The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: Search results for DDoS attack

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a completely undetectable Linux malware that exploits undocumented techniques to stay under the radar and targets publicly accessible Docker servers hosted with popular cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Alibaba Cloud. Docker is a popular platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution for Linux and Windows designed to make it easier for developers to create, test, and run their applications in a loosely isolated environment called a container. According to the latest research Intezer shared with The Hacker News, an ongoing Ngrok mining botnet campaign scanning the Internet for misconfigured Docker API endpoints and has already infected many vulnerable servers with new malware. While the Ngrok mining botnet is active for the past two years, the new campaign is primarily focused on taking control over misconfigured Docker servers and exploiting them to set up malicious containers with cryptominers running on the victims' infrastructu

The United States Department of Justice yesterday sentenced a 22-year-old Washington-based hacker to 13 months in federal prison for his role in creating botnet malware, infecting a large number of systems with it, and then abusing those systems to carry out large scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against various online service and targets. According to court documents, Kenneth Currin Schuchman , a resident of Vancouver, and his criminal associates–Aaron Sterritt and Logan Shwydiuk–created multiple DDoS botnet malware since at least August 2017 and used them to enslave hundreds of thousands of home routers and other Internet-connected devices worldwide. Dubbed Satori, Okiru, Masuta, and Tsunami or Fbot, all these botnets were the successors of the infamous IoT malware Mirai , as they were created mainly using the source code of Mirai, with some additional features added to make them more sophisticated and effective against evolving targets. Even after the orig

With Docker gaining popularity as a service to package and deploy software applications, malicious actors are taking advantage of the opportunity to target exposed API endpoints and craft malware-infested images to facilitate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and mine cryptocurrencies. According to a report published by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team, the purpose of these Docker images is to generate funds by deploying a cryptocurrency miner using Docker containers and leveraging the Docker Hub repository to distribute these images. "Docker containers provide a convenient way for packaging software, which is evident by its increasing adoption rate," Unit 42 researchers said . "This, combined with coin mining, makes it easy for a malicious actor to distribute their images to any machine that supports Docker and instantly starts using its compute resources towards cryptojacking." Docker is a well-known platform-as-a-servic

A group of hacktivists and transparency advocates has published a massive 269 GB of data allegedly stolen from more than 200 police departments, fusion centers, and other law enforcement agencies across the United States. Dubbed BlueLeaks , the exposed data leaked by the DDoSecrets group contains hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents from the past ten years with official and personal information. DDoSecrets, or Distributed Denial of Secrets , is a transparency collective similar to WikiLeaks, which publicly publishes data and classified information submitted by leakers and hackers while claiming the organization itself never gets involved in the exfiltration of data. According to the hacktivist group, BlueLeaks dump includes "police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more," which "provides unique insights into law enforcement and a wide array of government activities, including thousands of documents mentioning COVID19. As you can see in the screens

Israeli cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new flaw impacting DNS protocol that can be exploited to launch amplified, large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to takedown targeted websites. Called NXNSAttack , the flaw hinges on the DNS delegation mechanism to force DNS resolvers to generate more DNS queries to authoritative servers of attacker's choice, potentially causing a botnet-scale disruption to online services. "We show that the number of DNS messages exchanged in a typical resolution process might be much higher in practice than what is expected in theory, mainly due to a proactive resolution of name-servers' IP addresses," the researchers said in the paper. "We show how this inefficiency becomes a bottleneck and might be used to mount a devastating attack against either or both, recursive resolvers and authoritative servers." Following responsible disclosure of NXNSAttack, several of the companies i

The Ukrainian police have arrested a hacker who made headlines in January last year by posting a massive database containing some 773 million stolen email addresses and 21 million unique plaintext passwords for sale on various underground hacking forums. In an official statement released on Tuesday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it identified the hacker behind the pseudonym "Sanix," who is a resident of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine, but it did not reveal his actual identity to the media. In January last year, the hacker tried to sell the massive 87-gigabyte database labeled as "the largest array of stolen data in history," which, according to security experts, was just a fraction of the stolen data Sanix collected. According to the authorities, Sanix had at least 6 more similar databases of stolen and broken passwords, totaling in terabytes in size, which also included billions of phone numbers, payment card details, and Social Secu

In our previous stories, you might have already read about various campaigns warning how threat actors are capitalizing on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to infect your computers and mobile devices with malware or scam you out of your money. Unfortunately, to some extent, it's working, and that's because the attack surface is changing and expanding rapidly as many organizations and business tasks are going digital without much preparation, exposing themselves to more potential threats. Most of the recent cyberattacks are primarily exploiting the fears around the COVID-19 outbreak—fueled by disinformation and fake news—to distribute malware via Google Play apps , malicious links and attachments, and execute ransomware attacks. Here, we took a look at some of the wide range of unseen threats rising in the digital space, powered by coronavirus-themed lures that cybercriminals are using for espionage and commercial gain. The latest development adds to a l

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new emerging IoT botnet threat that leverages compromised smart devices to stage ' distributed denial-of-service ' attacks, potentially triggered on-demand through platforms offering DDoS-for-hire services. The botnet, named "dark_nexus" by Bitdefender researchers, works by employing credential stuffing attacks against a variety of devices, such as routers (from Dasan Zhone, Dlink, and ASUS), video recorders, and thermal cameras, to co-opt them into the botnet. So far, dark_nexus comprises at least 1,372 bots, acting as a reverse proxy, spanning across various locations in China, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, and Russia. "While it might share some features with previously known IoT botnets, the way some of its modules have been developed makes it significantly more potent and robust," the researchers said . "For example, payloads are compiled for 12 different CPU architectures and dynamically deliver

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a sustained malicious campaign dating back to May 2018 that targets Windows machines running MS-SQL servers to deploy backdoors and other kinds of malware, including multi-functional remote access tools (RATs) and cryptominers. Named " Vollgar " after the Vollar cryptocurrency it mines and its offensive "vulgar" modus operandi, researchers at Guardicore Labs said the attack employs password brute-force to breach Microsoft SQL servers with weak credentials exposed to the Internet. Researchers claim the attackers managed to successfully infect nearly 2,000-3,000 database servers daily over the past few weeks, with potential victims belonging to healthcare, aviation, IT & telecommunications, and higher education sectors across China, India, the US, South Korea, and Turkey. Thankfully for those concerned, researchers have also released a script to let sysadmins detect if any of their Windows MS-SQL servers have been

Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in digital video recorders (DVRs) for surveillance systems manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN have been exploited by botnet operators to infect and co-opt vulnerable devices into a family of denial-of-service bots. The findings come from Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 's Netlab team, who say different attack groups have been using LILIN DVR zero-day vulnerabilities to spread Chalubo , FBot , and Moobot botnets at least since August 30, 2019. Netlab researchers said they reached out to LILIN on January 19, 2020, although it wasn't until a month later the vendor released a firmware update (2.0b60_20200207) addressing the vulnerabilities. The development comes as IoT devices are increasingly being used as an attack surface to launch DDoS attacks and as proxies to engage in various forms of cybercrime. What Are the LILIN Zero-Days About? The flaw in itself concerns a chain of vulnerabilities that make use of hard-coded login cred

A new version of the infamous Mirai botnet is exploiting a recently uncovered critical vulnerability in network-attached storage (NAS) devices in an attempt to remotely infect and control vulnerable machines. Called " Mukashi ," the new variant of the malware employs brute-force attacks using different combinations of default credentials to log into Zyxel NAS, UTM, ATP, and VPN firewall products to take control of the devices and add them to a network of infected bots that can be used to carry out Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Multiple Zyxel NAS products running firmware versions up to 5.21 are vulnerable to the compromise, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 global threat intelligence team said, adding they uncovered the first such exploitation of the flaw in the wild on March 12. Zyxel's Pre-Authentication Command Injection Flaw Mukashi hinges on a pre-authentication command injection vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2020-9054 ), for which a proof-

The City of Baltimore was under cyber-attack last year, with hackers demanding $76,000 in ransom. Though the city chose not to pay the ransom, the attack still cost them nearly $18 million in damages, and then the city signed up for a $20 million cyber insurance policy. It's very evident that cyber-attacks are not only costly in terms of time and money but also bring extensive legal liability with them. According to Juniper Research 's prediction, the cost of a data breach could cross $150 million by 2020. With the rising cost of data breaches and cyber-attacks, cybersecurity has become a board room conversation on an unprecedented scale. In this ever-connected online world, web application security is the cornerstone of the overall cybersecurity of any company. When it comes to application security, web application firewall (WAF) based protection has been the first line of defense against web attacks for a while now. A web application firewall is deployed in fron

There's hardly any business nowadays that don't use computers and connect to the Internet. Companies maintain an online presence through their official websites, blogs, and social media pages. People use online services to conduct day to day activities like banking. And of course, there are many businesses that are completely based on the web like online markets, e-Commerce websites and financial services. All of these activities create opportunities for cyber attacks. Various threats can affect websites, online services, API endpoints, and the applications used or provided by businesses. Such devastating attacks include privacy intrusion, DDoS attacks , data breaches, defacements of websites, online store shutdowns, scraping, payment fraud, abuse of online services, and backdoor installations. The 2019 Cost of Cybercrime Study by Accenture reports that there has been a 67% increase in cyber attacks over the last five years. The corresponding increase in financial ter

Cyberattacks on small and midsized companies in 2019 cost $200,000 per company on average, mercilessly putting many of them out of business, says CNBC in its analysis of a recent Accenture report. In light of the global cybersecurity skills shortage, the number is set to soar in 2020. Solely in the UK, over 50,000 British SMEs could collapse next year following a cyberattack. This article brings a list of free tools that are already being used to combat these alarming challenges and enabling SMEs to arm themselves against a wide range of cyber offenders. Website Security Test with GDPR and PCI DSS Compliance Scan The problem: It would be hard to come across an SME without a website, or at least a web page on the Internet. Such websites are habitually poorly protected, becoming low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Even if the website does not store or handle any payment transactions or otherwise sensitive information, once breached, access to it can be sold in Dark Web mark