According to the Russian news portal Vedomosti, Ukrainian cyber threat actors compromised Russia’s central alcohol distribution portal that is considered crucial for the distribution of alcoholic beverages in Russian regions called Unified State Automated Alcohol Accounting Information System or EGAIS.
EGAIS is a portal that plays important role in alcohol distribution in the nation. As per the law, for all alcohol producers and distributors, it is mandatory to register their shipments with EGAIS. Therefore, this attack caused extensive service blockage across Russia.
The group hit the portal with DDoS attacks launched on May 2nd and 3rd. Through the DDoS or distributed denial of service attacks, the perpetrators overwhelm servers with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and render some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
Also, according to the experts, sophisticated strategies have to be required against such types of attacks, as simply attempting to block a single source is insufficient. Three sites belonging to the platform have been hit by DDoS attacks.
On May 4th, two EGAIS sites showed the error “the server stopped responding,” and the third didn’t work.
The attacks took place on May 2nd and the next day system failures became more obvious about the attack.
Wine trader Fort said that the site stopped working on May 4th, and the Union of Alcohol Producers, Igor Kosarev, and Ladoga representatives claimed the same.
Fort further added that they had failed to upload about 70% of invoices to EGAIS due to the attack. Its supplies of wine to retail chains and restaurants in the region apparently failed to distribute on May 4 due to the incident.
The outage impacted not only vodka distribution but wine companies faced disruption as well alongside purveyors of other types of alcohol.
“Due to a large-scale failure, factories cannot accept tanks with alcohol, and customers, stores, and distributors cannot receive finished products that have already been delivered to them,” Vedomosti reported.
Ukrainian threat actors group, the Disbalancer took responsibility for the attack and announced their future plans to launch more attacks on the platform.
