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

The Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack has become more sophisticated and complex and therefore has become one of the favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend the services of any host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack, from WordPress to online game websites. According to the new report released by a US based security solutions provider  Incapsula , DDOS activities have become threefold since the start of the year 2013, pointing the key source of trash traffic to be the remotely controlled " zombie army " that can be used to flood various websites by DDoS attacks and other malicious activities. The report site as " DDOS Threat Landscape ", explains that almost one in every three DDoS attacks is above 20Gbps and 81% of attacks feature multiple vector threats. The attackers are becoming more skillful at working around the network security and reusing their DDOS Botnets to attack multi

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

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

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

16-Year-Old Teenager has been arrested over his alleged involvement in the World's biggest largest DDoS attacks against the Dutch anti-spam group Spamhaus . The teenager, whose name is unknown at this point, was arrested by British police in April, but details of his arrest were just leaked to the British press on Thursday. He was taken into custody when police swooped on his south-west London home after investigations identified significant sums of money were flowing through his bank account. The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums. The March 20 attack on Spamhaus has been dubbed as the " biggest cyber attack in the history of the Internet " which saw server of the Dutch anti-spam organization being bombarded with traffic in tune of 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps). A DDoS attack takes place when hackers use an army of infected computers to send traffic to a server, causing a shutdown in the process. I

DDoS attackers attempted to bring down an Banking services earlier this week using one of the largest Distributed denial of service attack using DNS reflection technique. Prolexic, the global leader in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, announced  that it has successfully mitigated the largest DNS reflection attack ever recorded, which peaked at 167 Gigabits per second (Gbps). The company did not name the target of the digital assault. DNS-reflection was the attack method used in Operation Stophaus , an attack waged in March by The Spamhaus Project, a Geneva-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to fighting Internet spam . When Spamhaus was assaulted by a vast 300Gbps peak DNS reflection attack, it engaged the help of a content delivery network (CDN) called CloudFlare to help defend itself. The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Internet protocol spoof

In recent months the DDoS world has shifted from complex small scale Botnet attacks to much larger network based DDoS attacks , perpetrated largely by hijacked web servers. How many of these hijacked servers are out there remains to be seen. However, Incapsula recently got a very good idea of just how large these DDoS cannons are getting. Last Saturday Incapsula mitigated a rather small, 4Gbps DDoS attack, but this time it had a different pattern that attracted our attention. At first sight the attack seemed rather simple, generating 8 million DNS queries per second, to many domains, from spoofed IP addresses (using real domain name servers' IPs). But this time it included a hint about where it was coming from: all that traffic was coming from the same source. Probably on the same network, maybe even the same device. Tracing it to a single Source - TTL Giveaway Incapsula were able to trace the attack to a single source because this time the attackers slipped-u

Incapsula announced this week that they're offering an intriguing Backdoor Protection feature for sites using their cloud-based website security and performance services. What's a Backdoor? A backdoor is a malicious function that enables hackers to remotely operate a site or server, even after whatever exploit they used for initial access has been patched. Installing a backdoor is often the first thing a hacker will do after gaining access to your site - so if you've been hacked before, there's a good chance you've already got one. Hackers love backdoors because they provide easy return access to the site. Once installed, backdoors can used to distribute spam and malware, launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, or to help steal valuable data like credit card numbers. Recently, Incapsula reported how during the ongoing DDoS attacks against United States banks, a backdoor was used to turn a compromised site into a unwilling foot-soldier in the hackers Zombie Bo

Anonymous hackers once again hit Egyptian Government Websites and taken down. Hackers react under operation named #OpEgypt and hit 30 websites with DDos attack. Hacktivist using the handle @AnonymousGrupo claimed the responsibility of attack. Attacked websites include, The Egyptian Presidency website, The Egyptian Cabinet, Trade Agreements Sector (TAS), Maritime Transport site, Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, parliament website, Income Tax and many more. At the time of writing, many sites has been restored, but a few like https://www.presidency.gov.eg/ is still under maintenance. The Reason of Hack is mentioned in the banner shown above, was posted their facebook page. Readers can find list of sites under attack at Pastebin Note here .

Several weeks ago we reviewed Incapsula , a Cloud-based Security service which can significantly enhance the security of your website, while also boosting its performance. Following this review we've received many responses from our readers who wanted to learn more about Incapsula protection services. Specifically, we were asked to explain more about Incapsula Enterprise plan features. To answer these questions, today we are going to take a look at Incapsula DDoS Protection services. Distributed Denial of Service attacks If your business has a web presence, chances are that you've already heard about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. In case you didn't, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a DoS attack that is usually carried out by a "botnet", a network of computers acting in concert to overwhelm the server by depleting all available resources. Recently we all witnessed a large DDos attacks on U.S. banks by Muslim hacker group , an attack which crippled th