Russia fended off more than 70 million cyber-attacks in 2016, the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has claimed.
Nikolai Murashov, spokesperson for the FSB’s communications security center, told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday that the majority of attacks had originated abroad.
He maintained that Russia was well-equipped to fight off the potential hacks, but warned that many major Russian companies were not taking potential cyber threats seriously enough.
"Many companies which own large parts of the country’s critical information infrastructure are using these means of cyber defense,” he said, “but at the same time, there are companies, which, from our point of view, just aren’t paying enough attention.”
Russian security services expert Andrei Soldatov told The Moscow Times that he was skeptical about the FSB's overall figures.
"It seems that they are simply summarizing all kinds of attack and anything which possibly could have happened," he said.
