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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...

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...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The tale of LulzSec  two admits targeting websites Two British members of the notorious Lulz Security hacking collective have pleaded guilty to a slew of computer crimes, in the latest blow against online troublemakers whose exploits have grabbed headlines and embarrassed governments around the world. LulzSec members Ryan Cleary , 20, and Jake Davis , 19, pleaded guilty in a London court to launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks last year against several targets, including the CIA, the Arizona State Police, PBS, Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox, News International and the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency and National Health Service Ryan Cleary is from Essex, United Kingdom who was arrested by Metropolitan Police on June 21 2011 and charged with violating the Computer Misuse Act and the Criminal Law Act 1977. He was accused of being a member of LulzSec but was not a member of the said group although he admitted that he did run one of the IRC channels that t...

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...

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...

Reading a 'Note' created by anyone on the Facebook could trick you automatically to do malicious attacks against others unknowingly. A Security researcher Chaman Thapa, also known as chr13 claims that the flaw resides in 'Notes' section of the most popular social networking site - Facebook, that could allow anyone to launch the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack of more than 800 Mbps Bandwidth on any website. A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is one in which multiple compromised systems attacks a single target system or service to make it unavailable to its intended users. The flood of incoming requests essentially forces the target system or service to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to its legitimate users. While demonstrating the vulnerability on his blog , he explained that Facebook allows its users to include tags inside the post in order to draft a note with beautiful related images from any source. Faceb...

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 ...

European and U.S. law enforcement agencies have announced the dismantling of a bulletproof hosting service provider called  Lolek Hosted , which cybercriminals have used to launch cyber-attacks across the globe. "Five of its administrators were arrested, and all of its servers seized, rendering LolekHosted.net no longer available," Europol  said  in a statement. "The service facilitated the distribution of information-stealing malware, and also the launching of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, fictitious online shops, botnet server management, and distribution of spam messages worldwide," it added. Polish authorities, who made the arrests,  said  three other detainees have been subjected to preventive measures in the form of police supervision, bail, and a ban on leaving the country. Alongside the arrests, hundreds of servers containing terabytes of data, computer equipment, and mobile phones have been confiscated. The seizure, carried out on ...

During the weekend China's Internet was taken down by a powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the .cn domain slowed and blocked Internet access inaccessibility for hours. Security expert clarified that China could have been perpetrated by sophisticated hackers or by a single individual. The China Internet Network Information Center [ CINIC ] reported that the attack began at 02:00 local time on Sunday with a peek at 04:00 that made it the largest DDoS attack the country's networks have ever faced. The CCINIC is responsible for registering sites in the .cn domain. Before malicious coders can launch a DDoS attack, they must infect the computers of unsuspecting users, often by tricking people into installing malware on their computers. The China Internet Network Information Center confirmed the attack with an official statement informing internet users that it is gradually restoring web services and that will operate to improve the sec...

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...

A number of websites belonging to the Israeli government were felled in a distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attack on Monday, rendering the portals inaccessible for a short period of time. "In the past few hours, a DDoS attack against a communications provider was identified," the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD)  said  in a tweet. "As a result, access to several websites, among them government websites, was denied for a short time. As of now, all of the websites have returned to normal activity." A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious attempt to hamper the normal traffic of a targeted server or service by overwhelming the victim and its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of junk internet traffic by leveraging compromised computers and IoT devices as sources of attack traffic. The development comes after internet watchdog NetBlocks  reported  "significant disruptions" registered on multiple networks supplied by Israel...

It is a time when many are thinking of their families and loved ones, time off work, and gift-giving – the holidays. However, while many have their minds outside the realm of work during the holiday season, often, this is when attackers plan their most sinister attacks.  So how can you take precautions to protect your organization during these times? Why holidays put your company at risk of cyberattack Attackers today do not have a soft spot for businesses and give companies a break at any time of the year, especially not during holidays. On the contrary, any time of the year where companies may be less prepared to fend off a cyberattack is an opportunity for successful compromise. As a result, the holidays put your company at a higher risk of cyberattack.  Most end-users do not think about cybersecurity when surfing the web or receiving emails with holiday deals during the season. As a result, many let their guard down to a certain degree and become preoccupied and dis...

In what has become a yearly tradition, it's now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you'll see, 2010 has been very interesting. Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you're an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them. Let's get started! The major incidents on the Internet in 2010 were… Wikipedia's Failover Fail Wikipedia has become so ubiquitous that it can't go down for a minute without people noticing. According to Google Trends for Websites , the site has roughly 50 million visitors per day. In March, servers in Wikimedia's European data center overheated and shut down. The service was supposed to fail over to a US data center. Unfortunately, the failover mechanism didn't work properly and broke the DNS lookups for all of Wikipedia . This effectively rendered the site unreachable worldwide. It took...

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare on Thursday disclosed that it mitigated the largest ever volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack recorded to date. The attack, launched via a Mirai botnet, is said to have targeted an unnamed customer in the financial industry last month. "Within seconds, the botnet bombarded the Cloudflare edge with over 330 million attack requests," the company  noted , at one point reaching a record high of 17.2 million requests-per-second (rps), making it three times bigger than previously reported HTTP DDoS attacks. Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to target a specific network with an intention to overwhelm its bandwidth capacity and often utilize  reflective amplification techniques  to scale their attack and cause as much operational disruption as possible. They also typically originate from a network of malware-infected systems — consisting of computers, servers, and IoT devices — enabling threat ac...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of 48 domains that offered services to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on behalf of other threat actors, effectively lowering the barrier to entry for malicious activity. It also charged six suspects – Jeremiah Sam Evans Miller (23), Angel Manuel Colon Jr. (37), Shamar Shattock (19), Cory Anthony Palmer (22), John M. Dobbs (32), and Joshua Laing (32) – for their alleged ownership in the operation. The websites "allowed paying users to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks that flood targeted computers with information and prevent them from being able to access the internet," the DoJ said in a press statement. The six defendants have been charged with running various booter (or stresser) services, including RoyalStresser[.]com, SecurityTeam[.]io, Astrostress[.]com, Booter[.]sx, IPStresser[.]com, and TrueSecurityServices[.]io. They have also been accused ...

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...