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An unnamed 29-year-old man, named by authorities as "Daniel K.," pleaded guilty in a German court on Friday to charges related to the hijacking of more than one Million Deutsche Telekom routers . According to reports in the German press , the British man, who was using online monikers "Peter Parker" and "Spiderman," linked to domains used to launch cyber attacks powered by the notorious Mirai malware has been pleaded guilty to " attempted computer sabotage ." The suspect was arrested on 22nd February this year at Luton airport in London by Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) at the request of the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany, aka the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). The hacker, also known as 'BestBuy,' admitted to the court on Friday that he was behind the cyber attack that knocked more than 1.25 Million customers of German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom offline last November. According to the German aut

Cybercrime has continued to evolve and today exists in a highly organised form. Cybercrime has increasingly been commercialised, and itself become big business by renting out an expanded range of hacking tools and technologies, from exploit kits to ransomware, to help anyone build threats and launch attacks. In past few years, we have witnessed the increase in the popularity of malware-as-a-service (MaaS), which is today a prosperous business on the underground black market that offers an array of services, including ransomware-as-a-service , DDoS-as-a-service , phishing-as-a-service, and much more. Two such services have recently been spotted by two separate group of researchers, which we have detailed in this article. Ovidiy Stealer — $7 Password-Stealing Malware For Everyone A new credential stealing malware that targets primarily web browsers is being marketed at Russian-speaking web forums for as cheap as $7, allowing anyone with even little technical knowledge to h

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

A teenage student has been charged with running a supplying malware that was used for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites of some of the world's leading businesses. Jack Chappell , an 18-year-old teenager from Stockport, is accused of helping cyber criminals with his DDoS booter service (DDoS-for-hire service) to flood millions of websites around the world with the massive amount of data and eventually bring them down, making them unavailable to their users. Among the victims that were allegedly attacked by Chappell's malware are the National Crime Agency (NCA), T-Mobile, O2, Virgin Media, the BBC, Amazon, Vodafone, BT, Netflix, and NatWest that had its online banking systems down in a 2015 cyber attack. Chappell is charged following an investigation led by the West Midlands Regional Cyber Crime Unit and assisted by Israeli Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). According t

Since the Shadow Brokers released the zero-day software vulnerabilities and hacking tools – allegedly belonged to the NSA's elite hacking team Equation Group – several hacking groups and individual hackers have started using them in their own way. The April's data dump was believed to be the most damaging release by the Shadow Brokers till the date, as it publicly leaked lots of Windows hacking tools , including dangerous Windows SMB exploit. After the outbreak of WannaCry last week, security researchers have identified multiple different campaigns exploiting Windows SMB vulnerability (CVE-2017-0143), called Eternalblue , which has already compromised hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. I have been even confirmed by multiple sources in hacking and intelligence community that there are lots of groups and individuals who are actively exploiting Eternalblue for different motives. Moreover, the Eternalblue SMB exploit ( MS17-010 ) has now been ported to  Met

The Internet-connected devices are growing at an exponential rate, and so are threats to them. Due to the insecure implementation, a majority of Internet-connected embedded devices, including Smart TVs, Refrigerators, Microwaves, Security Cameras, and printers, are routinely being hacked and used as weapons in cyber attacks. We have seen IoT botnets like Mirai – possibly the biggest IoT-based malware threat that emerged late last year and caused vast internet outage by launching massive DDoS attacks against DynDNS provider – which proves how easy it is to hack these connected devices. Now, a security researcher is warning of another IoT threat involving Smart TVs that could allow hackers to take complete control of a wide range of Smart TVs at once without having any physical access to any of them. Researcher Shows Live Hacking Demonstration   The proof-of-concept exploit for the attack, developed by Rafael Scheel of cyber security firm Oneconsult, uses a low-cost tra

MIRAI – possibly the biggest IoT-based malware threat that emerged last year, which caused vast internet outage in October last year by launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the popular DNS provider Dyn . Now, the infamous malware has updated itself to boost its distribution efforts. Researchers from Russian cyber-security firm Dr.Web have now uncovered a Windows Trojan designed to built with the sole purpose of helping hackers spread Mirai to even more devices. Mirai is a malicious software program for Linux-based internet-of-things (IoT) devices which scan for insecure IoT devices, enslaves them into a botnet network, and then used them to launch DDoS attacks, and spreads over Telnet by using factory device credentials. It all started early October last year when a hacker publicly released the source code of Mirai . Dubbed Trojan.Mirai.1, the new Trojan targets Windows computers and scans the user's network for compromisable Linux-

Bad news for gamers! It's once again the time when most of you will get new PlayStations and XBoxes that continue to be among the most popular gifts for Christmas, but possibilities are you'll not be able to log into the online gaming console, just like what happens on every Christmas holidays. On 2014 Christmas holidays, the notorious hacker group Lizard Squad knocked the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live offline for many gamers by launching massive DDoS attacks against the gaming networks. This time a new hacking group, who managed to take down Tumblr this week for almost two hours, has warned gamers of launching another large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against XBox Live and PlayStation networks. Calling itself R.I.U. Star Patrol , the hacking group, posted a video on YouTube , announcing that they're planning to take down Sony's PSN and Microsoft's Xbox Live on Christmas Day by launching coordinated DDoS attacks. "We do it because w

Europol has announced that the law enforcement agencies from 13 countries around the globe have arrested 34 users of Netspoof DDoS attack tool and interviewed and warned 101 suspects in a global crackdown. According to the report published on the official website of Europol, law enforcement authorities worldwide have made the arrest between 5 December and 9 December 2016. Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) supported the law enforcement agencies in their efforts to identify suspects in the European Union and beyond. Arrested Suspects Are Mainly Teenagers All those arrested are mainly "young adults under the age of 20," who are suspected of paying for Netspoof stresser as well as booters services to maliciously deploy DDoS-for-hire software and using them to launch cyber attacks. The ddos attacks flooded target websites and web servers with massive amounts of data, leaving those services inaccessible to users. Europol's European Cybercrime Cent

DDoS has become a game now that could knock any service offline. A Turkish hacking group is encouraging individuals to join its DDoS-for-Points platform that features points and prizes for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a list of predetermined targets. The points earned can later be redeemed for various online click-fraud and hacking tools. Dubbed Sath-ı Müdafaa , translated as Surface Defense in English, this DDoS-for-Points platform is advertised via local Turkish hacking forums, including Turkhackteam and Root Developer. Surface Defense prompts other hackers in Turkey to sign up and asks them to attack political websites using a DDoS tool known as Balyoz , translated as Sledgehammer. According to Forcepoint security researchers, who discovered this program, Balyoz works via Tor and requires a username and password to log in. The tool then uses a DoS technique to flood targets with traffic. Here's How the Balyoz Tool Works On

Mirai Botnet is getting stronger and more notorious each day that passes by. The reason: Insecure Internet-of-things Devices. Last month, the Mirai botnet knocked the entire Internet offline for a few hours, crippling some of the world's biggest and most popular websites. Now, more than 900,000 broadband routers belonging to Deutsche Telekom users in Germany knocked offline over the weekend following a supposed cyber-attack, affecting the telephony, television, and internet service in the country. The German Internet Service Provider, Deutsche Telekom, which offers various services to around 20 Million customers, confirmed on Facebook that as many as 900,000 customers suffered internet outages on Sunday and Monday. Millions of routers are said to have vulnerable to a critical Remote code Execution flaw in routers made by Zyxel and Speedport, wherein Internet port 7547 open to receive commands based on the TR-069 and related TR-064 protocols, which are meant to use by

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a critical vulnerability in the Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) has been publically released that could allow anyone to crash a server with just a single maliciously crafted packet. The vulnerability has been patched by the Network Time Foundation with the release of NTP 4.2.8p9, which includes a total of 40 security patches, bug fixes, and improvements. The NTP daemon is used in almost every device that needs to synchronize time on computer clocks. NTP got the most attention in late 2014 and 2015 when hackers used it to launch highly amplified DDoS attacks against services. The flaw which affects NTP.org's nptd versions prior to 4.2.8p9, but not including ntp-4.3.94, has been discovered by security researcher Magnus Stubman, who privately disclosed it to the Network Time Foundation on June 24. A patch for the vulnerability was developed and sent to Stubman on 29th September and just two days later, the researcher acknowledged t

The Dutch hacker, who in 2013 was accused of launching the biggest cyberattack to date against the anti-spam group Spamhaus, escaped prison Monday even after he was sentenced to nearly 8 months in jail because most of his term was suspended. Sven Olaf Kamphuis , 39, was arrested in April 2013 by Spanish authorities in Barcelona based on a European arrest warrant for launching massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Spamhaus that peaked at over 300 Gbps. Spamhaus is a non-profit group based in Geneva and London that tracks spam and cyber-related threats, creates blacklists of those sites and then sells them to Internet Service Providers. However, the DDoS attacks on the company were so sustained that put "the proper functioning of the Internet at risk and thus the interests of many individuals, businesses and institutions," said the court. Kamphuis was initially sentenced to a total of 240 days, but he has already served 55 days in on remand aft

Yes, you only need a single laptop with a decent internet connection, rather a massive botnet, to launch overwhelming denial of service (DoS) attacks in order to bring down major Internet servers and modern-day firewalls. Researchers at TDC Security Operations Center have discovered a new attack technique that lone attackers with limited resources (in this case, a laptop and at least 15Mbps of bandwidth) can use to knock large servers offline. Dubbed a BlackNurse attack or the low-rate " Ping of Death " attack, the technique can be used to launch several low-volume DoS attacks by sending specially formed Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets, or 'pings' that overwhelm the processors on server protected by firewalls from Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, among others. ICMP is a protocol used by routers and other networking devices to send and receive error messages. According to a technical report [ PDF ] published this week, the BlackNurse attack is mo

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have risen enormously in past few months and, mostly, they are coming from hacked and insecure internet-connected devices, most commonly known as Internet of Things (IoT). Recent DDoS attack against DNS provider Dyn that brought down a large chunk of the Internet came from hacked and vulnerable IoT devices such as DVRs, security cameras, and smart home appliances. This DDoS was the biggest cyber attack the world has ever seen. Now, in the latest incident, at least five Russian banks have been subject to a swathe of DDoS attacks for two days, said the Russian banking regulator. The state-owned Sberbank was one of the five targets of the attacks that began on last Tuesday afternoon and lasted over the next two days. According to Kaspersky Lab, the longest attack last for 12 hours and peaked at 660,000 requests per second came from a botnet of at least 24,000 hacked devices located in 30 countries. Although the culprit appears

As announced on Tuesday, the OpenSSL project team released OpenSSL version 1.1.0c that addresses three security vulnerabilities in its software. The most serious of all is a heap-based buffer overflow bug (CVE-2016-7054) related to Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections using *-CHACHA20-POLY1305 cipher suites. The vulnerability, reported by Robert Święcki of the Google Security Team on September 25, can lead to DoS attack by corrupting larger payloads, resulting in a crash of OpenSSL. The severity of the flaw is rated "High" and does not affect OpenSSL versions prior to 1.1.0. However, the OpenSSL team reports there is no evidence that the flaw is exploitable beyond a DoS attack. The OpenSSL project also patches a moderate severity flaw (CVE-2016-7053) that can cause applications to crash. "Applications parsing invalid CMS structures can crash with a NULL pointer dereference. This is caused by a bug in the handling of the ASN.1 CHOICE type in OpenSSL 1.1.0

Just Imaging — What if, you enter into your home from a chilling weather outside, and the heating system fails to work because of a cyber attack, leaving you in the sense of panic? The same happened late last month when an attack knocks heating system offline in Finland. Last week, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack led to the disruption of the heating systems for at least two housing blocks in the city of Lappeenranta, literally leaving their residents in subzero weather. Both the apartments are managed by a company called Valtia, a facilities services company headquartered in Lappeenranta. Valtia CEO Simo Rounela confirmed to English language news outlet Metropolitan.fi that the central heating system and hot water system in both buildings had become a target of DDoS attacks. In an attempt to fight back the cyber attacks, which lived for a short time, the automated systems rebooted — and unfortunately got stuck in an endless loop, which restarted repeatedly a

With just two days before the presidential election, WikiLeaks late Sunday night published a new trove of emails apparently hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The most recent dump of more than 8,000 emails came after the whistleblowing site, on a daily basis over last four weeks, has already leaked over 50,000 emails stolen from the key figure in the DNC – Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. However, this time, not everything went as planned by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks early Monday morning announced on Twitter that shortly after the release of hacked DNC emails the organization was the target of a major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. What's more?  Soon after WikiLeaks reported the DDoS attack on its email publication servers, Twitter also went down, and the outage lasts for at least 30 minutes. According to a status monitor, the Twitter outage began at around 6.45am GMT and continued for nearly half an hour, though report

On Thursday, we compiled a story based on research published by a British security expert reporting that some cyber criminals are apparently using Mirai Botnet to conduct DDoS attacks against the telecommunication companies in Liberia, a small African country. In his blog post , Kevin Beaumont claimed that a Liberian transit provider confirmed him about the DDoS attack of more than 500 Gbps targeting one undersea cable servicing Internet connectivity for the entire country. Later, some media outlets also confirmed that the DDoS attack caused Internet outage in some parts of the country, citing 'slow Internet' and 'total outage' experienced by some local sources and citizens. "The DDoS is killing our business. We have a challenge with the DDoS. We are hoping someone can stop it. It's killing our revenue. Our business has frequently been targeted" an employee with one Liberian mobile service provider told PC World . Network firm Level 3 confirmed Zack Whittaker

Note — We have published  an updated article on what really happened behind the alleged DDoS attack against Liberia using Mirai botnet. Someone is trying to take down the whole Internet of a country, and partially succeeded, by launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using a botnet of insecure IoT devices infected by the Mirai malware. It all started early October when a cyber criminal publicly released the source code of Mirai – a piece of nasty IoT malware designed to scan for insecure IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks. Just two weeks ago, the Mirai IoT Botnet caused vast internet outage by launching massive DDoS attacks against DNS provider Dyn, and later it turns out that just 100,000 infected-IoT devices participated in the attacks. Experts believe that the future DDoS attack could reach 10 Tbps, which is enough to take down the whole Internet in any nation state. One such inciden