Cyber attacks have cost Russian companies and citizens up to three .6 trillion roubles ($49 billion) this year, the country’s largest lender Sberbank said.
Russia has encouraged its citizens to modify to bank cards and limit cash use to undertake to clamp down on the shadow economy, but the amount of crimes linked to bank cards has shot up by 500% this year, the inside ministry has estimated.
Stanislav Kuznetsov, Sberbank’s deputy chairman, who oversees security and services, told in an interview private business and ordinary Russians were the most targets of cyber attacks, because the state security services are better protected.
“The private sector is that the most vulnerable: everything from the clients’ accounts to financial data and tender documents are targeted: there are 2.3 million darknet accounts operating in Russian and offering the stolen data,” he said.
Russian-speaking cyber criminals operate from Germany, Ukraine and Venezuela, also as Russia, said the state-controlled Sberbank, which runs its own cybersecurity unit BI.ZONE to supply IT protection and cyber defense for the bank and for others.
While banks, including Sberbank are better protected compared with other parts of the economy, phone fraud – when the client is asked by an individual claiming to be a bank employee to supply a card’s data – is becoming more common, Kuznetsov said.
He estimated Russians may lose the maximum amount as 10 billion roubles from phone fraud this year alone. He didn’t provide data for 2019.
The Russian financial institution recorded quite half 1,000,000 unauthorized operations across bank accounts within the country last year, which saw 6.4 billion roubles stolen from private and company bank accounts.
($1 = 73.7290 roubles)
