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FBI Seizes 15 DDoS-For-Hire Websites, 3 Operators Charged

FBI Seizes 15 DDoS-For-Hire Websites, 3 Operators Charged

Dec 21, 2018
The FBI just saved the Christmas. The U.S. Justice Department announced earlier today that the FBI has seized domains of 15 "DDoS-for-hire" websites and charged three individuals running some of these services. DDoS-for-hire , or "Booter" or "Stresser," services rent out access to a network of infected devices, which then can be used by anyone, even the least tech-savvy individual, to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against any website and disrupt its access. In recent years, multiple hacking groups ruined Christmas Day for millions of gamers by taking down PlayStation, Xbox networks and other gaming servers using massive DDoS attacks. "Booter services such as those named in this action allegedly cause attacks on a wide array of victims in the United States and abroad, including financial institutions, universities, internet service providers, government systems, and various gaming platforms," the DoJ said. &qu
Chinese Electronics Firm to Recall its Smart Cameras recently used to Take Down Internet

Chinese Electronics Firm to Recall its Smart Cameras recently used to Take Down Internet

Oct 24, 2016
You might be surprised to know that your security cameras, Internet-connected toasters and refrigerators may have inadvertently participated in the massive cyber attack that broke a large portion of the Internet on Friday. That's due to massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Dyn, a major domain name system (DNS) provider that many sites and services use as their upstream DNS provider for turning IP addresses into human-readable websites. The result we all know: Twitter, GitHub, Amazon, Netflix, Pinterest, Etsy, Reddit, PayPal, and AirBnb, were among hundreds of sites and services that were rendered inaccessible to Millions of people worldwide for several hours. Why and How the Deadliest DDoS Attack Happened It was reported that the Mirai bots were used in the massive DDoS attacks against DynDNS, but they "were separate and distinct" bots from those used to execute record-breaking DDoS attack against French Internet service and hosting
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
SNMP Reflection DDoS Attacks on the Rise

SNMP Reflection DDoS Attacks on the Rise

May 23, 2014
The DDoS techniques have massively increased with the attackers becoming more skillful at working around the network security. A massive 300Gbps DDoS attack launched against Spamhaus website almost broke the Internet a year ago and also earlier this year, hackers have succeeded in reaching new heights of the massive DDoS attack targeting content-delivery and anti-DDoS protection firm CloudFlare, reaching more than 400Gbps at its peak of traffic. Akamai's Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) issued a threat advisory on Thursday reporting a significant surge in DDoS attacks last month abusing the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface in network devices. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based protocol which is commonly known and often used to manage network devices. SNMP is typically used in devices such as printers, routers and firewalls that can be found in the home and enterprise environments as well. Just as D
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
New Botnet Hunts for Linux — Launching 20 DDoS Attacks/Day at 150Gbps

New Botnet Hunts for Linux — Launching 20 DDoS Attacks/Day at 150Gbps

Sep 30, 2015
A network of compromised Linux servers has grown so powerful that it can blow large websites off the Internet by launching crippling Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS ) attacks of over 150 gigabits per second (Gbps). The distributed denial-of-service network, dubbed XOR DDoS Botnet , targets over 20 websites per day , according to an advisory published by content delivery firm Akamai Technologies. Over 90 percent of the XOR DDoS targets are located in Asia, and the most frequent targets are the gaming sector and educational institutions. XOR creator is supposed to be from China, citing the fact that the IP addresses of all Command and Control (C&C) servers of XOR are located in Asia, where most of the infected Linux machines also reside. How XOR DDoS Botnet infects Linux System? Unlike other DDoS botnets , the XOR DDoS botnet infects Linux machines via embedded devices such as network routers and then brute forces a machine's SSH service to gain ro
Massive HTTP DDoS Attack Hits Record High of 71 Million Requests/Second

Massive HTTP DDoS Attack Hits Record High of 71 Million Requests/Second

Feb 14, 2023
Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Monday disclosed that it thwarted a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at over 71 million requests per second (RPS). "The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (RPS) with the largest exceeding 71 million," the company  said , calling it a "hyper-volumetric" DDoS attack. It's also the largest HTTP DDoS attack reported to date, more than 35% higher than the previous 46 million RPS DDoS attack that  Google Cloud mitigated in June 2022 . Cloudflare said the attacks singled out websites secured by its platform and that they emanated from a botnet comprising more than 30,000 IP addresses that belonged to "numerous" cloud providers. Targeted websites included a popular gaming provider, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms. HTTP attacks of this kind are designed to send a tsunami of HTTP requests t
Incapsula innovative DDoS Protection techniques

Incapsula innovative DDoS Protection techniques

Nov 22, 2012
Several weeks ago we reviewed Incapsula , a Cloud-based Security service which can significantly enhance the security of your website, while also boosting its performance. Following this review we've received many responses from our readers who wanted to learn more about Incapsula protection services. Specifically, we were asked to explain more about Incapsula Enterprise plan features. To answer these questions, today we are going to take a look at Incapsula DDoS Protection services. Distributed Denial of Service attacks If your business has a web presence, chances are that you've already heard about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. In case you didn't, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a DoS attack that is usually carried out by a "botnet", a network of computers acting in concert to overwhelm the server by depleting all available resources. Recently we all witnessed a large DDos attacks on U.S. banks by Muslim hacker group , an attack which crippled th
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 increasingl
New GoLang-Based HinataBot Exploiting Router and Server Flaws for DDoS Attacks

New GoLang-Based HinataBot Exploiting Router and Server Flaws for DDoS Attacks

Mar 17, 2023 Cybersecurity / Botnet
A new Golang-based botnet dubbed  HinataBot  has been observed to leverage known flaws to compromise routers and servers and use them to stage distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "The malware binaries appear to have been named by the malware author after a character from the popular anime series, Naruto, with file name structures such as 'Hinata-<OS>-<Architecture>,'" Akamai  said  in a technical report. Among the methods used to distribute the malware are the exploitation of exposed Hadoop YARN servers and security flaws in Realtek SDK devices ( CVE-2014-8361 )and Huawei HG532 routers ( CVE-2017-17215 , CVSS score: 8.8). Unpatched vulnerabilities and weak credentials have been a low-hanging fruit for attackers, representing an easy, well-documented entry point that does not require sophisticated social engineering tactics or other methods. The threat actors behind HinataBot are said to have been active since at least December 2022, with the
Microsoft Mitigated Record-Breaking 3.47 Tbps DDoS Attack on Azure Customers

Microsoft Mitigated Record-Breaking 3.47 Tbps DDoS Attack on Azure Customers

Jan 28, 2022
Microsoft this week revealed that it had fended off a record number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its customers in 2021, three of which surpassed 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps). One of the DDoS attacks took place in November, targeting an unnamed Azure customer in Asia and lasted a total of 15 minutes. It hit a peak throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), making it the largest attack ever reported in history. "This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan," Alethea Toh, product manager of Azure Networking,  said . DDoS attacks occur when several compromised devices are employed as a conduit to overwhelm a targeted server, service, or network with a flood of internet traffic with the goal of overloading the systems and d
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
Hackers Abuse Mitel Devices to Amplify DDoS Attacks by 4 Billion Times

Hackers Abuse Mitel Devices to Amplify DDoS Attacks by 4 Billion Times

Mar 09, 2022
Threat actors have been observed abusing a high-impact reflection/amplification method to stage sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for up to 14 hours with a record-breaking amplification ratio of 4,294,967,296 to 1. The attack vector – dubbed TP240PhoneHome ( CVE-2022-26143 ) – has been weaponized to launch significant DDoS attacks targeting broadband access ISPs, financial institutions, logistics companies, gaming firms, and other organizations. "Approximately 2,600 Mitel MiCollab and MiVoice Business Express collaboration systems acting as PBX-to-Internet gateways were incorrectly deployed with an abusable system test facility exposed to the public Internet," Akamai researcher Chad Seaman said in a joint advisory . "Attackers were actively leveraging these systems to launch reflection/amplification DDoS attacks of more than 53 million packets per second (PPS)." DDoS reflection attacks typically involve spoofing the IP address of a vic
Imperva Thwarts 2.5 Million RPS Ransom DDoS Extortion Attacks

Imperva Thwarts 2.5 Million RPS Ransom DDoS Extortion Attacks

Mar 05, 2022
Cybersecurity company Imperva on Friday said it recently mitigated a ransom distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting an unnamed website that peaked at 2.5 million requests per second (RPS). "While ransom DDoS attacks are not new, they appear to be evolving and becoming more interesting with time and with each new phase," Nelli Klepfish, security analyst at Imperva,  said . "For example, we've seen instances where the ransom note is included in the attack itself embedded into a URL request." The top sources of the attacks came from Indonesia, followed by the U.S., China, Brazil, India, Colombia, Russia, Thailand, Mexico, and Argentina. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are a subcategory of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in which an army of connected online devices, known as a botnet, is used to overwhelm a target website with fake traffic in an attempt to render it unavailable to legitimate users. The California-headquartered firm s
Anonymous Hackers Launch #OpUSA against US Banking and Government Agencies

Anonymous Hackers Launch #OpUSA against US Banking and Government Agencies

May 08, 2013
#OpUSA campaign is officially started, the day has come, today May 7 as announced by Anonymous , a coordinated online attack will hit Banking and government websites. The announcement made by popular group of hacktivists is creating great concerns between US security experts in charge of defense the potential targets. The message passed sent by Anonymous to US authorities is eloquent, " We Will Wipe You Off the Cyber Map "  A new wave of attacks, presumably distributed-denial-of-service attack , is expected to hit principal US financial institutions exactly as already happened in the last months. The hacktivists participating to OpUSA campaign protest against the policy of the US Government blamed to have committed war crimes in foreign states and in its countries. "A nonymous will make sure that's this May 7 will be a day to remember. On that day anonymous will start phase one of operation USA. America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afg
Hackers Begin Weaponizing TCP Middlebox Reflection for Amplified DDoS Attacks

Hackers Begin Weaponizing TCP Middlebox Reflection for Amplified DDoS Attacks

Mar 02, 2022
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks leveraging a new amplification technique called TCP Middlebox Reflection have been detected for the first time in the wild, six months after the novel attack mechanism was presented in theory. "The attack […] abuses vulnerable firewalls and content filtering systems to reflect and amplify TCP traffic to a victim machine, creating a powerful DDoS attack," Akamai researchers  said  in a report published Tuesday. "This type of attack dangerously lowers the bar for DDoS attacks, as the attacker needs as little as 1/75th (in some cases) the amount of bandwidth from a volumetric standpoint," the researchers added. A distributed reflective denial-of-service ( DRDoS ) is a form of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that relies on publicly accessible UDP servers and bandwidth amplification factors (BAFs) to overwhelm a victim's system with a high volume of UDP responses. In these attacks, the adversary sends a
5 Major Russian Banks Hit With Powerful DDoS Attacks

5 Major Russian Banks Hit With Powerful DDoS Attacks

Nov 11, 2016
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
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
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