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Web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare on Tuesday said it detected and blocked a 5.6 Terabit per second (Tbps) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the largest ever attack to be reported to date. The UDP protocol-based attack took place on October 29, 2024, targeting one of its customers, an unnamed internet service provider (ISP) from Eastern Asia. The activity originated from a Mirai -variant botnet. "The attack lasted only 80 seconds and originated from over 13,000 IoT devices," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco said in a report. That said, the average unique source IP address observed per second was 5,500, with the average contribution of each IP address per second around 1 Gbps. The previous record for the largest volumetric DDoS assault was also reported by Cloudflare in October 2024, which peaked at 3.8 Tbps. Cloudflare also revealed it blocked approximately 21.3 million DDoS attacks in 2024, a 53% increase from 2023, and th...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a new large-scale campaign that exploits security flaws in AVTECH IP cameras and Huawei HG532 routers to rope the devices into a Mirai botnet variant dubbed Murdoc Botnet. The ongoing activity "demonstrates enhanced capabilities, exploiting vulnerabilities to compromise devices and establish expansive botnet networks," Qualys security researcher Shilpesh Trivedi said in an analysis. The campaign is known to be active since at least July 2024, with over 1,370 systems infected to date. A majority of the infections have been located in Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Evidence shows that the botnet leverages known security flaws such as CVE-2017-17215 and CVE-2024-7029 to gain initial access to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and download the next stage payload by means of a shell script. The script, for its part, fetches the botnet malware and executes it depending on the CPU architecture. The end goal of ...

A Mirai botnet variant has been found exploiting a newly disclosed security flaw impacting Four-Faith industrial routers since early November 2024 with the goal of conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The botnet maintains approximately 15,000 daily active IP addresses, with the infections primarily scattered across China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. Exploiting an arsenal of over 20 known security vulnerabilities and weak Telnet credentials for initial access, the malware is known to have been active since February 2024. The botnet has been dubbed "gayfemboy" in reference to the offensive term present in the source code. QiAnXin XLab said it observed the malware leveraging a zero-day vulnerability in industrial routers manufactured by China-based Four-Faith to deliver the artifacts as early as November 9, 2024. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-12856 (CVSS score: 7.2), which refers to an operating system (OS) command injectio...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a spike in malicious activity that involves roping vulnerable D-Link routers into two different botnets, a Mirai variant dubbed FICORA and a Kaiten (aka Tsunami) variant called CAPSAICIN. "These botnets are frequently spread through documented D-Link vulnerabilities that allow remote attackers to execute malicious commands via a GetDeviceSettings action on the HNAP (Home Network Administration Protocol) interface," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Vincent Li said in a Thursday analysis. "This HNAP weakness was first exposed almost a decade ago, with numerous devices affected by a variety of CVE numbers, including CVE-2015-2051 , CVE-2019-10891 , CVE-2022-37056 , and CVE-2024-33112 ." According to the cybersecurity company's telemetry data, attacks involving FICORA have targeted various countries globally, whereas those related to CAPSAICIN primarily singled out East Asian territories like Japan and Taiwan. T...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed more light on a Chinese actor codenamed SecShow that has been observed conducting Domain Name System (DNS) on a global scale since at least June 2023. The adversary, according to Infoblox security researchers Dr. Renée Burton and Dave Mitchell, operates from the China Education and Research Network ( CERNET ), a project funded by the Chinese government. "These probes seek to find and measure DNS responses at open resolvers," they said in a report published last week. "The end goal of the SecShow operations is unknown, but the information that is gathered can be used for malicious activities and is only for the benefit of the actor." That said, there is some evidence to suggest that it may have been linked to some kind of academic research related to "performing measurements using IP Address Spoofing Techniques on domains within secshow.net" modeled on the same approach as the Closed Resolver Project . This, howeve...

The threat actors behind the RedTail cryptocurrency mining malware have added a recently disclosed security flaw impacting Palo Alto Networks firewalls to its exploit arsenal. The addition of the PAN-OS vulnerability to its toolkit has been complemented by updates to the malware, which now incorporates new anti-analysis techniques, according to findings from web infrastructure and security company Akamai. "The attackers have taken a step forward by employing private crypto-mining pools for greater control over mining outcomes despite the increased operational and financial costs," security researchers Ryan Barnett, Stiv Kupchik, and Maxim Zavodchik said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The infection sequence discovered by Akamai exploits a now-patched vulnerability in PAN-OS tracked as CVE-2024-3400 (CVSS score: 10.0) that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall. A successful exploitatio...

The threat actors behind the CatDDoS malware botnet have exploited over 80 known security flaws in various software over the past three months to infiltrate vulnerable devices and co-opt them into a botnet for conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "CatDDoS-related gangs' samples have used a large number of known vulnerabilities to deliver samples," the QiAnXin XLab team  said . "Additionally, the maximum number of targets has been observed to exceed 300+ per day." The flaws impact routers, networking gear, and other devices from vendors such as Apache (ActiveMQ, Hadoop, Log4j, and RocketMQ), Cacti, Cisco, D-Link, DrayTek, FreePBX, GitLab, Gocloud, Huawei, Jenkins, Linksys, Metabase, NETGEAR, Realtek, Seagate, SonicWall, Tenda, TOTOLINK, TP-Link, ZTE, and Zyxel, among others. CatDDoS was previously documented by  QiAnXin  and  NSFOCUS  in late 2023, describing it as a  Mirai botnet variant  capable of performing DDoS attacks using...

Threat actors are actively scanning and exploiting a pair of security flaws that are said to affect as many as 92,000 internet-exposed D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Tracked as  CVE-2024-3272  (CVSS score: 9.8) and  CVE-2024-3273  (CVSS score: 7.3), the vulnerabilities impact  legacy D-Link products  that have reached end-of-life (EoL) status. D-Link, in an  advisory , said it does not plan to ship a patch and instead urges customers to replace them. "The vulnerability lies within the nas_sharing.cgi uri, which is vulnerable due to two main issues: a backdoor facilitated by hard-coded credentials, and a command injection vulnerability via the system parameter," security researcher who goes by the name netsecfish  said  in late March 2024. Successful exploitation of the flaws could lead to arbitrary command execution on the affected D-Link NAS devices, granting threat actors the ability to access sensitive information, alt...

Details have been made public about a now-patched high-severity flaw in Kubernetes that could allow a malicious attacker to achieve remote code execution with elevated privileges under specific circumstances. "The vulnerability allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled  said . "To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to apply malicious YAML files on the cluster." Tracked as CVE-2023-5528 (CVSS score: 7.2), the shortcoming impacts all versions of kubelet, including and after version 1.8.0. It was addressed as part of updates released on November 14, 2023, in the following versions - kubelet v1.28.4 kubelet v1.27.8 kubelet v1.26.11, and kubelet v1.25.16 "A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes where a user that can create pods and persistent volumes on Windows nodes may be able to escalate to admin privileges on those nodes," Kubernetes maintainers  s...

An active malware campaign is leveraging two zero-day vulnerabilities with remote code execution (RCE) functionality to rope routers and video recorders into a Mirai-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet. "The payload targets routers and network video recorder (NVR) devices with default admin credentials and installs Mirai variants when successful," Akamai  said  in an advisory published this week. Details of the flaws are currently under wraps to allow the two vendors to publish patches and prevent other threat actors from abusing them. The fixes for one of the vulnerabilities are expected to be shipped next month. The attacks were first discovered by the web infrastructure and security company against its honeypots in late October 2023. The perpetrators of the attacks have not been identified as yet. The botnet, which has been codenamed InfectedSlurs due to the use of racial and offensive language in the command-and-control (C2) servers and hard-coded strin...

Russian threat actors have been possibly linked to what's been described as the "largest cyber attack against Danish critical infrastructure," in which 22 companies associated with the operation of the country's energy sector were targeted in May 2023.  "22 simultaneous, successful cyberattacks against Danish critical infrastructure are not commonplace," Denmark's SektorCERT  said  [PDF]. "The attackers knew in advance who they were going to target and got it right every time. Not once did a shot miss the target." The agency said it found evidence connecting one or more attacks to Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, which is also tracked under the name  Sandworm  and has a track record of orchestrating disruptive cyber assaults on industrial control systems. This assessment is based on artifacts communicating with IP addresses that have been traced to the hacking crew. The unprecedented and coordinated cyber attacks took place on...

The unexpected drop in malicious activity connected with the Mozi botnet in August 2023 was due to a kill switch that was distributed to the bots. "First, the drop manifested in India on August 8," ESET  said  in an analysis published this week. "A week later, on August 16, the same thing happened in China. While the mysterious control payload – aka kill switch – stripped Mozi bots of most functionality, they maintained persistence." Mozi is an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet that  emerged  from the source code of several known malware families, such as Gafgyt, Mirai, and IoT Reaper. First spotted in 2019, it's known to exploit weak and default remote access passwords as well as unpatched security vulnerabilities for initial access. In September 2021, researchers from cybersecurity firm Netlab  disclosed  the arrest of the botnet operators by Chinese authorities. But the  precipitous decline  in Mozi activity – from around 13,300 hosts on Au...

Cloudflare on Thursday said it mitigated thousands of hyper-volumetric HTTP distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exploited a recently disclosed flaw called  HTTP/2 Rapid Reset , 89 of which exceeded 100 million requests per second (RPS). "The campaign contributed to an overall increase of 65% in HTTP DDoS attack traffic in Q3 compared to the previous quarter ," the web infrastructure and security company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Similarly,  L3/4 DDoS attacks  also increased by 14%." The total number of HTTP DDoS attack requests in the quarter surged to 8.9 trillion, up from 5.4 trillion in Q2 2023 and 4.7 trillion in Q1 2023. The number of attack requests in Q4 2022 stood at 6.5 trillion. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE-2023-44487) came to light earlier this month following an industry-wide coordinated disclosure that delved into DDoS attacks orchestrated by an unknown actor by leveraging the flaw to target various providers such as ...

A  Mirai botnet  variant called  Pandora  has been observed infiltrating inexpensive Android-based TV sets and TV boxes and using them as part of a botnet to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Doctor Web said the compromises are likely to occur either during malicious firmware updates or when applications for viewing pirated video content are installed. "It is likely that this update has been made available for download from a number of websites, as it is signed with publicly available Android Open Source Project test keys," the Russian company  said  in an analysis published Wednesday. "The service that runs the backdoor is included in boot.img," enabling it to persist between system restarts. In the alternative distribution methods, it's suspected that users are tricked into installing applications for streaming pirated movies and TV shows through websites that mainly single out Spanish-speaking users. The list of apps is as foll...

Misconfigured and poorly secured Apache Tomcat servers are being targeted as part of a new campaign designed to deliver the  Mirai botnet malware  and cryptocurrency miners. The findings come courtesy of Aqua, which detected more than 800 attacks against its Tomcat server honeypots over a two-year time period, with 96% of the attacks linked to the Mirai botnet. Of these attack attempts, 20% (or 152) entailed the use of a web shell script dubbed "neww" that originated from 24 unique IP addresses, with 68% of them originating from a single IP address (104.248.157[.]218). "The threat actor scanned for Tomcat servers and launched a brute force attack against it, attempting to gain access to the Tomcat web application manager by trying different combinations of credentials associated with it," Aqua security researcher Nitzan Yaakov  said . Upon gaining a successful foothold, the threat actors have been observed deploying a  WAR file  that contains a malicious w...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a recently patched critical security flaw in Zyxel gear to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2023-28771  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue relates to a  command injection flaw  impacting different firewall models that could enable an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code by sending a specially crafted packet to the device. Zyxel addressed the security defect as part of updates released on April 25, 2023. The list of impacted devices is below - ATP (versions ZLD V4.60 to V5.35, patched in ZLD V5.36) USG FLEX (versions ZLD V4.60 to V5.35, patched in ZLD V5.36) VPN (versions ZLD V4.60 to V5.35, patched in ZLD V5.36), and ZyWALL/USG (versions ZLD V4.60 to V4.73, patched in ZLD V4.73 Patch 1) The Shadowserver Foundation, in a  recent tweet , said the flaw is "being actively exploited to bu...

Microsoft has confirmed that the  active exploitation of PaperCut servers  is linked to attacks that are designed to deliver Cl0p and LockBit ransomware families. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is attributing a subset of the intrusions to a financially motivated actor it tracks under the name  Lace Tempest  (formerly DEV-0950), which overlaps with other hacking groups like FIN11, TA505, and Evil Corp. "In observed attacks, Lace Tempest ran multiple PowerShell commands to deliver a TrueBot DLL, which connected to a C2 server, attempted to steal LSASS credentials, and injected the  TrueBot payload  into the conhost.exe service," Microsoft  said  in a series of tweets. The next phase of the attack entailed the deployment of Cobalt Strike Beacon implant to conduct reconnaissance, move laterally across the network using WMI, and exfiltrate files of interest via the file-sharing service MegaSync. Lace Tempest is a Cl0p ransomware affilia...