ddos attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The bar has been raised. As more amplified attacks were expected following the record-breaking 1.35 Tbps Github DDoS attack , someone has just set a new record after only four days — 1.7 Tbps DDoS attack. Network security and monitoring company Arbor Networks claims that its ATLAS global traffic and DDoS threat data system have recorded a 1.7Tbps reflection/amplification attack against one of its unnamed US-based customer's website. Similar to the last week's DDoS attack on GitHub, the massive bandwidth of the latest attack was amplified by a factor of 51,000 using thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers exposed on the Internet. Memcached, a popular open source distributed memory caching system, came into news earlier last week when researchers detailed how attackers could abuse it to launch amplification DDoS attack by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcached server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few b

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

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

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 simple yet serious application-level denial of service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress CMS platform that could allow anyone to take down most WordPress websites even with a single machine—without hitting with a massive amount of bandwidth, as required in network-level DDoS attacks to achieve the same. Since the company has denied patching the issue, the vulnerability ( CVE-2018-6389 ) remains unpatched and affects almost all versions of WordPress released in last nine years, including the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.9.2). Discovered by Israeli security researcher Barak Tawily , the vulnerability resides in the way " load-scripts.php ," a built-in script in WordPress CMS, processes user-defined requests. For those unaware, load-scripts.php file has only been designed for admin users to help a website improve performance and load page faster by combining (on the server end) multiple JavaScript files into a single request. Howe

The cybersecurity threat landscape has never been more extensive and is most likely to grow exponentially in 2018. Although the original creators of Mirai DDoS botnet have already been arrested and jailed, the variants of the infamous IoT malware are still in the game due to the availability of its source code on the Internet. Security researchers have spotted a new variant of infamous Mirai IoT malware designed to hijack insecure devices that run on ARC embedded processors. Until now, Mirai and its variants have been targeting CPU architectures— including x86, ARM, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC and Motorola 6800 —deployed in millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Dubbed Okiru , the new Mirai variant, first spotted by @unixfreaxjp from MalwareMustDie team and notified by independent researcher Odisseus , is a new piece of ELF malware that targets ARC-based embedded devices running Linux operating system. " This is the FIRST TIME ever in the history of computer eng

Although the original creators of the infamous IoT malware Mirai have already been arrested and sent to jail, the variants of the notorious botnet are still in the game due to the availability of its source code on the Internet. Hackers have widely used the infamous IoT malware to quietly amass an army of unsecured internet-of-things devices , including home and office routers, that could be used at any time by hackers to launch Internet-paralyzing DDoS attacks . Another variant of Mirai has hit once again, propagating rapidly by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in a Huawei home router model. Dubbed Satori (also known as Okiru), the Mirai variant has been targeting Huawei's router model HG532, as Check Point security researchers said they tracked hundreds of thousands of attempts to exploit a vulnerability in the router model in the wild. Identified initially by Check Point researchers late November, Satori was found infecting more than 200,000 IP addresses in just

Security researchers have discovered multiple attack campaigns conducted by an established Chinese criminal group that operates worldwide, targeting database servers for mining cryptocurrencies, exfiltrating sensitive data and building a DDoS botnet. The researchers from security firm GuardiCore Labs have analyzed thousands of attacks launched in recent months and identified at least three attack variants— Hex, Hanako, and Taylor —targeting different MS SQL and MySQL servers for both Windows and Linux. The goals of all the three variants are different—Hex installs cryptocurrency miners and remote access trojans (RATs) on infected machines, Taylor installs a keylogger and a backdoor, and Hanako uses infected devices to build a DDoS botnet. So far, researchers have recorded hundreds of Hex and Hanako attacks and tens of thousands of Taylor attacks each month and found that most compromised machines are based in China, and some in Thailand, the United States, Japan and others.

The U.S. federal officials have arrested three hackers who have pleaded guilty to computer-crimes charges for creating and distributing Mirai botnet that crippled some of the world's biggest and most popular websites by launching the massive DDoS attacks last year. According to the federal court documents unsealed Tuesday, Paras Jha (21-year-old from New Jersey), Josiah White (20-year-old Washington) and Dalton Norman (21-year-old from Louisiana) were indicted by an Alaska court last week on multiple charges for their role in massive cyber attacks conducted using Mirai botnet. Mirai is a piece of nasty IoT malware that scans for insecure routers, cameras, DVRs, and other Internet of Things devices which are still using their default passwords and then add them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks on websites and Internet infrastructure. According to his plea agreement, Jha " conspired to conduct DDoS attacks against websites and web ho

Just a year after Mirai —biggest IoT-based malware that caused vast Internet outages by launching massive DDoS attacks—completed its first anniversary, security researchers are now warning of a brand new rapidly growing IoT botnet. Dubbed ' IoT_reaper ,' first spotted in September by researchers at firm Qihoo 360, the new malware no longer depends on cracking weak passwords; instead, it exploits vulnerabilities in various IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network. IoT_reaper malware currently includes exploits for nine previously disclosed vulnerabilities in IoT devices from following manufactures: Dlink (routers) Netgear (routers) Linksys (routers) Goahead (cameras) JAWS (cameras) AVTECH (cameras) Vacron (NVR) Researchers believe IoT_reaper malware has already infected nearly two million devices and growing continuously at an extraordinary rate of 10,000 new devices per day. This is extremely worrying because it took only 100,000 infected devices

It's been close to five years since we last looked at Incapsula , a security-focused CDN service known for its DDoS mitigation and web application security features. As one would expect, during these five years the company has expanded and improved, introducing lots of new features and even several new products. Most recently, Incapsula underwent an extensive network expansion that includes new PoPs in Asia including two new data centers in New Delhi and Mumbai. This seems like an excellent opportunity to revisit the service and see how it has evolved. Acquisition, Award and Growth Before we jump into Incapsula's service upgrades, we want to mention the changes in the company itself briefly. The most notable of those is Incapsula's 2014 acquisition by Imperva—an authority in web application security and a four-time Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for web application firewalls. The acquisition boosted Incapsula's security capabilities, resulting in its own cloud

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

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-