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Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Monday disclosed that it thwarted a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at over 71 million requests per second (RPS). "The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (RPS) with the largest exceeding 71 million," the company  said , calling it a "hyper-volumetric" DDoS attack. It's also the largest HTTP DDoS attack reported to date, more than 35% higher than the previous 46 million RPS DDoS attack that  Google Cloud mitigated in June 2022 . Cloudflare said the attacks singled out websites secured by its platform and that they emanated from a botnet comprising more than 30,000 IP addresses that belonged to "numerous" cloud providers. Targeted websites included a popular gaming provider, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms. HTTP attacks of this kind are designed to send a tsunami of HTTP requests t

In yet another campaign targeting the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository, six malicious packages have been found deploying information stealers on developer systems. The now-removed packages, which were  discovered  by Phylum between December 22 and December 31, 2022, include pyrologin, easytimestamp, discorder, discord-dev, style.py, and pythonstyles. The malicious code, as is  increasingly the case , is concealed in the setup script (setup.py) of these libraries, meaning running a "pip install" command is enough to activate the malware deployment process. The malware is designed to launch a PowerShell script that retrieves a ZIP archive file, install invasive dependencies such as pynput, pydirectinput, and pyscreenshot, and run a Visual Basic Script extracted from the archive to execute more PowerShell code. "These libraries allow one to control and monitor mouse and keyboard input and capture screen contents," Phylum said in a technical report published

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A new attack method can be used to circumvent web application firewalls (WAFs) of various vendors and infiltrate systems, potentially enabling attackers to gain access to sensitive business and customer information. Web application firewalls are a  key line of defense  to help filter, monitor, and block HTTP(S) traffic to and from a web application, and safeguard against attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and SQL injection (SQLi). The generic bypass "involves appending  JSON syntax  to SQL injection payloads that a WAF is unable to parse," Claroty researcher Noam Moshe  said . "Most WAFs will easily detect SQLi attacks, but prepending JSON to SQL syntax left the WAF blind to these attacks." The industrial and IoT cybersecurity company said its technique successfully worked against WAFs from vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, F5, Imperva, and Palo Alto Networks, all of whom have since released updates

A phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform known as  Robin Banks  has relocated its attack infrastructure to DDoS-Guard, a Russian provider of bulletproof hosting services. The switch comes after "Cloudflare disassociated Robin Banks phishing infrastructure from its services, causing a multi-day disruption to operations," according to a  report  from cybersecurity company IronNet. Robin Banks was  first documented  in July 2022 when the platform's abilities to offer ready-made phishing kits to criminal actors were revealed, making it possible to steal the financial information of customers of popular banks and other online services. It was also found to prompt users to enter Google and Microsoft credentials on rogue landing pages, suggesting an attempt on part of the malware authors to monetize initial access to corporate networks for post-exploitation activities such as espionage and ransomware. In recent months, Cloudflare's decision to blocklist its infrastruct

The threat actor behind the attacks on  Twilio  and  Cloudflare  earlier this month has been linked to a broader phishing campaign aimed at 136 organizations that resulted in a cumulative compromise of 9,931 accounts. The activity has been condemned  0ktapus  by Group-IB because the initial goal of the attacks was to "obtain Okta identity credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes from users of the targeted organizations." Calling the attacks well designed and executed, the Singapore-headquartered company said the adversary singled out employees of companies that are customers of identity services provider Okta. The modus operandi involved sending targets text messages containing links to phishing sites that impersonated the Okta authentication page of the respective targeted entities. "This case is of interest because despite using low-skill methods it was able to compromise a large number of well-known organizations," Group-IB  said . "Furthe

WordPress sites are being hacked to display fraudulent Cloudflare DDoS protection pages that lead to the delivery of malware such as NetSupport RAT and Raccoon Stealer. "A recent surge in JavaScript injections targeting WordPress sites has resulted in fake DDoS prevent prompts which lead victims to download remote access trojan malware," Sucuri's Ben Martin  said  in a write-up published last week. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection pages are essential browser verification checks designed to deter bot-driven unwanted and malicious traffic from eating up bandwidth and taking down websites. The new attack vector involves hijacking WordPress sites to display fake DDoS protection pop-ups that, when clicked, ultimately lead to the download of a malicious ISO file ("security_install.iso") to the victim's systems. This is achieved by injecting three lines of code into a JavaScript file ("jquery.min.js"), or alternatively into the active

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Tuesday disclosed at least 76 employees and their family members received text messages on their personal and work phones bearing similar characteristics as that of the sophisticated  phishing attack against Twilio . The attack, which transpired around the same time Twilio was targeted, came from four phone numbers associated with T-Mobile-issued SIM cards and was ultimately unsuccessful. The text messages pointed to a seemingly legitimate domain containing the keywords "Cloudflare" and "Okta" in an attempt to deceive the employees into handing over their credentials. The wave of over 100 smishing messages commenced less than 40 minutes after the rogue domain was registered via Porkbun, the company noted, adding the phishing page was designed to relay the credentials entered by unsuspecting users to the attacker via Telegram in real-time. This also meant that the attack could defeat 2FA roadblocks, as the Time-based On

The botnet behind the largest HTTPS distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June 2022 has been linked to a spate of attacks aimed at nearly 1,000 Cloudflare customers. Calling the powerful botnet  Mantis , the web performance and security company attributed it to more than 3,000 HTTP DDoS attacks against its users. The most attacked industry verticals include internet and telecom, media, gaming, finance, business, and shopping, of which over 20% of the attacks targeted U.S.-based companies, followed by Russia, Turkey, France, Poland, Ukraine, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada. Last month, the company said it  mitigated  a record-breaking DDoS attack aimed at an unnamed customer website using its Free plan that peaked at 26 million requests per second (RPS), with each node generating approximately 5,200 RPS. The tsunami of junk traffic lasted less than 30 seconds and generated more than 212 million HTTPS requests from more than 1,500 networks in 121 countries,

Cloudflare on Tuesday disclosed that it had acted to prevent a record-setting 26 million request per second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack last week, making it the largest HTTPS DDoS attack detected to date. The web performance and security company said the attack was directed against an unnamed customer website using its Free plan and emanated from a "powerful" botnet of 5,067 devices, with each node generating approximately 5,200 RPS at peak. The botnet is said to have created a flood of more than 212 million HTTPS requests within less than 30 seconds from over 1,500 networks in 121 countries, including Indonesia, the U.S., Brazil, Russia, and India. Roughly 3% of the attack came through Tor nodes. The attack "originated mostly from Cloud Service Providers as opposed to Residential Internet Service Providers, indicating the use of hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers to generate the attack — as opposed to much weaker Internet of Things

Cloudflare on Wednesday disclosed that it acted to mitigate a 15.3 million request-per-second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The web infrastructure and website security company called it one of the "largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record."  "HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive in terms of required computational resources because of the higher cost of establishing a secure TLS encrypted connection," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik and Julien Desgats  said . "Therefore it costs the attacker more to launch the attack, and for the victim to mitigate it." The volumetric DDoS attack is said to have lasted less than 15 seconds and targeted an unnamed Cloudflare customer operating a crypto launchpad.  Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a target network/service with significantly high volumes of malicious traffic, which typically originate from a botnet under a threat actor's control. Cloudflare said the latest attack w

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Wednesday revealed that threat actors are actively attempting to exploit a  second bug  disclosed in the widely used Log4j logging utility, making it imperative that customers move quickly to install the latest version as a barrage of attacks continues to pummel unpatched systems with a variety of malware. The new vulnerability, assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-45046 , makes it possible for adversaries to carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and follows disclosure from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) that the original fix for the remote code execution bug — CVE-2021-44228 aka Log4Shell — was "incomplete in certain non-default configurations." The issue has since been addressed in Log4j version 2.16.0. "This vulnerability is actively being exploited and anyone using Log4j should update to version 2.16.0 as soon as possible, even if you have previously updated to 2.15.0," Cloudflare's Andre Bluehs and Gabriel

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare on Thursday disclosed that it mitigated the largest ever volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack recorded to date. The attack, launched via a Mirai botnet, is said to have targeted an unnamed customer in the financial industry last month. "Within seconds, the botnet bombarded the Cloudflare edge with over 330 million attack requests," the company  noted , at one point reaching a record high of 17.2 million requests-per-second (rps), making it three times bigger than previously reported HTTP DDoS attacks. Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to target a specific network with an intention to overwhelm its bandwidth capacity and often utilize  reflective amplification techniques  to scale their attack and cause as much operational disruption as possible. They also typically originate from a network of malware-infected systems — consisting of computers, servers, and IoT devices — enabling threat actors

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare last month fixed a critical vulnerability in its CDNJS library that's  used by 12.7% of all websites  on the internet. CDNJS is a free and open-source content delivery network (CDN) that serves about  4,041 JavaScript and CSS libraries , making it the  second most popular  CDN for JavaScript after Google Hosted Libraries. The weakness concerned an issue in the CDNJS library update server that could potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands, leading to a complete compromise. The vulnerability was discovered and reported by security researcher RyotaK on April 6, 2021. There is no evidence of in-the-wild attacks abusing this flaw. Specifically, the vulnerability works by publishing packages to Cloudflare's CDNJS using GitHub and npm, using it to trigger a  path traversal vulnerability , and ultimately trick the server into executing arbitrary code, thus achieving remote code execution. It's wor

If you use the Firefox web browser, here's an important update that you need to be aware of. Starting today, Mozilla is activating the DNS-over-HTTPS security feature by default for all Firefox users in the U.S. by automatically changing their DNS server configuration in the settings. That means, from now onwards, Firefox will send all your DNS queries to the Cloudflare DNS servers instead of the default DNS servers set by your operating system, router, or network provider. As you may know, DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol performs DNS lookups — i.e., finding the server I.P. address of a certain domain name — over an encrypted connection to a DNS server rather than sending queries in the plaintext. This privacy-focused technology makes it harder for man-in-the-middle attackers, including your ISPs, to manipulate DNS queries, eavesdrop on your Internet connection, or learning what sites you visit. "This helps hide your browsing history from attackers on the network,

Immediately after Mozilla announced its plan to soon enable ' DNS over HTTPS ' (DoH) by default for Firefox users in the United States, Google today says it is planning an experiment with the privacy-focused technology in its upcoming Chrome 78. Under development since 2017, ' DNS over HTTPS ' performs DNS lookups—finding the server IP address of a certain domain name—over an encrypted HTTPS connection to a DNS server, rather than sending DNS queries in plaintext. The protocol that sends DNS queries over secure HTTPS connections has specifically been designed to prevent miscreants from interfering with domain name lookups, eventually stopping network observers, including your ISPs and attackers, from figuring out what sites you visit. Though the privacy-focused technology is also helpful in preventing attackers from redirecting unsuspecting visitors to phishing and malware sites, DNS over HTTPS could also bring its own new challenges to the enterprise security so

Imperva, one of the leading cybersecurity startups that helps businesses protect critical data and applications from cyberattacks, has suffered a data breach that has exposed sensitive information for some of its customers, the company revealed today. The security breach particularly affects customers of Imperva's Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) product, formerly known as Incapsula , a security-focused CDN service known for its DDoS mitigation and web application security features that protect websites from malicious activities. In a blog post published today, Imperva CEO Chris Hylen revealed that the company learned about the incident on August 20, 2019, only after someone informed it about the data exposure that "impacts a subset of customers of its Cloud WAF product who had accounts through September 15, 2017." The exposed data includes email addresses and hashed and salted passwords for all Cloud WAF customers who registered before 15th September 2017

Almost every activity on the Internet starts with a DNS query, a key function of the Internet that works as an Internet's directory where your device looks up for the server IP addresses after you enter a human-readable web address (e.g., thehackernews.com). Since DNS queries are sent in clear text over UDP or TCP without encryption, the information can reveal not only what websites an individual visits but is also vulnerable to spoofing attacks. To address these problems, Google announced Wednesday that its Public DNS (Domain Name System) service finally supports DNS-over-TLS security protocol, which means that the DNS queries and responses will be communicated over TLS-encrypted TCP connections. The DNS-over-TLS has been designed to make it harder for man-in-the-middle attackers to manipulate the DNS query or eavesdrop on your Internet connection. Launched over eight years ago, Google Public DNS, at IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, is world's largest public Domai

Cloudflare, a well-known Internet performance and security company, announced the launch of 1.1.1.1 —world's fastest and privacy-focused secure DNS service that not only speeds up your internet connection but also makes it harder for ISPs to track your web history. Domain Name System (DNS) resolver, or recursive DNS server, is an essential part of the internet that matches up human-readable web addresses with their actual location on the internet, called IP addresses. For example, when you try to open a website, say thehackernews.com, your DNS looks up for the IP address linked to this domain name and load the site. Since the default DNS services provided by ISPs are often slow and insecure, most people rely on alternative DNS providers—such as OpenDNS (208.67.222.222), Comodo DNS (8.26.56.26) and Google (8.8.8.8), to speed up their Internet. But if you use Cloudflare new 1.1.1.1 DNS service , your computer/smartphone/tablet will start resolving domain names within a bla

When yesterday I was reporting about the sudden outbreak of another global ransomware attack ' Bad Rabbit ,' I thought what could be worse than this? Then late last night I got my answer with a notification that Coinhive has been hacked — a popular browser-based service that offers website owners to embed a JavaScript to utilise their site visitors' CPUs power to mine the Monero cryptocurrency for monetisation. Reportedly an unknown hacker managed to hijack Coinhive's CloudFlare account that allowed him/her to modify its DNS servers and replace Coinhive's official JavaScript code embedded into thousands of websites with a malicious version. https://coin-hive[.]com/lib/coinhive.min.js Hacker Reused Leaked Password from 2014 Data Breach Apparently, hacker reused an old password to access Coinhive's CloudFlare account that was leaked in the Kickstarter data breach in 2014. "Tonight, Oct. 23th at around 22:00 GMT our account for our DNS provi

A severe security vulnerability has been discovered in the CloudFlare content delivery network that has caused big-name websites to expose private session keys and other sensitive data. CloudFlare, a content delivery network (CDN) and web security provider that helps optimize safety and performance of over 5.5 Million websites on the Internet, is warning its customers of the critical bug that could have exposed a range of sensitive information, including passwords, and cookies and tokens used to authenticate users. Dubbed Cloudbleed , the nasty flaw is named after the Heartbleed bug that was discovered in 2014, but believed to be worse than Heartbleed. The vulnerability is so severe that it not only affects websites on the CloudFlare network but affects mobile apps as well. What exactly is "Cloudbleed," how it works, how are you affected by this bug, and how you can protect yourself? Let's figure it out. What is Cloudbleed? Discovered by Google Project Ze