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You might be surprised to know that your security cameras, Internet-connected toasters and refrigerators may have inadvertently participated in the massive cyber attack that broke a large portion of the Internet on Friday. That's due to massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Dyn, a major domain name system (DNS) provider that many sites and services use as their upstream DNS provider for turning IP addresses into human-readable websites. The result we all know: Twitter, GitHub, Amazon, Netflix, Pinterest, Etsy, Reddit, PayPal, and AirBnb, were among hundreds of sites and services that were rendered inaccessible to Millions of people worldwide for several hours. Why and How the Deadliest DDoS Attack Happened It was reported that the Mirai bots were used in the massive DDoS attacks against DynDNS, but they "were separate and distinct" bots from those used to execute record-breaking DDoS attack against French Internet service and hosting

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

Follow this real-life network attack simulation, covering 6 steps from Initial Access to Data Exfiltration. See how attackers remain undetected with the simplest tools and why you need multiple choke points in your defense strategy. Surprisingly, most network attacks are not exceptionally sophisticated, technologically advanced, or reliant on zero-day tools that exploit edge-case vulnerabilities. Instead, they often use commonly available tools and exploit multiple vulnerability points. By simulating a real-world network attack, security teams can test their detection systems, ensure they have multiple choke points in place, and demonstrate the value of networking security to leadership. In this article, we demonstrate a real-life attack that could easily occur in many systems. The attack simulation was developed based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Atomic Red Team,  Cato Networks ' experience in the field, and public threat intel. In the end, we explain why a holistic secur

UPDATE — How an army of million of hacked Internet-connected smart devices almost broke the Internet today. Cyber attacks are getting evil and worst nightmare for companies day-by-day, and the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one such attacks that cause a massive damage to any service. Recently, the Internet witnessed a record-breaking largest DDoS attack of over 1 Tbps against France-based hosting provider OVH, and now the latest victim of the attack is none other than Dyn DNS provider. A sudden outage of popular sites and services, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Shopify, for many users, is causing uproar online. It's because of a DDoS attack against the popular Domain Name System (DNS) service provider Dyn, according to a post on Ycombinator . DNS act as the authoritative reference for mapping domain names to IP addresses. In other words, DNS is simply an Internet's phone book that resolves human-readable web addresses, like thehackerne

With rapidly growing Internet of Thing (IoT) devices, they have become a much more attractive target for cybercriminals. Just recently we saw a record-breaking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the France-based hosting provider OVH that reached over one Terabit per second (1 Tbps), which was carried out via a botnet of infected IoT devices. Now, such attacks are expected to grow more rapidly as someone has just released the source code for IoT botnet, which was 'apparently' used to carry out world's largest DDoS attacks. Internet of Things-Botnet 'Mirai' Released Online Dubbed Mirai , the malware is a DDoS Trojan that targets BusyBox systems , a collection of Unix utilities specifically designed for embedded devices like routers. The malware is programmed to hijack connected IoT devices that are using the default usernames and passwords set by the factory before devices are first shipped to customers. Spotted by Brian Krebs , the

Do you know — Your Smart Devices may have inadvertently participated in a record-breaking largest cyber attack that Internet has just witnessed. If you own a smart device like Internet-connected televisions, cars, refrigerators or thermostats, you might already be part of a botnet of millions of infected devices that was used to launch the biggest DDoS attack known to date, with peaks of over 1 Tbps of traffic. France-based hosting provider OVH was the victim to the record-breaking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that reached over one terabit per second (1 Tbps) over the past week. As the Internet of Things (IoT) or connected devices are growing at a great pace, they continue to widen the attack surface at the same time, giving attackers a large number of entry points to affect you some or the other way. 1 Tbps DDoS Attack Hits OVH IoTs are currently being deployed in a large variety of devices throughout your home, businesses, hospitals, and even entire cities (

The OpenSSL Foundation has patched over a dozen vulnerabilities in its cryptographic code library, including a high severity bug that can be exploited for denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. OpenSSL is a widely used open-source cryptographic library that provides encrypted Internet connections using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) for the majority of websites, as well as other secure services. The vulnerabilities exist in OpenSSL versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.1.0 and patched in OpenSSL versions 1.1.0a, 1.0.2i and 1.0.1u. The Critical-rated bug ( CVE-2016-6304 ) can be exploited by sending a large OCSP Status Request extension on the targeted server during connection negotiations, which causes memory exhaustion to launch DoS attacks, the OpenSSL Project said . What is OCSP Protocol? OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol), supported by all modern web browsers, is a protocol designed to perform verification and obtain the revocation status of a digital

What would it take for hackers to significantly disrupt the US' 911 emergency call system? It only takes 6,000 Smartphones. Yes, you heard it right! According to new research published last week, a malicious attacker can leverage a botnet of infected smartphone devices located throughout the country to knock the 911 service offline in an entire state, and possibly the whole United States, for days. The attacker would only need 6,000 infected smartphones to launch automated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against 911 service in an entire state by placing simultaneous calls from the botnet devices to the emergency numbers. However, as little as 200,000 infected mobile phones could knock the 911 emergency call system offline across the entire US. Where does the Problem Lies? Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Cyber-Security Research Center say the problem is in the fact that current US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regula

It's 2016, and now, you can earn some dollars by contributing into well-organized DDoS attack scheme. Do you know while mining Bitcoins you are actually contributing a significant computational power to keep the Bitcoin network running? In Bitcoins, the miners actually build and maintain massive public ledger containing a record of every Bitcoin transaction in history. When one user tries to send Bitcoins to another user, the miners validate the transfer by checking the ledger to make sure the sender is not transferring money he/she does not have, adding the transaction to the ledger and then finally sealing it behind layers and layers of computational work to protect that ledger from getting compromised or hacked. So for this, miners are rewarded with Bitcoins. So, basically, you are contributing the massive amount of computing power that keeps the Bitcoin transactions running and makes you earn some cryptocurrency in return as an incentive. However, Bitcoin has long be

If you think that the HTTP/2 protocol is more secure than the standard HTTP ( Hypertext Transfer Protocol ), then you might be wrong, as it took researchers just four months to discover four flaws in the HTTP/2 protocol. HTTP/2 was launched properly just in May last year after Google bundled its SPDY project into HTTP/2 in February in an effort to speed up the loading of web pages as well as the browsing experience of the online users. Now, security researchers from data center security vendor Imperva today at Black Hat conference revealed details on at least four high-profile vulnerabilities in HTTP/2 – a major revision of the HTTP network protocol that the today's web is based on. The vulnerabilities allow attackers to slow web servers by flooding them with innocent looking messages that carry a payload of gigabytes of data, putting the servers into infinite loops and even causing them to crash. The HTTP/2 protocol can be divided into three layers: The transmissio

The Internet of Things (IoTs) or Internet-connected devices are growing at an exponential rate and so are threats to them. Due to the insecure implementation, these Internet-connected embedded devices, including Smart TVs, Refrigerators, Microwaves, Set-top boxes, Security Cameras and printers, are routinely being hacked and used as weapons in cyber attacks. We have seen how hackers literally turned more than 100,000 Smart TVs and Refrigerator into the cyber weapon to send out millions of malicious spam emails for hacking campaigns; we have also seen how hackers abused printers and set-top-boxes to mine Bitcoins. And now… Cyber crooks are hacking CCTV cameras to form a massive botnet that can blow large websites off the Internet by launching Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Researchers at Security firm Sucuri came across a botnet of over 25,000 CCTV cameras targeting business around the globe while defending a small jewelry shop against a DDoS attack . Al

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

Staminus Communications – a California-based hosting and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection company – is recovering a massive data breach after hackers broke down into its servers and leaked personal and sensitive details of its customers. Though the company acknowledged that there was a problem in a message posted to Twitter on Thursday morning, it did not specify a data breach. Staminus's website went offline at 8 am Eastern Time on Thursday, and on Friday afternoon, a representative said in a Twitter post that "a rare event cascaded across multiple routers in a system-wide event, making our backbone unavailable." What type of information? The dump of information on Staminus' systems includes: Customer usernames Hashed passwords E-mail addresses Customer real names Customer credit card data in plain text Customer support tickets Server logs data Chat logs Source code of some of the company's services including Intreppi

Utah State computer systems are experiencing a massive cyber attack on up to 300 Million Hacking attempts per day due to National Security Agency's (NSA) data center in the state. Yes, 300,000,000 hacking attempts in a day! According to the statistical survey, it is evident that the computer systems in the US State of Utah began to experience the hacking attack a few years back, precisely, soon after the NSA revelations by global surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is a less-known fact that the NSA has built its new data center near the city of Bluffdale, Utah. However, a couple of years back, when Snowden revealed the presence of the data center, the attacks have constantly been going on. The PRISM spying program by Big Brothers at NSA might have shifted the attention of hackers for the retaliation against mass-surveillance and flared up this heightened cyber attacks against the spying agency. According to Utah Commissioner of public safety, Keith S

Last month, the Norway police arrested five hackers accused of running the MegalodonHTTP Remote Access Trojan (RAT). The arrests came as part of the joint operation between Norway's Kripos National Criminal Investigation Service and Europol, codenamed " OP Falling sTAR ." According to the United States security firm, all the five men, aged between 16 and 24 years and located in Romania, France, and Norway, were charged with possessing, using and selling malware. One of those arrested also confessed to running his own web store where he sold malware, designed to take full control of target computers, harvesting passwords, and other personal data. Moreover, the malware can be used to hijack webcams in real-time, and steal documents, images, and videos as well. "Damballa's threat discovery center worked in cooperation with the Norway police over the last few months to track and identify the author of the malware dubbed MegalodonHTTP," threat

Cyber attacks are getting evil and worst nightmare for companies day-by-day, and the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one of the favorite weapon for hackers to temporarily suspend services of a host connected to the Internet. Until now, nearly every big website had been a victim of this attack, and the most recent one was conducted against the BBC 's websites and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump 's main campaign website over this past holiday weekend. Out of two, the largest DDoS attack in the history was carried out against the BBC website: Over 600 Gbps . Largest DDoS Attack in the History The group calling itself New World Hacking claimed responsibility for taking down both the BBC's global website and Donald Trump's website last week. The group targeted all BBC sites, including its iPlayer on-demand service, and took them down for at least three hours on New Year's Eve. At the moment, the BBC news organiz

Tibet is an area in the Republic of China that has been the point of conflict for many years in China. While China believes that Tibet has been under Chinese rule for many centuries, Tibetans claim that they declared itself an independent republic in 1912. Tibetan Groups, especially pro-democracy activists, are being repeatedly targeted by persistent Cyber Attacks by Chinese State-sponsored hackers. Our Sources in Tibetan Community told The Hacker News that they are once again being targeted by Chinese hackers; this time their social network website. Chinese hackers are believed to have targeted a Tibetan only social networking site, unitib.com ( United Tibet ) as Beijing views the platform as a threat promoting free Tibet movement. The Unitib technical team sought assistance from Taiwanese and Indian security experts after they were forced to take the platform offline for few days due to the attack. Tashi, a member of the technical team at Unitib told The Hac

Remember the notorious hacker group Lizard Squad that spoiled last Christmas holidays of many game lovers by knocking the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live offline with apparent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks? But, Will you be able to Play Xbox and PlayStation Game this Christmas? Probably Not. Because a new hacking group is threatening to carry out similar attacks by taking down the Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network for a week during Christmas. Be Ready this Christmas for Attacks on PSN and XBox LIVE In a series of tweets, a bunch of DDoS hackers calling themselves " Phantom Group " (@PhantomSquad) announced that they will disrupt the XBox Live and PlayStation networks in a coordinated DoS attack. The attacks could prevent millions of gamers worldwide from enjoying their newly opened Christmas gifts and accessing games online. Also Read: PlayStation 4 Jailbreak Confirms . Here are the tweets by Phantom Squad: We are goi

Someone just DDoSed one of the most critical organs of the Internet anatomy – The Internet's DNS Root Servers . Early last week, a flood of as many as 5 Million queries per second hit many of the Internet's DNS ( Domain Name System ) Root Servers that act as the authoritative reference for mapping domain names to IP addresses and are a total of 13 in numbers. The attack, commonly known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, took place on two separate occasions. The first DDoS attack to the Internet's backbone root servers launched on November 30 that lasted 160 minutes ( almost 3 hours ), and the second one started on December 1 that lasted almost an hour. Massive Attacks Knocked Many of the 13 Root Servers Offline The DDoS attack was able to knock 3 out of the 13 DNS root servers of the Internet offline for a couple of hours. Also Read:  Secure Email Service Paid Hackers $6000 Ransom to Stop DDoS Attacks . The request queries fired