Monthly Archives: April 2016

Hacker Faces 10 Years for DDoS Attacks and Sex Toy Pranks in DOJ Crackdown

A nonymous’s repeated attacks on Donald Trump since December of 2015 have made hacker harassment a part of everyday conversation. Today, the United States Department of Justice handed down a sentence to a member of the Electronik Tribulation Army (ETA) that shows just how severe the punishment for those types of hacks can be. Benjamin Earnest Nichols, a 37-year-old ETA member from Oklahoma City, pled guilty to intentionally causing damage with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on mcgrewsecurity.com in 2010. Nichols hasn’t been sentenced yet, but faces a maximum of 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. It’s the DDoS attack that put Nichols in court, but the list of other things he admits to doing range from costly to downright dirty: causing $6,500 in losses to McGrew Security because of a downed website, making disparaging remarks and insulting McGrew (owner of the attacked website and security service), photoshopping images of McGrew, and sending sex toys to McGrew’s home. The exact type of sex toys were not mentioned in the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release. Regardless, it’s the type of behavior hacking groups have made a name doing. It’s also behavior that the U.S. DOJ plans on stopping. McGrew became a target of the ETA because of his role in the arrest of Jesse McGraw, the leader of the hacker group, back in 2009. McGraw was arrested after he installed malware and a remote-access program on dozens of computers at the North Central Medical Plaza in Dallas. He planned to use the medical computers for a DDoS attack on a rival hacker group, but was stopped before anything came of his tampering. He was sentenced to nine years in federal prison in 2011. It was one of the first major cybercrime sentences given, and the hacking community still mentions the decision’s importance. After McGraw’s arrest, Nichols and two other ETA members turned their eyes on McGrew. “They set up a website in my name to pose as me, and put up embarrassing content or things they though would embarrass me, including a call-to-action to buy sex toys, and fake pornographic images,” McGrew told Wired in 2010. “They harvest email addresses from the university I work at and emailed it out to those.” McGrew was a key witness against McGraw, so the FBI got involved. They raided Nichols’ home because his actions were “affecting a potential witness in an official proceeding,” the search warrant affidavit read. The search warrant lists Nichols as going by the names “thefixer25,” ”fixer,” “fix,” ”c0aX,” and “ballsdeep.” Witness intimidation is a federal crime. The ETA responded by posting the following on its website: “On the 23rd of June 2010 the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued search warrants on ETA members. All their computers and electronic devices have been taken for forensic investigation…. We are not terrorists, we are freedom fighters and cyber protesting is not illegal.” Back in 2009, when McGraw was arrested, ETA members were hyper aware of how they could be next. When Nichols was asked if he was still in the ETA in an email from another member, he responded: “Right now admissal (sic) of any kind like that is certainly what some douchebag prosecutor would like. I cannot give you that answer when you ask me outright, however.” Nichols also said that he wiped his computers. Turns out he didn’t wipe them well enough, and can look forward to big time for his hacking crimes. It’s a message from the DOJ to the hacking community that it surely won’t ignore. Source: https://www.inverse.com/article/13891-hacker-faces-10-years-for-ddos-attacks-and-sex-toy-pranks-in-doj-crack

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Hacker Faces 10 Years for DDoS Attacks and Sex Toy Pranks in DOJ Crackdown

Over half of companies feel investment in DDoS protection is justified

A quarter of all companies risk their business-critical systems due to a lack of anti-DDoS protection according to new research by Kaspersky Lab. It’s the kind of absence that can cause enterprises massive financial loss and reputational damage and, according to the research, more than half of companies feel that investing in protection against DDoS attacks is justified. About the same number of survey respondents from telecoms (82 percent) and finance (78 percent) think anti-DDoS protection is an important cyber-security requirement for infrastructure. Just shy of a quarter (24 percent) of respondents don’t use DDoS protection or only use it part of the time (41 percent). Only 34 percent of companies are fully protected against the threat. A majority of companies with no anti-DDoS protection are the ones attacked the most often such as media (36 percent), healthcare and education (both 31 percent). A quarter of companies stated that the stability of business-critical systems is a priority for their organisation, however only 15 percent plan to implement anti-DDoS protection in the near future. “It’s important to take DDoS attacks seriously as they can be just as damaging to a business as any other cyber-crime, especially if used as part of a bigger targeted attack. Organisations must understand that protection of the IT infrastructure requires a comprehensive approach and continuous monitoring, regardless of the company’s size or sphere of activity,” said Russ Madley, head of B2B at Kaspersky Lab. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/over-half-of-companies-feel-investment-in-ddos-protection-is-justified/article/487567/

eBook: Guide to protecting SaaS apps from DDoS attacks

With a business model dependent on 100% uptime for their online customers, the last thing SaaS companies can afford is a DDoS attack. Read this DDoS eBook from Incapsula and find out: Why SaaS companies are such a popular target for DDoS attacks What are the costs and risks of DDoS attacks to your business What are the steps SaaS companies can take to defend themselves. How does Incapsula work? Once activated through a simple … More ?

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eBook: Guide to protecting SaaS apps from DDoS attacks

Novosti-Armenia and ARKA news agencies come Tuesday under heavy DDoS-attacks

The websites of Novosti-Armenia (newsarmenia.am) and ARKA (arka.am) news agencies came Tuesday under heavy DDoS-attacks, hampering access to these resources for half an hour. An inquiry found that the attacks were carried out from Russian IP addresses, but this does not mean that the order came from that country. The administrations of both websites have managed to eliminate the problem. DDoS attack is short for Distributed Denial of Service Attack. DDoS is characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from using that service. There are two general forms of DoS attacks: those that crash services and those that flood services. The most serious attacks are distributed and in many or most cases involve forging of IP sender addresses so that the location of the attacking machines cannot easily be identified, nor can filtering be done based on the source address. Source: http://arka.am/en/news/technology/novosti_armenia_and_arka_news_agencies_come_tuesday_under_heavy_dddos_attacks/

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Novosti-Armenia and ARKA news agencies come Tuesday under heavy DDoS-attacks

Hacker Redirects DDoS Attack to Israeli Intelligence Site

A hacker using the handle “The Jester” allegedly rerouted distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to hit the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The Jester became a high-profile hacker in 2010 when he claimed to have attacked the Wikileaks website. He also is known to attack websites affiliated with ISIS, Hamas, Anonymous and the Occupy movement. In a 2010 article, the New York Times claimed the Jester is a former military contractor who was involved with US special forces operations. The Jester’s website reportedly came under attack with DDoS attacks, which the hacker claims to have redirected against the Israeli intelligence service. He claims to have altered the IP address that his website was registered on to the Mossad address. “To the s***loads attacking my blog, I’ve pointed my domain to 147.237.0.71. Ur now hitting Israeli Intelligence Service (Mossad). Good luck,” the Jester, or th3j35t3r, wrote in an online post. The hacker said he redirected the traffic to Mossad’s IP address because “they can look after themselves perfectly well,” according to reports. Israel’s Information and Communications Technology Authority reportedly issued a statement that Mossad’s website did not encounter irregularities or down time. The Israeli intelligence service’s website remains online and functional, while the Jester’s site is offline at the time of this post. Source: http://www.batblue.com/hacker-redirects-ddos-attack-to-israeli-intelligence-site/

Finnish Defense Ministry Hit by DDoS Cyberattack

Finland’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) is reviewing its IT security infrastructure in the wake of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its main website. The attack was launched hours before Finnish President Sauli Niinistö met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on March 22 to discuss regional security issues and the implementation of deeper cooperation on border defense. Initial investigations by the National Cyber Defense Center (NCDC) are examining the possibility that the cyberattack may have been launched from Russia to coincide with high-level, inter-government talks. Similar DDoS attacks launched against public and private organizations in Sweden in March had traced the servers to Russia. Niinistö met with US President Barack Obama in Washington on April 1. The meeting took place during the international Nuclear Security Summit hosted by the US president. Finland’s MoD confirmed that the sustained DDoS attack, which lasted more than three hours, was the second such cyberattack against its online IT infrastructure in 2016. The MoD responded by diverting traffic from its main site defmin.fi to a temporary site. The previous DDoS attack took place Feb. 27 and lasted nearly five hours. Other key government department websites, including finance, social affairs and health, agriculture and forestry, and the Council of State office, were targeted in simultaneous attacks. The timing of the latest DDoS attack is significant, coming as Finnish and US governments finalize plans connected to joint military exercises in Finland. Source: http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/international/2016/04/04/finnish-defense-ministry-hit-ddos-cyberattack/82608438/

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Finnish Defense Ministry Hit by DDoS Cyberattack

Calculate the cost and probability of a DDoS attack

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly larger, more complex, and perpetrated by cyber extortionist instead of hacktivists and vandals, according to a recent survey from Arbor Networks. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan finds that the DDoS mitigation market earned revenues of $449.5 million in 2014 and estimates this to more than double to $977.2 million by 2019. DDoS Downtime Calculator Incapsula’s DDoS Downtime Calculator is designed to help you assess the risks associated with an … More ?

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Calculate the cost and probability of a DDoS attack

Notorious pro-US hacker Jester diverts DoS attack towards Israeli spy service Mossad

A high-profile US hacker has turned an attack on his website into an assault against the Israeli intelligence service. ‘The Jester’ – or th3j35t3r – claims that he diverted an attempt to overload his website to assault Mossad’s online presence. Haaretz reported that Jester’s website – jesterscourt.cc – was the victim of a denial of service (DoS) attack on the night of 1 April. In a tweet, Jester announced that he had diverted the hacker’s attack by simply changing the IP address his website was registered on. When asked why he picked Mossad by one of his 74,400 Twitter followers, Jester replied “Because they can look after themselves perfectly well.” On his blog, Jester claims to have used this technique before. In a post called Offensive Counter Measures – Be Like Water, Jester details the steps he took to divert another DoS attack, which he alleges was carried out by Anonymous, towards websites linked with the Occupy movement. According to Haaratz, Israel’s Information and Communications Technology Authority said Mossad’s website had not seen any irregularities or disruptions of service. At the time of writing, Mossad’s website was working, but IBTimes UK could not confirm whether it had suffered any downtime. However, The Jester’s website was not working. Anti-ISIS, anti-Anonymous Jester is one of the hacking community’s most high-profile members. What is a DoS attack? During a denial of service (DoS) or a distributed denial of service (DoS) attack, hackers attempt to overload a website’s connections by sending in data requests from multiple sources. Most often hackers use a ‘botnet’ – internet-connected PCs that are compromised by malware – to send in the requests to visit the site, without the users’ knowledge. The huge number of requests, which can reach thousands per second, overload the ability of a website’s server to respond, eventually causing an error message to appear instead of the site’s pages. Making a DDoS is relatively simple. Botnets are available to hire on websites not reachable via search engines (deep web) or on encrypted websites (the dark web). Jester’s career as a vigilante hacker appears to have started in 2010, when he claimed to have been involved in an attack on the Wikileaks website. That year, the New York Times reported Jester was a a former military contractor who had worked with US special forces. Since then, Jester has developed a reputation as a pro-US hacker vigilante and cybersecurity expert. Through writing his own blog on cybersecurity, he gives talks on the subject through text chat to keep his identity a secret, and is known for attacking websites linked to Hamas and Islamic State (Isis). Jester has also attacked websites used by the Occupy movement and Anonymous – whom he described as “pathetic terrorist sympathizing buttholes”. He claims to have caused more than 180 websites to go offline since 2010. Jester was listed as one of Time magazine’s “most influential people on the internet” in March 2015. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/notorious-pro-us-hacker-jester-diverts-dos-attack-towards-israeli-spy-service-mossad-1552895

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Notorious pro-US hacker Jester diverts DoS attack towards Israeli spy service Mossad

Coinkite Is Closing Down Its Web Wallet Citing Legal and DDoS Issues

Coinkite, the popular wallet and hardware payment network service provider, has announced it is closing down its web wallet to focus on other projects after legal issues and DDoS attacks have impeded the use of the wallet. Hardware products focus After a noticeable lack in posting on their blog after incredibly frequent posting over the last three years, Coinkite CT r: 24 has announced it is shutting down its web wallet service. Users of the service need not worry about the hardware aspect of Coinkite, as that will remain unaffected, and the team in fact hopes to expand it. “We are winding down the web wallet part of Coinkite so that our team can focus on a number of new products that are more decentralized and embodied as hardware products. We’re still big Bitcoin fans, supporters and Hodlrs, and although Coinkite has been great adventure in the SaaS business, we want to spend more time where our heart is, hardware products, software-”not-as-a-service”, and other exciting new possibilities.” Under DDoS since the first month Coinkite cited the legal issues associated with being a centralized Bitcoin CT r: 8 service, and hence the financial strain brought about by lawyers, and non-stop DDoS-ing since launch for the closing down of the service. “Being a centralized bitcoin service does attract attention from state actors and other well funded pains in the butt, and as a matter of fact, we’ve been under DDoS since the first month we launched—over three years–yay. Plus we have put real fiat dollars into our lawyers’ pockets, to defend our customers from their own governments. This is not what we love to do, which is coding and delivering awesome services.” Programmers-turned-businessmen an issue Part of the issue in the cryptocurrency industry is that many of those who are choosing to create businesses in this newly-fledged sector, are fundamentally programmers, and as such are ill-equipped to deal with the likes of lawyers and regulators. The simple solution to this problem is greater co-operation between the financial industry and the cryptocurrency industry. The financial sector has been around for far, far longer than the cryptocurrency industry. It has the infrastructure, processes, and people already in place to deal with a lot of the issues facing these programmers-turned-businessmen, and if more startups are to succeed, they are going to need to implement them. Source: http://cointelegraph.com/news/coinkite-is-closing-down-its-web-wallet-citing-legal-and-ddos-issues

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Coinkite Is Closing Down Its Web Wallet Citing Legal and DDoS Issues

The Anonymous ‘war’ on Donald Trump is a complete disaster

The “total war” that Anonymous declared earlier this month against Donald Trump has quickly devolved into a civil war among hackers fighting within the group and pro-Trump supporters who are trolling them within their chat rooms. In early March, hackers affiliated with Anonymous tried to reboot their Operation Trump campaign by calling for everyone to take down Trump’s websites in a coordinated effort on April 1. Almost immediately, the initiative was criticized by people within Anonymous as irresponsible and “cringeworthy,” but a dedicated group apparently moved on with the plan. It’s April 1: Many of the GOP frontrunner’s sites are still standing, there are now two competing OpTrump chat rooms with totally different missions, and one of them has been flooded with pro-Trump supporters and others leaving trolling comments like “Hitler did nothing wrong.” In short: The so-called war seems to be a complete disaster. ‘A mess is happening’ It’s unclear when the split between Anonymous factions occurred, but it seems to have happened sometime after a hacker named Beemsee, who has been leading the original OpTrump effort, released a new statement claiming that attacking Trump’s websites was all a ruse for publicity around April Fools’ Day. “There is no DDoS,” Beemsee and two other hackers wrote, using the acronym for a distributed denial-of-service attack, a tactic used to overload a website. “It’s only purpose was to gain attention, which this Operation needs. … the point of this Operation is not to attack Donald Trump. Instead, it is going to try to give citizens some insight.” Beemsee and their cohorts say in their statement that people should try and capture “the darker nature of Trump’s supporters” and post it on social media sites with hashtags like #OpTrump and #Trump2016. But a hacker called AnonymousLoyalist disagreed. In a competing statement, the hacker wrote that they moved to a “far more organized channel, which has already seen unsurprisingly large amounts of success.” That channel is #OpTrump2016, but it was unclear exactly what that success boiled down to. When Tech Insider viewed the #OpTrump2016 chat room on Friday, it was an unorganized mess. Most Anonymous chat rooms are moderated in some way, and people usually get kicked out for spamming or posting nonsense. But it appeared to be flooded with trolls intent on calling them children, “social justice warriors,” and, more often than not, homophobic slurs. “A mess is happening,” wrote one user in #OpTrump, expressing a shared frustration among others in Beemsee’s chat room. The ‘war’ goes on It was clear on Friday that at least some of Trump’s websites were indeed under cyberattack. The website CitizensForTrump.com is currently unreachable, and the site for Trump’s hotels brought up an error for a few seconds before pulling up a cached version powered by CloudFlare, a service that protects from attacks like this. Anonymous may be able to bring down some of Trump’s unprotected websites, but it will almost certainly come back online after a few hours or days. And many of his other sites are probably not at risk at all, since Tech Insider previously spoke with CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince, and he wasn’t particularly worried. “DDoS attacks are not particularly sophisticated cyber attacks,” Prince said. “They are sort of the functional equivalent of a caveman with a club.” A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Tech Insider, but spokeswoman Hope Hicks previously told Tech Insider: “The government and law-enforcement authorities are seeking the arrest of the people responsible for attempting to illegally hack Mr. Trump’s accounts and telephone information.” Depending on who you believe in Anonymous, the plan is a coordinated DDoS attack or a social-media shaming campaign against Trump’s supporters. But Beemsee left open the possibility of something else, perhaps an actual way to take over one of their targeted websites — which the hacker collective has been scanning for vulnerabilities since the beginning. “This is NOT the last time you hear of this operation,” Beemsee wrote. “We will be watching, and will act when the time is right.” Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/anonymous-war-donald-trump-fail-2016-4

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The Anonymous ‘war’ on Donald Trump is a complete disaster