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Millions of Vulnerable Routers aiding Massive DNS Amplification DDoS Attacks

Millions of Vulnerable Routers aiding Massive DNS Amplification DDoS Attacks

Apr 03, 2014
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex with the increase in the skills of attackers and so, has become one of favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend or crash the services of a host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack. Since 2013, Hackers have adopted new tactics to boost the sizes of Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack known as ‘ Amplification Attack ’, leveraging the weakness in the UDP protocols. One of the commonly used by hacker is (Domain Name System) DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS). WHAT IS DrDoS ATTACK? The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Internet protocol spoofing, the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to the target and the target of the attack receives re...
DNS Flood DDoS Attack Hit Video Gaming Industry with 90 Million Requests per Second

DNS Flood DDoS Attack Hit Video Gaming Industry with 90 Million Requests per Second

Jun 24, 2014
Hackers are leveraging large number of compromised machines (a botnet network) to carry out massive DNS Flood DDoS attack against a large Video Gaming Industry website, peaking above 110 Gbps. A US based security solutions provider Incapsula , is protecting a famous Video Gaming website from this high bandwidth DDoS attack from last 48 Hours and according to them, the attack is still continuing. Incapsula has not yet disclosed the name of the video gaming company. “The attack is still going on - that over 48 hours by now, from what I see it ain't gonna stop anytime soon ,” Incapsula spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to The Hacker News. DDoS AT 90 MILLION PACKETS/SECOND The researchers at the security firm noticed a surge of massive DNS Flood DDoS attack on one of its clients, peaking at approximately 90 Mpps (Million Packets Per Second), which is really a very very big number. Majority number of attacking IP addresses belong to China and India. “ Good reason to think ...
Mirai Botnet Hits Wynncraft Minecraft Server with 2.5 Tbps DDoS Attack

Mirai Botnet Hits Wynncraft Minecraft Server with 2.5 Tbps DDoS Attack

Oct 14, 2022
Web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare disclosed this week that it halted a 2.5 Tbps distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched by a Mirai botnet. Characterizing it as a "multi-vector attack consisting of UDP and TCP floods," researcher Omer Yoachimik said the DDoS attack targeted the Minecraft server Wynncraft in Q3 2022. "The entire 2.5 Tbps attack lasted about 2 minutes, and the peak of the 26 million rps attack [was] only 15 seconds," Yoachimik  noted . "This is the largest attack we've ever seen from the bitrate perspective." Cloudflare also pointed to a surge in multi-terabit DDoS attacks as well as longer-lasting volumetric attacks during the time period, not to mention an uptick in attacks targeting Taiwan and Japan. The disclosure comes almost 10 months after Microsoft said it thwarted a  record-breaking 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack  in November 2021 directed against an unnamed Azure customer in Asia. Other  DDoS attacks ...
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Vulnerability in World Largest Video Site Turned Million of Visitors into DDoS Zombies

Vulnerability in World Largest Video Site Turned Million of Visitors into DDoS Zombies

Apr 03, 2014
An application layer or 'layer 7' distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attacks is one of the most complicated web attack that disguised to look like legitimate traffic but targets specific areas of a website, making it even more difficult to detect and mitigate. Just Yesterday Cloud-based security service provider ' Incapsula ' detected a unique application layer DDoS attack, carried out using traffic hijacking techniques. DDoS attack flooded one of their client with over 20 million GET requests, originating from browsers of over 22,000 Internet users. What makes this case especially interesting is the fact that the attack was enabled by persistent XSS vulnerability in one of the world’s largest and most popular site - one of the domains on Alexa’s “ Top 50 ” list. XSS  vulnerability  to Large-Scale DDoS Attack Incapsula has not disclosed the name of vulnerable website for security reasons, but mentioned it as a high profile video content provid...
Friday's Massive DDoS Attack Came from Just 100,000 Hacked IoT Devices

Friday's Massive DDoS Attack Came from Just 100,000 Hacked IoT Devices

Oct 27, 2016
Guess how many devices participated in last Friday's massive DDoS attack against DNS provider Dyn that caused vast internet outage? Just 100,000 devices. I did not miss any zeros. Dyn disclosed on Wednesday that a botnet of an estimated 100,000 internet-connected devices was hijacked to flood its systems with unwanted requests and close down the Internet for millions of users. Dyn executive vice president Scott Hilton has issued a statement , saying all compromised devices have been infected with a notorious Mirai malware that has the ability to take over cameras, DVRs, and routers. "We're still working on analyzing the data but the estimate at the time of this report is up to 100,000 malicious endpoints," Hilton said. "We are able to confirm that a significant volume of attack traffic originated from Mirai-based botnets." Mirai malware scans for Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are still using their default passwords and then enslaves those...
DDoS Attacks on the Environmental Services Industry Surge by 61,839% in 2023

DDoS Attacks on the Environmental Services Industry Surge by 61,839% in 2023

Jan 15, 2024 Server Security / Cyber Attack
The environmental services industry witnessed an “unprecedented surge” in HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, accounting for half of all its HTTP traffic. This marks a 61,839% increase in DDoS attack traffic year-over-year, web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare said in its DDoS threat report for 2023 Q4 published last week. “This surge in cyber attacks coincided with  COP 28 , which ran from November 30th to December 12th, 2023,” security researchers Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco  said , describing it as a “disturbing trend in the cyber threat landscape.” The uptick in HTTP attacks targeting environmental services websites is part of a larger trend observed annually over the past few years, specifically during COP 26 and COP 27, as well as other United Nations environment-related resolutions or announcements. “This recurring pattern underscores the growing intersection between environmental issues and cyber security, a nexus that is in...
Cloudflare Saw Record-Breaking DDoS Attack Peaking at 26 Million Request Per Second

Cloudflare Saw Record-Breaking DDoS Attack Peaking at 26 Million Request Per Second

Jun 15, 2022
Cloudflare on Tuesday disclosed that it had acted to prevent a record-setting 26 million request per second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack last week, making it the largest HTTPS DDoS attack detected to date. The web performance and security company said the attack was directed against an unnamed customer website using its Free plan and emanated from a "powerful" botnet of 5,067 devices, with each node generating approximately 5,200 RPS at peak. The botnet is said to have created a flood of more than 212 million HTTPS requests within less than 30 seconds from over 1,500 networks in 121 countries, including Indonesia, the U.S., Brazil, Russia, and India. Roughly 3% of the attack came through Tor nodes. The attack "originated mostly from Cloud Service Providers as opposed to Residential Internet Service Providers, indicating the use of hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers to generate the attack — as opposed to much weaker Internet of Things...
DDOS attack on Change.org from China !

DDOS attack on Change.org from China !

Apr 20, 2011
DDOS attack on Change.org from China ! Change.org, an online petitioning platform, has come under an ongoing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack originating from China after the site hosted a call urging Chinese authorities to release artist Ai Weiwei from custody. The attacks, which started late Sunday, have nearly brought down the site, according to Change.org founder Ben Rattray. DDoS attacks work by using hundreds or thousands of hacked computers to send traffic to a website, overwhelming it with data so it becomes inaccessible to normal users. Change.org said the current attack originates from an expanding group of computers primarily based in China, and has yet to stop. This is the first time the site has been hit with a DDoS attack. Change.org has been hosting a online petition calling for the release of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who is currently under arrest. The petition has attracted almost 100,000 people from 175 countries, making it one of Change.org'...
ProtonMail Paid Hackers $6000 Ransom in Bitcoin to Stop DDoS Attacks

ProtonMail Paid Hackers $6000 Ransom in Bitcoin to Stop DDoS Attacks

Nov 06, 2015
The Geneva-based encrypted email service ProtonMail was forced to pay a  Ransom of almost $6,000 to stop sustained Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that have knocked its service offline since Tuesday. ProtonMail – a full, end-to-end encrypted email service that launched last year – has been dealing with, what it called, the extremely powerful DDoS attack, and is still unavailable at the time of writing. ProtonMail Paid $6,000 to Stop DDoS In an official statement posted on a WordPress blog Thursday, officials of ProtonMail said the powerful DDoS attack by an unknown group of hackers forced them to pay 15 Bitcoins (about $5,850) in exchange for them halting the assault. However, even after paying the ransom amount, the crippling DDoS attacks continued to the ProtonMail service. DDoS Attack Continues Even After Paying Ransom ProtonMail officials said, "We hoped that by paying [ransom], we could spare other companies impacted by the [DDoS] attack again...
GitHub Again Hit by DDoS Cyberattack

GitHub Again Hit by DDoS Cyberattack

Aug 26, 2015
Github – the popular code sharing website used by programmers to collaborate on software development – again became a victim of a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday morning. The attack came just a few months after the popular code repository website GitHub suffered a massive DDoS attack, which was linked to China. Also Read: China Using A Powerful 'Great Cannon' Weapon to Censor The Internet The company was made aware of the issue early on Tuesday. After investigating the problem, the team discovered that the service was under a new DDoS attack. The code repository disclosed the new attack on its status page as well as its official Twitter account. "The connectivity problems have been identified as a DDoS attack. We're working to mitigate now," GitHub status log read early on Tuesday. The March DDoS attack against GitHub lasted close to a week . At the time, the attackers used malicious JavaScript to hijack Internet...
Feedly and Evernote Hit by DDoS Attacks, Extortion Demands

Feedly and Evernote Hit by DDoS Attacks, Extortion Demands

Jun 12, 2014
Yesterday, the most popular RSS reader Feedly was down as a result of a large scale distributed-denial-of service (DDoS) attack carried by the cybercriminals to extort money. On Wednesday, the Feedly was temporarily unavailable for its users. Feedly posted details of the attack at 5:00 AM ET on its blog saying that they were under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and cyber-criminals were demanding money in return for returning the service to its normal operations. “ Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop, ” Edwin Khodabakchian, founder and CEO of Feedly said in a statement on Wednesday. He also expressed regret, “ We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized. ” Feedly is a very popular RSS feed service which is available for desktop, iOS and...
Someone Just Tried to Take Down Internet's Backbone with 5 Million Queries/Sec

Someone Just Tried to Take Down Internet's Backbone with 5 Million Queries/Sec

Dec 10, 2015
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...
Biggest-Ever DDoS Attack (1.35 Tbs) Hits Github Website

Biggest-Ever DDoS Attack (1.35 Tbs) Hits Github Website

Mar 02, 2018
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...
DDoS Attacks : A Serious unstoppable menace for IT security communities

DDoS Attacks : A Serious unstoppable menace for IT security communities

Oct 18, 2013
It should be the busiest day of the year for your business, but your website has just disappeared off the Internet and orders have dried up. If this happens to you, then you likely just become yet another victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack . By now, everyone who uses the Internet has come across DDoS attacks . It is one of the oldest attack technologies on the web, and a popular way of paralyzing the huge data centers. Just yesterday we have reported about a massive 100Gbps DDoS attack that hit World's 3rd Largest Chinese Bitcoin exchange for 9 hours. Arbor Networks, a leading provider of DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions, today released data on global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack trends for the first three quarters of 2013, revealed that this kind of attack still represents a serious menace for IT security communities.  The document provides an interesting overview into Internet traffic patterns and threat evo...
Massive DDoS Attack Against Dyn DNS Service Knocks Popular Sites Offline

Massive DDoS Attack Against Dyn DNS Service Knocks Popular Sites Offline

Oct 21, 2016
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...
Cloudflare Thwarts Record DDoS Attack Peaking at 15 Million Requests Per Second

Cloudflare Thwarts Record DDoS Attack Peaking at 15 Million Requests Per Second

Apr 28, 2022
Cloudflare on Wednesday disclosed that it acted to mitigate a 15.3 million request-per-second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The web infrastructure and website security company called it one of the "largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record."  "HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive in terms of required computational resources because of the higher cost of establishing a secure TLS encrypted connection," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik and Julien Desgats  said . "Therefore it costs the attacker more to launch the attack, and for the victim to mitigate it." The volumetric DDoS attack is said to have lasted less than 15 seconds and targeted an unnamed Cloudflare customer operating a crypto launchpad.  Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a target network/service with significantly high volumes of malicious traffic, which typically originate from a botnet under a threat actor's control. Cloudflare said the latest attack w...
Gcore Thwarts Massive 650 Gbps DDoS Attack on Free Plan Client

Gcore Thwarts Massive 650 Gbps DDoS Attack on Free Plan Client

Feb 22, 2023 Server Security / DDoS Attack
At the beginning of January, Gcore faced an incident involving several L3/L4 DDoS attacks with a peak volume of 650 Gbps. Attackers exploited over 2000 servers belonging to one of the top three cloud providers worldwide and targeted a client who was using a free CDN plan. However, due to Gcore’s distribution of infrastructure and a large number of peering partners, the attacks were mitigated, and the client’s web application remained available. Why was mitigating these attacks so significant? 1. These attacks were significant because they exceeded the average bandwidth of similar attacks by 60×.  The performed attacks relate to volume-based attacks targeted to saturate the attacked application’s bandwidth in order to overflow it. Measuring total volume (bps)—rather than the number of requests—is the way these attacks are usually tabulated. The average bandwidth of this attack type is generally in the tens of Gbps (about 10 Gbps). Therefore, the specified attacks (at 650 Gb...
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