Monthly Archives: December 2014

Sony Reportedly Fights Back Against Hackers With DDoS Attacks Of Their Own

As many have heard by now, hackers have been chipping away at Sony Pictures, leaking information in the process, such as the salaries of Sony execs, celebrity information, email exchanges, and more. It also does not appear that the hacks are slowing down or that they could be stopping anytime soon. However if you thought that maybe Sony would be taking this lying down, you would be mistaken. According to reports, it seems that Sony Pictures has decided to fight back. How are they doing this? Well by attacking the hackers themselves in the form of a DDoS attack through the use of Amazon Web Services which has data centers located in Tokyo and Singapore. This is actually a tactic used to combat against movie and music piracy to help knock the servers hosting the files offline, but in this case, Sony is hoping that they are able to knock the hackers themselves offline too. It is unclear as to how effective their efforts have been so far, but it’s refreshing to see Sony go on the offensive. So far the hackers claim to have stolen as much as 100TB of Sony Pictures’ files which includes payroll information, financial information, budgets, and even feature films, some of which have already been leaked online. Source: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/12/sony-reportedly-fights-back-against-hackers-with-ddos-attacks-of-their-own/?utm_source=mainrss

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Sony Reportedly Fights Back Against Hackers With DDoS Attacks Of Their Own

AbleGamers’ weird weekend of porn stars, charity and a worries over a DDoS attack [correction]

AbleGamers believe they became the target of a DDoS attack over the weekend after the charity founders declined to accept funds from porn star Mercedes Carrera because of her connection to the GamerGate movement, according to the gaming and disability charity. But Carrera tells Polygon she had nothing to do with the issues the site ran into over the weekend and that while she is a GamerGate supporter the live stream adult cam show is not connected to GamerGate. “In fact, I was unaware any of this was happening until checking my social media on Sunday,” she said. The disagreement started out as an offer by Carrera to help raise funds for AbleGamers, a website dedicated to gaming and disability. “I chose AbleGamers as I have become friendly with some disabled gamers and wanted to support the mission of providing alternatives in gaming for those who are not fully abled,” Carrera told Polygon. “I see the value in disabled gamers having an opportunity to experience a variety of actions they may not have access to in day to day life.” AbleGamers officials said they were initially open to the idea. “As a sex positive organization, our immediate response was ‘Absolutely,’” according to a post on AbleGamers. “We would be honored to be chosen.” But a thread about the fundraiser on Reddit raised concerns for AbleGamers. “In doing our due diligence we discovered the event organizer was putting together a GamerGate stream that would ‘for now’ be ‘a charity stream’ because they ‘cannot mention that it is a GG stream as it might shy away BZ (Brazzers) and others,’” reads a statement from the organization. According to a message on its official website, AbleGamers “became concerned by the lack of transparency in the original emails having made no mention of GamerGate. We became further alarmed as the post continued adding ‘GamerGate [h]as just weaponized porn.’” Carrera said that AbleGamers emailed the coordinators of the event and said they didn’t want to receive money from the fundraising because of what they read on the Reddit thread, including someone writing that “GamerGate had weaponized porn”. After announcing it would no longer be involved in the charity event, the AbleGamers website began having technical issues, according to site officials. AbleGamers representative Steven Spohn told Polygon that a DDoS attack was confirmed by the website’s host. “When we released our statement, we figured it was traffic,” says Spohn. “Our server is ‘charity level’ which means cheap and no DDoS protection. “When we started getting ‘cannot connect to service’ on the webpage, we called Liquid Web. Three different phone representatives said that it was in fact a DDoS. We relayed the information to our audience as it was happening. Our website is on a cloud server, sandboxed away from others. “So, were we?” Spohn continues. “Our host says so. Could they be wrong? Sure. If LW tells us three techs and their top admin were wrong, then we’ll agree we weren’t [victims of a DDoS attack]. Until then I’m sticking to we were DDoS attacked around 1pm Eastern on Sunday for about 30 minutes.” Carrera is adamant she had nothing to do with the issues, something she goes into in more detail in an open letter on Destructoid. She also said that the fundraiser has never been connected with GamerGate. “The live stream cam show adult content event happening January 2 is not connected to GamerGate,” she said. “However, as I have come out in support of GamerGate’s mission of ethics in journalism and resistance to censorship, it is not surprising that the two became conflated on Reddit. However the show itself is not intended to be a GamerGate sanctioned event. ” She added that the fundraiser is still happening and that a partnership is in the works for who will be the recipient of the money raised. Source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/9/7358899/ablegamers-gamergate-mercedes-carrera-ddos

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AbleGamers’ weird weekend of porn stars, charity and a worries over a DDoS attack [correction]

1&1 goes titsup, blames lengthy outage on DDoS attack

UK hosting company 1&1 went titsup late on Tuesday night and struggled to recover this morning, after claiming it had been the victim of a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The website collapsed shortly before 10pm yesterday, and it has taken 1&1 a full 12 hours to get its service back up and running. Readers who told the Reg about the outage said that the service had been flaky for several hours before it keeled over. 1&1 blamed the downtime on a DDoS attack in a tweet. However, although the website appeared to be returning to normal, 1&1 had yet to update its customers about the status of its system at time of writing. Customers were still griping about the mysterious outage this morning. Indeed, 1&1 was tight-lipped about the cause of the service disruption on its status page, which made no mention of a system security breach. Last month, Fasthosts blamed a five-hour outage it had suffered on a DDoS attack. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/1_and_1_hosting_firm_claims_ddos_attack_downs_website/

66 year old British Rock Guitarist jailed for taking part in 2010 Anonymous DDoS campaign called Operation Payback

Geoffrey ‘Jake’ Commander, a 66-years-old British rock guitarist and part of the Electric Light Band Orchestra (ELO), has been given a a jail sentence for joining the popular online hacktivists collective ‘Anonymous’ and taking part in the famous Operation Payback campaign in 2010 which brought down many financial websites. Washington Times quotes that, “Geoffrey “Jake” Commander, a rock guitarist who has played with the Electric Light Orchestra, George Harrison and Elton John, among others, walked unnoticed through the halls of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria early Friday afternoon” The sentence was given by the Alexandria District Court on Friday following the admission of guilty plea by ‘Jake.’ The ELO guitarist admitted to his involvement in the Anonymous operation at the hearing before the sentence was pronounced. He also promised the Judge never to return to the United States after his release. The authorities said that he could serve only ten days in prison, ‘Jake’ was earlier facing a likely prison sentence of ten years jail time in a federal prison. Operation Payback The Anonymous campaign called Operation Payback was a coordinated attack against the opponents of Internet piracy. Anonymous started the Operation Payback started as retaliation to DDoS attacks on torrent sites by anti piracy lobby. The Anonymous then allegedly took down many anti-piracy websites all over the world through coordinated DDoS attacks. After Wikileaks published the leaks of Diplomatic cables in December 2010, some banks withdrew banking facilities given to Wikileaks. Anonymous then turned the Operation Payback against such banks which had withdrawn the banking facilities. Geoffrey’s Role in Operation Payback. Reports indicate that Geoffery took part in the IRC chat administered by members of Anonymous collective and joined the 1000 members of Anonymous to launch a DDoS attack against MasterCard. He was alleged part of the Operation Payback for over 3 hours in which he he contributed to the amplification of the attack by using the LOIC (low-orbit Ion cannon) tool on his PC. MasterCard had reported later that it recorded a $1 million loss due to this DDoS attack. Geoffery was arrested in 2013 after he returned to the United States with his family, 3 years after the attack. Source: http://www.techworm.net/2014/12/66-year-old-british-rock-guitarist-jailed-taking-part-2010-anonymous-ddos-attack.html

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66 year old British Rock Guitarist jailed for taking part in 2010 Anonymous DDoS campaign called Operation Payback

Carbon Poker Crash and Possible DDoS Attacks Highlight Need for Legalization

Recent happenings at what was considered one of the more reliable and trustworthy offshore online poker rooms, Carbon Poker, is simply furthering the case for regulated online poker in the United States. Anyone calling for a ban of online gambling in the U.S. should pay particular attention to what has taken place at Carbon Poker over the past couple weeks, as these are the types of online poker operators that will survive a federal online gambling ban. If Sheldon Adelson gets his way, regulated sites like WSOP.com would be forced to shut down and sites like Carbon would continue to fill the void. In the past couple weeks the site experienced several significant problems that have left many players concerned about the safety of their accounts and their personal information, as well as with the overall integrity of the games at the site. Server crash leads to data breach The first issue occurred during one of the biggest tournament days in Carbon Poker’s history. On November 23, the Main Event of the Carbon Poker Online Poker Series, along with dozens of other tournaments at the site, were running when the Carbon Poker servers’ crashed, bringing everything to a screeching halt. Site-wide server crashes are rare, but they do happen. Unfortunately for Carbon, this was not a typical server crash, which is bad enough in its own right. According to multiple reports by poker players on social media sites and on the poker forums, the server crash not only caused widespread disconnections, but also caused hole cards to change mid-hand for players still able to log in and play, and even more worrisome, customers were inexplicably able to gain access to other players’ accounts when they tried to log back on to the site. Players reported that this first of its kind (to my knowledge) technical glitch, not only allowed them access to other Carbon Poker’s players accounts, but they were capable of gambling with those funds (including players that were active on the site when the servers crashed), as well as being able to see the accountholders sensitive personal information. A DDoS superuser? As concerning as the server crash and data breach were, things got even worse this weekend when, after several days of unexplained and consistent disconnect issues, widespread rumors began to take hold that targeted DDoS attacks were behind the ongoing technical issues, and were being used to win pots. Following pages of frustration over the ongoing disconnects, the DDoS rumors took hold with an out of left field (something that is not uncommon on 2+2) accusation: I found the hacker that is disconnecting the server. He builds big pots and once he min-raises he crashes the server and scoops the pot. His username is L4ss3m4jj4n. He did it to me a few times and took quite a bit from me at PLO. I then followed him and watched him do it to others. I emailed support so lets see what happens.” And from there it escalated: “Guys, I would normally say this is just somebody coming up with a wild conspiracy theory, but this is serious, everybody should open up this table, it’s table 24 in the $215/125k, something is super super fishy about the way L4ss3m4jj4n is playing, every disconnect has benefited him so far, it seems too obvious if you watch it for a few of the disconnects.” “second time i’m witnessing him betting in big pot and a disconnect taking place.” “Kh8s9d7h board he checks, phat1cat bets 1888 into 3750, l4ss3m4jj4n minraises to 3776 and disconnect.” In addition to the forum gossip, the potential DDoS superuser was also discussed/mentioned on social media by well-known poker players and poker commentators. Click here and also here. As the story began to unfold, over 100 players started monitoring this person’s play as it was being live-streamed on Twitch.com, and at the same time were furiously contacting Carbon Poker customer support en masse to have something done about the situation. You can read a good summary (for those that can’t handle 200 pages of 2+2 posts) of what took place at Carbon Poker/Merge Gaming here. It should be stated, that whether this was a concerted DDOS attack by some nefarious player(s), or if the sites are simply experiencing ongoing technical issues is unclear. What is clear is that unregulated sites make it much harder for players to be treated fairly and properly compensated when these things occur. It also shows the inability of players on unregulated sites to take their grievances to a regulatory body that oversees the site. The important takeaway is, if these types of issues are occurring at Carbon Poker, considered one of the top unregulated online poker sites still serving the U.S. market, what is happening at the other, more suspect, operators? Source: http://www.pokerupdate.com/news/networks-and-rooms/12083-carbon-poker-crash-and-possible-ddos-attacks-highlight-need-for-legalization/

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Carbon Poker Crash and Possible DDoS Attacks Highlight Need for Legalization

Hacker Group ‘Lizard Squad’ Hits Xbox Live and PlayStation Network with DDoS Attacks

A hacker group used distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against two giants in the gaming industry, causing widespread service outages among users. First, Lizard Squad, the self-professed “king of DDoS,” took down Xbox Live early last week. The ensuing outage lasted all of Monday night, with Microsoft support announcing that service had been restored on Tuesday. Shortly after the service interruption occurred, Lizard Squad tweeted “Xbox Live #offline” and announced that they would gift Microsoft a “wonderful” Christmas present this year. It would appear the group is living up to its promise. Later on Friday, Lizard Squad brought down Xbox Live again with another DDoS attack. Xbox 360 users were disproportionately affected by the group’s second attack against Microsoft that week, though Xbox One also experienced some problems. Then late last night on Sunday, Lizard Squad shifted its focus to Sony, which is still in the process of investigating a massive hack, and used a DDoS attack to bring down Sony Entertainment’s PlayStation Network (PSN). The group has also claimed responsibility for bringing down Sony’s online PlayStation store, replacing the homepage with the text, “Page Not Found! It’s not you. It’s the Internet’s Fault.” While service has been restored to PSN, the PlayStation store outage is still ongoing as of this writing. Sony is no stranger to Lizard Squad. The hacker group attacked the tech giant in August earlier this year, causing a massive service interruption among North American users. The group shortly thereafter tweeted that explosives were aboard an American Airlines flight on which Sony Entertainment President John Smedley was flying, causing the plane to be diverted. These recent attacks against Xbox Live and Sony are just the beginning, according to Lizard Squad. On Christmas Day, the hacker group has announced that it will bring down Xbox Live, only this time, it promises that the attack will irreversibly cripple the service, causing the outage to last “forever.” Whether the hacker group makes good on this promise remains to be seen. At any event, we can certainly expect additional attacks from Lizard Squad before this holiday season is over. Source: http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/top-security-stories/hacker-group-lizard-squad-hits-xbox-live-and-playstation-network-with-ddos-attacks/

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Hacker Group ‘Lizard Squad’ Hits Xbox Live and PlayStation Network with DDoS Attacks

Fort Lauderdale Website Under DDoS Attack Again

The City of Fort Lauderdale announced Wednesday that it may have to disconnect its Internet service at different points due to another attempt at a denial of service attack on the city’s website. Fort Lauderdale recently saw its home page and the website for Mayor Jack Seiler both go through denial of service attacks at the hands of Anonymous. The hacker collective launched the DDoS attack to try to change the homeless feeding ordinance and other city rules. The Anonymous DDoS attack lasted for several hours during the first attack which kept the home page inaccessible for several hours. The city said Wednesday that it is working with its Internet Service Provider to mitigate risk and safeguard the system. However, the city said there may be service interruptions and intermittent website performance due to the possible new attack. Source: http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Fort-Lauderdale-Website-Under-Attack-Again-284672121.html

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Fort Lauderdale Website Under DDoS Attack Again

Summary of DDoS Attacks this Holiday Season

A number of high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have taken place over the past few days, and it is expected that more will occur as we draw closer to the holidays. The attacks began early last week when a hacker who is associated with Anonymous orchestrated a DDoS attack against the websites for the Supreme Court of Canada and the Ottawa Police Forces. The DDoS attack was preceded by a hack against the City of Ottawa, during which the attacker replaced the website’s homepage with an image of a dancing banana. According to the hacker who has claimed responsibility for the attacks, the DDoS campaign was meant to respond to the arrest of a teen that had allegedly made more than 30 emergency 9-1-1 calls across North America. The hacker believes the teen was framed and is trying to help him clear his name. Following a busy Thanksgiving weekend, which included the Sony breach, Cyber Monday saw a DDoS attack against DNSimple, a domain management provider. The attack, which lasted approximately 12 hours, sustained traffic of up to 25Gbps and about 50 million packets per second sent to DNSimple’s servers. Finally, a DDoS attack launched on Tuesday by Lizard Squad, a group well known for this type of attack, succeeded in bringing down the servers at Blizzard Entertainment, a gaming enterprise known for the popular World of Warcraft computer game franchise. Just a day earlier, Lizard Squad had succeeded in using a DDoS campaign to bring down Xbox Live, much to the frustration of shoppers who had purchased the gaming console on Cyber Monday. The attacks on the Canadian government websites, DNSimple, and Blizzard Entertainment suggest that high-volume DDoS attacks are on the rise. In fact, Verisign, a Virginia-based security firm, has been tracking this trend throughout the third quarter. Over the course of its investigation, it has noted an increase of as much as 60 percent quarter-on-quarter in 2014 for some companies. Researchers at Verisign recommend that companies invest in advanced DDoS protection solutions. This is especially true as we approach the holidays, for this type of attack spikes around this time of year. And with Lizard Squad preparing for additional DDoS attacks, their advice could not be more perfectly timed. It looks like it’s going to be a busy holiday season. Source: http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/top-security-stories/ddos-attacks-ramp-up-for-the-holidays/

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Summary of DDoS Attacks this Holiday Season

Fort Lauderdale websites DDoSed after Anonymous threats over feeding ban

Turns out the whole thing was pointless anyway Municipal websites in Fort Lauderdale, Florida suffered a distributed denial of service attack on Monday after Anonymous promised to disrupt the city’s activities following the passing of local laws outlawing the feeding of homeless people.…

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Fort Lauderdale websites DDoSed after Anonymous threats over feeding ban

The Conversation hit by DDoS Attack

Academia-meets-journalism website the Conversation was hit by a denial of service hacker attack this morning, preventing it from posting new articles or sending its daily email for around eight hours. The cyber attack was targeted at the site’s domain name server DNSimple and affected hundreds of sites across the world. It is believed to be related to the Cyber Monday sales which were going on in the US and UK at the time. In a note in today’s newsletter, sent at 2pm as opposed to the regular 6am, managing editor Misha Ketchell wrote: “Apologies for the long delay in sending today’s newsletter. Our website has been down since shortly after 6am thanks to a “denial of service” attack on our domain name server, DNSimple. “If that’s got you scratching your head, you’re not alone. A denial of service attack is easy enough to understand: it’s where malevolent hackers inundate a server with so many requests it ceases to function. “What’s confounding is why anyone would do something so pointless. In this case we think we’ve been caught up in a targeted attack to coincide with the Cyber Monday sales events in the US, as David Glance explains here. “For now the worst appears to be over and we are working on ways to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Thanks for your patience.” DNSimple is still currently experiencing issues across some of its domains due to the attacks, which are explained in more detail in a piece on The Conversation. Source: http://mumbrella.com.au/conversation-hit-denial-service-hackers-morning-265908

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The Conversation hit by DDoS Attack