Critical Infrastructure | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The surge in DDoS attack traffic this year has been driven in part by the rapid expansion of IoT devices - from smart watches and home appliances to cars, hundreds of millions of new devices are joining the global internet. Many of these new devices feature poor security and are easily added to attacker's pool of botnets.  It is true that the DDoS threat grows alongside internet expansion. But the relationship isn't linear. The true catalyst behind this surge lies in the mass availability of botnet-for-hire platforms and low-barrier attack tools. Meanwhile, the number of high-value targets – such as financial institutions, governments, and critical infrastructure – remains relatively fixed. The result is a growing imbalance, in which more attackers are armed with more tools - targeting the same essential services with increasing frequency and complexity. How AI Makes DDoS More Dangerous  AI and machine learning are impacting the evolution of DDoS strategies and tactics. T...

Since Russia's latest escalation in 2022 with its invasion of Ukraine, hacktivism has surged, impacting both private and public sectors through DDoS attacks, defacements, and disinformation campaigns. These cyberattacks align with geopolitical events. As 2024 saw over 50 countries holding elections, this creates particularly ripe conditions for influence operations such as misinformation and propaganda campaigns. DDoS attacks have also intensified, with one pro-Russian hacktivist group alone claiming over 6,000 attacks since March 2022. Driven by political tensions and geopolitical conflicts, we saw a significant increase in both volume and intensity. Hacktivists are now more experienced, leveraging DDoS-for-hire services and sophisticated tools. To better understand the complex threat landscape, we aim to explore current hacktivism more deeply, examining its various facets and connections to geopolitical tensions, building on our previous findings. This article doesn't cover ...

Throughout history, societies have protected their most valuable assets by building walls, fortresses, and moats. Whether it was a medieval castle or an ancient city-state, security meant keeping threats on the outside and creating barriers around the things that mattered most.  We took these principles with us as we moved into the digital age, designing network security with firewalls, access controls, and gated perimeters to protect digital assets. Firewalls and network devices became our virtual walls, defining trusted and untrusted zones, and keeping the "bad actors" at the gate. For years, this perimeter-based approach was the primary line of defense in the world of cybersecurity, establishing a digital fortress around systems and data. But just as history has shown us that walls and borders can be breached, so too has modern cybersecurity taught us that no perimeter is foolproof. As organizations increasingly connect their IT systems to the wider internet and integrate the...