The Russian Foreign Ministry was targeted by a severe cyber attack on Wednesday, coinciding with the major BRICS summit taking place in the country, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

Earlier Zakharova said that the ministry had been targeted by a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS).

“A massive cyberattack from abroad began this morning on the infrastructure of the official website, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s portal,” Zakharova said.

She noted that the ministry regularly encounters similar attacks, but today’s attack was “unprecedented in scale”.

The BRICS summit, aimed at demonstrating Moscow’s global standing despite Western sanctions, takes place in Russia’s Kazan on Oct. 22-24.

(Reuters)