe we will be regularly updating you on these statistics. This example will give you an idea of the scale of resources directed against Russian government agencies.
Specialists say the ministry’s website regularly comes under attack from IP addresses registered in the US. In February 2017 alone, three attacks were registered. In March 2017, we recorded a significantly heightened level of activity by so-called bots, automatic programmes that can adversely affect the Foreign Ministry’s website from the US. Their share of the total number of visitors to the pages was 88 percent (1.51 million bot users of 1.77 million came from US territory). This refers to visits not by ordinary users who are interested in specific materials but those who use the entire array of actions that are usually called hacking attacks, computer systems, everything that does not qualify as legal or legitimate use of cyber technology. Bot visits to our website account for 50 percent of the total (1.47 million page viewings of 2.97 million). Analysis showed that all of them have similar characteristics (they are used by the same programme or organisation). According to our technical services, they come mainly from the US, from California (64 percent of all queries from Mountain View (47 percent) and San Jose (17 percent)), as well as from Ohio (8 percent) and the District of Columbia (8 percent).
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