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Pro-Russian “Killnet” group launches DDoS attack against the U.S. Treasury Department.

The U.S. Treasury Department was targeted by a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks attributed to Killnet, a pro-Russian hacker group that had already claimed responsibility for operations against U.S. state government websites and airport portals. A senior Treasury official, cybersecurity counselor Todd Conklin, said the incident caused “little to no disruption” to Treasury operations and was successfully repelled, arguing that it demonstrated the effectiveness of the department’s strengthened cybersecurity posture for the financial system. The attacks focused on overwhelming public-facing services with malicious traffic rather than breaching internal networks or stealing data, a typical Killnet tactic aimed at visibility and nuisance value. According to public reports, Treasury and its partners detected and mitigated the DDoS flows before they could materially affect core functions, including payment systems and sanctions-implementation tools. Officials linked the episode to a wider campaign of Russian-aligned cyber pressure that intensified after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Killnet targeting institutions in NATO countries that support Kyiv. In the financial domain, Treasury had already been working with banks and critical market utilities to harden defenses and share threat intelligence on Russian-attributed cyber activity, and the October attack was held up internally as a live test of these measures.

Occurrence

2022-11-01

Publication

2022-10-31T23:00:00Z

First observed

2026-09-24T06:09:10.079Z

Review status

Not assessed

Countries

US

Updated

2026-09-27T23:56:59.668Z