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DDoS attacks are a growing issue facing by governments and businesses. In a recent attack, thousands of legitimate WordPress websites have been hijacked by hackers, without the need for them to be compromised. Instead, the attackers took advantage of an existing WordPress vulnerability ( CVE-2013-0235 ) - " Pingback Denial of Service possibility ". According to security company Sucuri , in a recent amplification attack more than 162,000 legitimate Wordpress sites were abused to launch a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack . The attack exploited an issue with the XML-RPC (XML remote procedure call) of the WordPress, use to provide services such as Pingbacks, trackbacks, which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site. The functionality should be used to generate cross references between blogs, but it can easily be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. " Any

Currently there are more than Million people worldwide playing Windows Games, Computer Games and Online Video Games, at least an hour a day, but the gaming servers are often insecure and misconfigured. Yesterday, a popular multiplayer Free Online Game ' Wurm ' servers were knocked offline by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Servers were targeted shortly after its most recent update. The Online Game company announced a Bounty Reward of  €10,000  ($13,000) for information about the attacker involved in the recent DDOS attack .  As the gaming servers go down, the company will lose gamers, reputation and revenue. The Wurn Online Game developer said: " We can offer 10,000 Euro for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack. " Free Online Game service was already planning to change the server, but the DDoS attack made the gaming application offline for more than a day. " Shortly after todays update we wer

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is the one of favourite weapon for the hackers to temporarily suspend services of a host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack. Since 2013, Hackers have adopted new tactics to boost Distributed Denial of Service attack sizes, which is known as ' Amplification Attack ', that provide the benefits of obscuring the source of the attack, while enabling the bandwidth to be used to multiply the size of the attack. Just yesterday, hackers have succeeded in reaching new heights of the massive DDoS attack targeting content-delivery and anti-DDoS protection firm CloudFlare , reaching more than 400Gbps at its peak of traffic, striking at the company's data servers in Europe. " Very big NTP reflection attack hitting us right now. Appears to be bigger than the #Spamhaus attack from last year. Mitigating ," CloudFlare CEO Matthew Price said in a tweet. " Someone's got a big, new can

Since 2011, the collective hacking group, Anonymous and LulzSec were targeting both Government and law-enforcement websites of U.S and UK, by their own DDoS attack tactics which they used to communicate and plan on Chat rooms known as IRCs, but British intelligence agency GCHQ used their own weapon against them. According to the recent Edward Snowden document, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is also very well known as the British counterpart of the NSA, had shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a " denial of service " (DDOS) attacks, making the British government the first western government known to have conducted such an attack, NBC news reports . The same DDoS technique the hackers use to take down government, political and industry websites, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), Sony News International and Westbor

Have you given shed to Zombies in your house? No???? May be you have no idea about it. After Computers, Servers, Routers, Mobiles, Tablets…. Now its turn of your home appliances to be a weapon or a victim of cyber war. Recently Security Researchers from Proofpoint  found more than 100,000 Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances compromised by hackers to send out 750,000 malicious spam emails. As the ' Internet of Things ' becoming smart and popular it became an easy weapon for cyber criminals to launch large scale of cyber attacks. " The attack that Proofpoint observed and profiled occurred between December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014, and featured waves of malicious email, typically sent in bursts of 100,000, three times per day, targeting Enterprises and individuals worldwide." Previously, such attacks were only drafted theoretically by researchers, but this is the first such proven attack involved smart household appliances that are used as ' thingB

The New Year begins with a new form of amplified Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack, a weapon for attackers to bring down websites and servers. As we have reported two weeks ago that the attackers are abusing the Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to perform an amplified version of DDoS Attack on various targets across the world. Earlier this week a number of popular Gaming services, including League of Legends, EA.com and Battle.net from Blizzard were taken down by similar DDoS attack . 'Network Time Protocol (NTP)' is a distributed network clock time synchronization protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock times in a network of computers and runs over port 123 UDP. " The attacker sends a small spoofed 8-byte UDP packets are sent to the vulnerable NTP Server that requests a large amount of data (megabytes worth of traffic) be sent to the DDoS's target IP Address.  "Security Researcher, Wang Wai  detailed  in a previous article on 'The

In 2013, we have seen a significant increase in the use of a specific distributed denial of service (DDoS) methodology known as Distributed Reflection Denial of Service attacks (DrDoS). Open and misconfigured DNS (Domain Name System) can be used by anyone to resolve domain names to IP addresses are increasingly abused to launch powerful DDoS attacks. But not only the DNS servers, Security Researchers at Symantec  have spotted Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection DDoS attacks being launched by cyber criminals during the Christmas Holidays. ' Network Time Protocol (NTP) ' is a distributed network clock time synchronization protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock times in a network of computers and runs over port 123 UDP. NTP is one of those set-it-and-forget-it protocols that is configured once and most network administrators don't worry about it after that. Unfortunately, that means it is also not a service that is upgraded often, leaving it vulnerable to th

Eric Rosol , A  38-year-old hacker who joined an Anonymous hacker attack for just one minute has been sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay $183,000 fine. Yes you read right! $183,000 fine  for just 1 Minute of DDoS attack. In 2011, Eric participated in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack organized by hacker collective Anonymous against the servers of Koch Industries. The DDoS attack was organized in opposition to Koch Industries' reported weakening of trade unions. He used a software called a Low Orbit Ion Cannon Code , LOIC is a popular DDoS tool used by anonymous hackers and other hackers to perform the DDoS attack. Rosol pleaded guilty and was agreed to direct pay for the losses as a result of the attack on the company website i.e. around $5,000 only, but Koch Industries had argued that it hired a consulting group to protect its web sites at a cost of approximately $183,000. Unfortunately, the company website was knocked offline for just 15

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has arrested a gang of cyber criminals believed to be responsible for creating the Skynet Botnet. Skynet was first detected by Security Firm G DATA in December 2012. It is a variant of the famous Zeus malware to steal banking credentials with DDoS attack and Bitcoin mining capabilities. The Botnet was controlled from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server hidden behind Tor network in order to evade sinkholing. According to a press release from German police, they arrested two people suspected of illegally generating Bitcoins worth nearly $1 million using a modified version of existing malware i.e. Skynet Botnet. German police conducted raids earlier this week on 3rd December and found evidence of other hacking activities i.e. Fraud and distribution of copyrighted pornographic material. A third person is under suspicion but has not been arrested. However, Police didn't mention Skynet Botnet in their press release, but just a day

In a recent cyber attack on a Forum site, thousands of outdated legitimate WordPress blogs were abused to perform DDOS attacks using previously known vulnerabilities . After analyzing the Log file from the victim's server, we have noticed many Wordpress CMS based educational (.EDU) and Government (.GOV) websites from where the attack was originated. In the past we have reported about many such cyber attacks, where attackers hacked into the Wordpress blogs using password brute-force attack or they used the  PINGBACK  vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress without compromising the server. WordPress has a built in functionality called Pingback , which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site and it can be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. We have seen more than 100,000 IP addresses involved in the recent DDOS attack and the victim's Forum website received more than 40,000 requests in 7 mi

The breaking news is that, another Bitcoin exchange  company gets hacked i.e. BIPS ( bips.me ), one of the largest European Danish Bitcoin payment processors. On Friday evening, a bunch of cyber criminals just broke into BIPs - Bitcoin payment processor servers and wiped out around 1,295 Bitcoin from people's wallets, currently worth $1 Million. More than 22,000 consumer wallets have been compromised and BIPS will be contacting the affected users. Initially on 15th November, Hackers launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on BIPS, originate from Russia and neighboring countries and then hackers attacked again on 17th November. This time somehow they got access to several online Bitcoin wallets, which allowed them to steal the 1,295 BTC. " As a consequence Bips will temporarily close down the wallet initiative to focus on real-time merchant processing business which does not include storing of Bitcoins. " company says. " All existing users will be aske

Takashi Katsuki, a researcher at Antivirus firm Symantec has discovered a new cyber attack ongoing in the wild, targeting an open-source Web server application server Apache Tomcat with a cross platform Java based backdoor that can be used to attack other machines. The malware, dubbed as " Java.Tomdep " differs from other server malware and is not written in the PHP scripting language. It is basically a Java based backdoor act as Java Servlet that gives Apache Tomcat platforms malicious capabilities. Because Java is a cross platform language, the affected platforms include Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and most supported versions of Windows. The malware was detected less than a month ago and so far the number of infected machines appears to be low. You may think that this type of attack only targets personal computers, such as desktops and laptops, but unfortunately that isn't true. Servers can also be attacked. They are quite valuable targets, since they are usu

Browser-based botnets are the T-1000s of the DDoS world. Just like the iconic villain of the old Judgment Day movie, they too are designed for adaptive infiltration. This is what makes them so dangerous. Where other more primitive bots would try to brute-force your defenses, these bots can simply mimic their way through the front gate. By the time you notice that something`s wrong, your perimeter has already been breached, your servers were brought down, and there is little left to do but to hang up and move on. So how do you flush out a T-1000? How do you tell a browser-based bot from a real person using a real browser? Some common bot filtering methods, which usually rely on sets of Progressive Challenges , are absolutely useless against bots that can retain cookies and execute JavaScripts. The alternative to indiscriminately flashing CAPTCHA's for anyone with a browser is nothing less than a self-inflicted disaster - especially when the attacks can go on for weeks a

12-year-old Canadian has pleaded guilty to breaking into multiple major government and police websites in the name of the hacker collective Anonymous . Surprisingly, this Fifth Grade student wreaked computer havoc during the Quebec student uprising in 2012, traded pirated information to Anonymous for video games. He had not just participated in  DDoS attacks , but also stole information belonging to users and administrators. The court estimates he did $60,000 worth of damage by attacking major government websites included those of Montreal police, the Quebec Institute of Public Health, the Chilean government and some non-public sites. His lawyer also described in the Court that buy saw it as a challenge, he was only 12 years old and was no political purpose. According to Montreal police, the boy also taught others how to hack. The 12 year old was among the several hackers arrested over the Anonymous protest. While others have been arrested in connection with t

Last Tuesday, The National Police Agency of South Korea warned the people that many Malware infected video games being offered in the South Korean markets with the purpose of launching Cyber attacks on the Country. That Malware is collecting location data and IP addresses of infected users and according to experts, malware is sending data back to its master servers based in North Korea . Just today the Korea's largest anti-virus software firm AhnLab  confirmed that they have detected distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on local companies' websites. According to the report, about 16 websites of 13 companies, including Daum, MSN and the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper had been affected. AhnLab said that some 10-thousand computers have been hit, mainly because they failed to install a vaccination program or update an existing one since the last cyber attack in July. The attack was detected around 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, infecting around 10,000 computer

It should be the busiest day of the year for your business, but your website has just disappeared off the Internet and orders have dried up. If this happens to you, then you likely just become yet another victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack . By now, everyone who uses the Internet has come across DDoS attacks . It is one of the oldest attack technologies on the web, and a popular way of paralyzing the huge data centers. Just yesterday we have reported about a massive 100Gbps DDoS attack that hit World's 3rd Largest Chinese Bitcoin exchange for 9 hours. Arbor Networks, a leading provider of DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions, today released data on global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack trends for the first three quarters of 2013, revealed that this kind of attack still represents a serious menace for IT security communities.  The document provides an interesting overview into Internet traffic patterns and threat evolutio

In March of this year, we saw the first ever 300 Gigabit DDoS attack , which was possible due to a DNS Reflection Amplification attack against Spamhaus . On 24 September World's 3rd Largest Bitcoin exchange BTC China , a platform where both Bitcoin and Chinese yuan are traded faced massive DDoS attack for continued nine hours, where no amplification techniques were used. Incapsula , Cloud-based security service provider helped the Chinese Bitcoin trader to protect them from such massive denial-of-service attack and successfully mitigated the threats. Incapsula tweeted  a graph of DDoS attack last month as shown, " Yesterday we prevented a ~100Gbps DDoS. The attack's load was distributed across our 350Gbps network. " Specialist at Incapsula shared the details of the attack with TheRegister , explained " The attack against BTC China took the form of a SYN flood rather than the DNS amplification-style attack ", " The attacker balanced the assault betwee

A U.S. Grand jury indicted and accused 13 members of the hacking group Anonymous for allegedly participating in the cyber attacks against a number of websites as an  anti-copyright campaign called " Operation Payback " Hackers took down the sites by inflicting a denial of service, or DDoS, attack , including those belonging to the Recording Industry Association of America, Visa and MasterCard. The attacks were in retaliation for the shutdown of " The Pirate Bay ," a Sweden-based file-sharing website used to illegally download copyrighted material. The DDoS Campaign was later extended to Bank of America and credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard after they refused to process payments for WikiLeaks . According to the indictment, the suspects are charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to protected computers. Suspects downloaded and used software known as Low Orbit Ion Cannon , or LOIC, to launch distributed denial-of-service

Nation-state driven cyber attacks are routinely conducted on a global scale to defend national sovereignty and project national power. We are living in the cyber era, human conflict is involving also the fifth domain of warfare , the cyberspace . As never before disputes take place with blows of bits, militias of every government are developing cyber capabilities dedicating great effort for the establishment of cyber units . Network security company, FireEye, has released a report titled " World War C: Understanding Nation-State Motives Behind Today's Advanced Cyber Attacks " which describes the effort spent by governments in cyber warfare context, the document analyzes in detail the different approaches adopted by various countries in conducting nation-state driven cyber attacks . Security experts highlight the intensification of state-sponsored attacks for both cyber espionage and sabotage purpose, campaigns such as Moonlight Maze and Titan Rain or the destruc