Distributed Denial of Service | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

As we enter 2024, Gcore has released its latest Gcore Radar report, a twice-annual publication in which the company releases internal analytics to track DDoS attacks. Gcore's broad, internationally distributed network of scrubbing centers allows them to follow attack trends over time. Read on to learn about DDoS attack trends for Q3–Q4 of 2023, and what they mean for developing a robust protection strategy in 2024. Gcore's Key Findings DDoS attack trends for the second half of 2023 reveal alarming developments in the scale and sophistication of cyberthreats. Unprecedented Attack Power The past three years have brought about a >100% annual increase in DDoS peak (registered maximum) attack volume: In 2021, the peak capacity of DDoS attacks was  300 Gbps In 2022, it increased to  650 Gbps In Q1–Q2 of 2023, it increased again to  800 Gbps In Q3–Q4 of 2023, it surged to  1600 Gbps  (1.6 Tbps) Notably, the jump in H2 of 2023 means the cybersecurity indu...

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed new samples of malware called RapperBot that are being used to build a botnet capable of launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against game servers. "In fact, it turns out that this campaign is less like RapperBot than an older campaign that appeared in February and then mysteriously disappeared in the middle of April," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers Joie Salvio and Roy Tay  said  in a Tuesday report. RapperBot, which was first  documented  by the network security firm in August 2022, is known to exclusively brute-force SSH servers configured to accept  password authentication . The nascent malware is heavily inspired by the  Mirai botnet , whose source code leaked in October 2016, leading to the rise of several variants. What's notable about the updated version of RapperBot is its ability to perform Telnet brute-force, in addition to supporting DoS attacks using the Generic Routing Encap...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

If you were a buyer of any online DDoS-for-hire service, you might be in trouble. After taking down and arresting the operators of the world's biggest DDoS-for-hire service last year, the authorities are now in hunt for customers who bought the service that helped cyber criminals launch millions of attacks against several banks, government institutions, and gaming industry. Europol has announced that British police are conducting a number of live operations worldwide to track down the users of the infamous Webstresser.org service that the authorities dismantled in April 2018. Launched in 2015, Webstresser let its customers rent the service for about £10 to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against their targets with little to no technical knowledge, which resulted in more than 4 million DDoS attacks. According to the Europol announcement published on Monday, the agency gained access to the accounts of over 151,000 registered Webstresser users last yea...

The Bitcoin Core development team has released an important update to patch a major DDoS vulnerability in its underlying software that could have been fatal to the Bitcoin Network, which is usually known as the most hack-proof and secure blockchain. The DDoS vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-17144, has been found in the Bitcoin Core wallet software, which could potentially be exploited by anyone capable of mining BTC to crash Bitcoin Core nodes running software versions 0.14.0 to 0.16.2. In other words, Bitcoin miners could have brought down the entire blockchain either by overflooding the block with duplicate transactions, resulting in blockage of transaction confirmation from other people or by flooding the nodes of the Bitcoin P2P network and over-utilizing the bandwidth. The vulnerability had been around since March last year, but the team says nobody noticed the bug or nobody was willing to incur the expense of exploiting it. According to the bitcoin core developers...

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018, GitHub's code hosting website hit with the largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at record 1.35 Tbps. Interestingly, attackers did not use any botnet network, instead weaponized misconfigured Memcached servers to amplify the DDoS attack. Earlier this week we published a report detailing how attackers could abuse Memcached, popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system, to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attack than its original strength. Dubbed Memcrashed , the amplification DDoS attack works by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcrashed server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address. "This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September 2016...

Cybercriminals have figured out a way to abuse widely-used Memcached servers to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attacks than their original strength, which could result in knocking down of major websites and Internet infrastructure. In recent days, security researchers at Cloudflare , Arbor Networks , and Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 noticed that hackers are now abusing "Memcached" to amplify their DDoS attacks by an unprecedented factor of 51,200. Memcached is a popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory and has been designed to work with a large number of open connections. Memcached server runs over TCP or UDP port 11211. The Memcached application has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. It's widely used by thousands of websites, including Facebook, Flickr,...

A massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against Dyn , a major domain name system (DNS) provider, broke large portions of the Internet on Friday, causing a significant outage to a ton of websites and services, including Twitter, GitHub, PayPal, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and Spotify. But how the attack happened? What's the cause behind the attack? Exact details of the attack remain vague, but Dyn reported a huge army of hijacked internet-connected devices could be responsible for the massive attack. Yes, the same method recently employed by hackers to carry out record-breaking DDoS attack of over 1 Tbps against France-based hosting provider OVH. According to security intelligence firm Flashpoint , Mirai bots were detected driving much, but not necessarily all, of the traffic in the DDoS attacks against DynDNS. Mirai is a piece of malware that targets Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, and security cameras, DVRs, and enslaves vast numbers of ...

In Brief Cyber crooks find a new and ingenious way to make hundreds of thousands of dollars with no effort. An unknown cyber gang, pretending to be Armada Collective , has made more than $100,000 in less than two months simply by threatening to launch DDoS attack on websites, but never actually launched a single attack. A group of Cyber Extortionists is sending threatening emails to businesses across the globe involves the launching of powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against victim's website unless a ransom is paid. But, the group never actually launched a single DDoS attack. In a typical scenario, attackers disrupt a targeted website with a short-term DDoS attack in order to demonstrate its power, followed by an e-mail containing ransom note threatening further disruption, if the ransom does not get paid. Armada Collective is the same criminal gang that was responsible for one of largest DDoS attacks against ProtonMail in November 2015 and ext...

The United Kingdom's National Crime Agency (NCA) has arrested 56 suspected hackers in a campaign against cybercrime called "strike week." Law-enforcement officials conducted, in total, 25 separate operations across England, Scotland and Wales, and those arrested were suspected in a wide range of cyber crimes including: Network intrusion and data theft from multinational companies and government agencies Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks Cyber-enabled fraud Malicious software and virus development The raids conducted by NCA were coordinated by its National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) , special officers Metropolitan Police and Regional Organised Crime Unit's (ROCUs) , associated with local forces around the UK. The arrested hackers also include alleged hackers suspected of being behind attacks on Yahoo, the US Department of Defence (DoD) , and PlayStation. The list of hackers arrested in the operation is given below: A 23-year-old man w...

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...