The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: Search results for Distributed Denial of Service

The connected devices, better known as the Internet of Things , have been attracting the significant interest of, not only users but also cyber criminals that are turning them into weapons for cyber war. Due to the insecure implementation of Internet-connected embedded devices, they are routinely being hacked and used in cyber attacks. We have seen Smart TVs and Refrigerator sending out millions of malicious spam emails ; we have also seen printers and set-top-boxes mining Bitcoins . And Now… Cyber crooks have targeted innocent looking CCTV cameras – common Internet-of-Things (IoT) device – to launch Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks . Also Read: 100,000 Refrigerators and other home appliances hacked to perform cyber attack. Yes, Surveillance cameras in shopping malls are being targeted to form a large botnet that can blow large websites off the Internet by launching crippling Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. THE CAUSE The cro

What would it take for hackers to significantly disrupt the US' 911 emergency call system? It only takes 6,000 Smartphones. Yes, you heard it right! According to new research published last week, a malicious attacker can leverage a botnet of infected smartphone devices located throughout the country to knock the 911 service offline in an entire state, and possibly the whole United States, for days. The attacker would only need 6,000 infected smartphones to launch automated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against 911 service in an entire state by placing simultaneous calls from the botnet devices to the emergency numbers. However, as little as 200,000 infected mobile phones could knock the 911 emergency call system offline across the entire US. Where does the Problem Lies? Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Cyber-Security Research Center say the problem is in the fact that current US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regula

Radware's Attack Mitigation System Delivers the First Fully Integrated Solution to Fight Cyber Attacks in Real Time The solution blocks the new breed of sophisticated attacks that target Multiple layers of the IT infrastructure .  Today's point security tools for IT infrastructures are not enough to protect against the new wave of sophisticated cyber attacks. That's why  Radware  (NASDAQ: RDWR), a leading provider of  application delivery  and  application security  solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, today announced Radware Attack Mitigation System (AMS), the industry's first fully integrated IT security strategy and portfolio that protects the application infrastructure in real time against network and application downtime, application vulnerability exploitation, malware spread, information theft, Web service attacks and Web defacement. Additional Resources   ·                 AMS Brochure   ·                 CTO Expert Article   ·                 ERT Inci

Github – a popular coding website used by programmers to collaborate on software development – was hit by a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for more than 24 hours late Thursday night. It seems like when users from outside countries visit different websites on the Internet that serve advertisements and tracking code from Chinese Internet giant Baidu , the assailants on Chinese border quietly inject malicious JavaScript code into the pages of those websites. The code instructs browsers of visitors to those websites to rapidly connect to GitHub.com every two seconds in a way that visitors couldn't smell, creating "an extremely large amount of traffic," according to a researcher who goes by the name A nthr@x . "A certain device at the border of China's inner network and the Internet has hijacked the HTTP connections went into China, replaced some JavaScript files from Baidu with malicious ones," A nthr@x wrote at Insight La

Image Credit: Pixelbay Blockchain startups are cropping up left and right aiming to disrupt existing services and business models. These range from the trivial to potentially game-changing solutions that can revolutionize the internet as we know it. Among those that promise to change the world, most are attempting to reconstruct the entire internet infrastructure into something that is decentralized, secure, scalable, and tokenized. There are also those that aim to solve the most significant problems plaguing the digital world, particularly potentially costly and tedious security issues. We do not lack for dangers, ranging from data breaches to denial-of-service attacks, and other hacks. For the most part, there are capable SaaS and software-defined services that are capable enough in addressing the threats that involve malware and DDoS. However, blockchains offer much much more. The plague of DDoS Distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attacks involve a malicious hacke

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 evolutio

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

Two weeks ago, we reported how a serious flaw in the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent file sharing protocols could be exploited to carry out a devastating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, allowing lone hackers with limited resources to take down large websites. Good news is that the developers of BitTorrent have fixed the security issue in its service that is being used by hundreds of Millions of users worldwide. In a blog post published Thursday, BitTorrent announced that the flaw was resided in a reference implementation of the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP) called libuTP , which is used by many widely used BitTorrent clients such as μTorrent , Vuze and Mainline . The San Francisco company also announced that it has rolled out a patch for its libuTP software that will stop miscreants from abusing the p2p protocol to conduct Distributed Reflective Denial-of-Service (DRDoS) attacks. DRDoS attack is a more sophisticated form of conventional DDoS att

In what has become something of 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, when 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 w

At least 300,000 IP addresses associated with MikroTik devices have been found vulnerable to multiple remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities that have since been patched by the popular supplier of routers and wireless ISP devices. The most affected devices are located in China, Brazil, Russia, Italy, Indonesia, with the U.S. coming in at number eight, cybersecurity firm Eclypsium said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "These devices are both powerful, [and] often highly vulnerable," the researchers  noted . "This has made MikroTik devices a favorite among threat actors who have commandeered the devices for everything from DDoS attacks, command-and-control (aka 'C2'), traffic tunneling, and more." MikroTik devices are an enticing target not least because there are more than two million of them deployed worldwide, posing a huge attack surface that can be leveraged by threat actors to mount an array of intrusions. Indeed, earlier this Septem

The Norwegian police have arrested and charged a 17-year-old for a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack earlier this week that disabled the websites of major financial institutions and other businesses in the country. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is designed to sabotage, shut down and overload the targeted website with web traffic more than its capacity in order to make it unavailable to users. The attack targeted five major banks, two telecommunication firms, three airlines and one insurance company, as their websites and online payment systems were disrupted. The unnamed teen claimed to be a part of the hacktivist group Anonymous Norway for what was thought to be the country's biggest ever cyber-attack on businesses. Although, the Anonymous Norway, via a Twitter message, has dismissed any connection to him or the cyber attack. The youngster was a resident of Bergen, on Norway's west coast. He was arrested on Thursday morning and que

FBI warning about Banking trojan " Gameover " Organized crooks have begun launching debilitating cyber attacks against banks and their customers as part of a smoke screen to prevent victims from noticing simultaneous high-dollar cyber heists. On Friday the FBI issued a warning about a banking trojan named Gameover. It's a new variant of Zeus, a user credential stealing malware that targets online bank users. Zeus has been around for years, and every now and then a new version with a new twist pops up. Gameover has also been implicated in Distributed-Denial-of-Service attacks that temporarily-disable bank websites to draw attention away from fraudulent transactions. Like another Zeus variant, Troj/BredoZp-GY, Gameover uses e-mail spam to propagate, and the safest way to keep Gameover away from your PC is to avoid links and file attachments that are contained in unfamiliar e-mail messages. Experts warn that any interaction with this fake NACHA link can infect your PC with

Over 2011-2012 we've seen an increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other web attacks on SME's websites. Incapsula is one of the companies whose service is useful to protect your website from all threats and mitigate DDoS attacks which affect your websites, servers, databases, and other essential infrastructure. Incapsula is a cloud-based website security and performance service, including a PCI-certified cloud web application firewall and a content delivery network (CDN) for small and medium-sized businesses. We at ' The Hacker News ' got the chance to review the service using an Enterprise plan account. Really it takes I think 1-2 minutes to join the service and add this extra layer of virtual shield around your Website. You have to make a simple DNS settings change in your domain panel. Your site traffic is then routed through Incapsula's global network of high-powered servers. Incoming traffic is analyzed and a security layer is a