MOSCOW. March 28 (Interfax) - Turnover from Russian cyber crime rose about 30% to about $2.5 billion in 2013, said a specialist at information security company Group-IB.
"The annual report in April will contain the exact statistics. At the moment they're approximate assessments," Sergei Nikitin, deputy head of Group-IB's forensic computer laboratory, told Interfax.
DDoS attacks made up a larger proportion of cyber crimes in 2013 than before. The number of attacks carried out in the first quarter of 2014 exceeded last year's six-month levels if not its annual number, Nikitin said.
Group-IB said that in 2012 Russia's cyber crime turnover went down 6% to $1.98 billion from $2.05 billion the year before. The DDoS attack segment shrank to $110 million from $130 million. "This decrease in that segment was the result of the closure of some large botnets. This trend was sustained into the first half of 2013, but in the autumn the situation deteriorated sharply. In the first quarter of 2014, DDoS attacks against Russian companies and organizations due to the foreign policy situation have grown in intensity significantly," Nikitin said.
He said that this year's DDoS attacks are likely to become more powerful, sophisticated and flexible and cause more damage.
Nikitin said today's Russian market of anti-DDoS services is equivalent to about one-third of the total revenue from such attacks - $110 million in 2012. He said he believed the reason was that many businesses either don't take any serious anti-DDoS measures or believe they are well protected.
According to Radware, a U.S. company supplying anti-DDoS solutions, DDoS attacks are growing in number and duration and are increasingly sophisticated worldwide.
About 25% of them go on for more than a week, 50% simultaneously have more than five targets, which may include data transmission channels, servers and applications, and another 25% have 10 or more targets.
"The company has no separate statistics for Russia. At a meeting of a specialist committee at the State Duma, experts put the growth of DDoS attacks in the Russian Federation in 2013 at 178% and losses at 1.7 trillion rubles," Mikhail Sukonnik, Radware director for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, told Interfax.
Sukonnik said a DDoS attack is a lot easier to organize in Russia than in the West.
"If you put 'order a DDoS attack' in Yandex, you get about 136,000 results - a year ago there were about a million. The cost of the service of organizing such an attack varies from $300 per day to between $500 and $700 per hour, depending on the complexity of the task. As a rule, organizers of DDoS attacks return the money to the customers if an attack fails," he said.