Big Russian port operator says its systems were targeted by foreign hackers

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia's Port Alliance group, which operates a network of sea cargo terminals, said on Thursday that foreign hackers had targeted its systems over three days in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and an attempted hack.

It said in a statement that critical elements of its digital infrastructure had been targeted with the aim of disrupting export shipments of coal and mineral fertilisers at its sea terminals in the Baltic, Black Sea, Far East and Arctic regions.

The attack was successfully repelled and operations remained unaffected, Port Alliance said.

Denial of service is among the web's most basic form of attack and it works by simply overwhelming targeted servers with a firehose of bogus requests for data, making it impossible for legitimate web traffic to get through.

Russian authorities and state companies have regularly reported attempted DDoS and hacking attacks from abroad since Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine and some Western countries have in turn accused Russia of launching cyberattacks.

Port Alliance group operates cargo terminals at five Russian ports.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Gleb Stolyarov and Anton Kolodyazhnyy; Editing by Andrew Osborn)