Category Archives: DDoS News

Hong Kong Student Gets Probation Time for DDoS Attack During Occupy Campaign

A judge at the Fanling Court in Hong Kong has sentenced Chu Tsun-wai, 20, of Hong Kong, to 15 months of probation for launching a DDoS attack on a Chinese bank’s website during the 2014 Hong Kong Occupy protests. The judge also ruled that the suspect’s Mac computer be confiscated as punishment for carrying out the attack, SCMP reports. Chu, who is one of the top students at his university, had decided to get involved in the Occupy protests that were taking place in Hong Kong during the autumn of 2014. Teen was inspired by one of Anonymous Asia’s videos The teen saw a video posted online by the Anonymous hacker collective, which was warning Hong Kong police to stop the violence against Hong Kong Occupy protesters. The group threatened to hack government websites and release personal information belonging to Hong Kong police officers. The group also called out for others to participate in its protests. The prosecution says that Chu went online and searched on Google for ways to carry out DDoS attacks. He launched one such DDoS attack against the Shanghai Commercial Bank’s website. Police say that the student sent 6,652 HTTP requests in 16 seconds on the bank’s website, on October 12, 2014. Bank website barely noticed the attack This sounds odd since a Web server should, in theory, be capable of handling much more than 6,000 requests per second, but Chinese authorities have come down hard on people who participated in the protests, to begin with. The judge was lenient on Chu because this was his first offense and because the bank’s website didn’t go offline. Chinese news outlet Ejinsight reports that one of Chu’s professors wrote the judge a letter asking the judge to give the suspect a second chance. Public broadcaster RTHK reported that Chu also stands to face disciplinary hearings at his university. Below is the original video that started it all, with the Anonymous group calling out for attacks against Hong Kong police officials during the Occupy protests. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/hong-kong-student-gets-probation-time-for-ddos-attacks-during-occupy-campaign-506720.shtml

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Hong Kong Student Gets Probation Time for DDoS Attack During Occupy Campaign

DDoS attacks increase by over 80 percent

In the second quarter of this year DDoS attacks increased by 83 percent to more than 182,900, according to the latest threat report from security solutions company Nexusguard. The report shows that Russia has become the number one victim country. Starlink — a Russian ISP supporting small, medium and large enterprises — received more than 40 percent of the DDoS attacks measured over a two-day period. This targeted DNS attack also pushed the mean average DDoS duration to hours instead of minutes, as measured in the previous quarter. Nexusguard’s researchers attributed this increase to nationalist hactivists organizing a targeted attack to take out Russian businesses, rather than outbreaks driven by popular DDoS-for-hire activity. As a result, they advise businesses to safeguard their infrastructures and check service provider security to ensure continuity for their web presence. The United States and China continue to hold spots in the top three target countries. Brazil remains in the top 10, as well, but saw its attacks decline by more than half. Nexusguard also recorded increases in other attack varieties, including routing information protocol (RIP) and multicast domain name system (mDNS) threats. Hackers are experimenting with new attack methodologies, and with the upcoming Olympics in Brazil and political tensions around the world, researchers predict these factors will contribute to a DDoS spike in Q3. “We were surprised to see an increase in DDoS attacks this quarter, especially as hackers experiment with ransomware, phishing schemes and other data-grabbing methods for monetary gain,” says Terrence Gareau, chief scientist at Nexusguard. “Organizations can expect cyberattacks to continue growing in frequency this year, especially with more attention on the Summer Olympics and the November election season in the US. The results from this quarter also show how important it is to not only protect your website, but also to plan for new payloads and attacks on your infrastructure”. Source: http://betanews.com/2016/07/27/ddos-attacks-increase-by-over-80-percent/

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DDoS attacks increase by over 80 percent

DDoS attacks increase 83%, Russia top victim

DDoS attacks increased 83 percent to more than 182,900 attacks in the second quarter of the year, according to Nexusguard. The newest report shows that Russia has become the No. 1 victim country. Starlink – a Russian ISP supporting small, medium and large enterprises – received more than 40 percent of the DDoS attacks measured over a two-day period. This targeted DNS attack also pushed the mean average DDoS duration to hours instead of minutes, … More ?

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DDoS attacks increase 83%, Russia top victim

MIT Faced 35 DDoS Attacks in the First Six Months of 2016

Attackers targeted the servers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 35 times in the first six months of the year, according to a threat advisory released by Akamai, a content delivery network and cloud services provider headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The biggest of these incidents was a DDoS attack that lasted a day, starting on June 7, that peaked at 295 Gbps and 58.6 million packets per second, combining different vectors such as DNS reflection, SYN flood, UDP fragment, PUSH flood, TCP flood, and UDP flood. Compared to other attacks recorded globally in the first six months, according to Arbor Networks, this MIT DDoS attack is one of the 46 such attacks that went over the 200 Gbps limit, with the absolute record being 597 Gbps . Kaiten botnet behind massive 295 Gbps attack Akamai believes that this attack took place at the hands of a botnet powered by the Kaiten malware. Prior to the 295 Gbps DDoS attack, MIT suffered an 89.35 Gbps attack as well. Attackers targeted multiple IPs in MIT’s network and used a combination of 14 different DDoS flood types. Akamai says that 43 percent of these attacks used protocols susceptible to DDoS reflection flaws that amplified the attacker’s traffic. The company detected 18,825 different sources of reflected traffic, with the most located in China. China’s presence on any DDoS source list should not be a surprise by now to anyone since the country is the source of much of today’s vulnerable equipment that gets connected online, a source ready for the taking for any determined hacker. DDoS attacks are on the rise The same Arbor Networks reports cites an overall increase in terms of DDoS attacks globally, a trend which has continued in July as well. Just this week, we reported on DDoS attacks against WikiLeaks , after announcing it would release emails from Turkey’s main political party; against the Rio de Janeiro court that banned WhatsApp in Brazil; Steemit social network ; the Philippines government websites ; Pokemon GO servers ; the HSBC bank ; and against the US Congress , US Library of Congress, and the US Copyright Office. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/mit-faced-35-ddos-attacks-in-the-first-six-months-of-2016-506542.shtml

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MIT Faced 35 DDoS Attacks in the First Six Months of 2016

Anonymous Launches DDoS Attacks Against Rio Court Website

Members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous reportedly launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the website of the Court of Rio de Janeiro for its decision to block WhatsApp in Brazil. The DDoS attacks against the Court of Rio de Janeiro allegedly forced the site offline for a period. Members of Anonymous Brazil confirmed the attack on their Facebook page saying, “Court of Justice of the state of Rio de Janeiro off in protest to the blockade of the WhatsApp.” The Rio Court recently ruled to block WhatsApp in Brazil as the application will not decrypt communications for criminal investigation procedures, according to reports. The Court of Rio de Janeiro had allegedly sent three court orders to receive specific information from WhatsApp related to criminal investigations. WhatsApp implemented end-to-end encryption to its messages between users in April 2016. The message service provider said it is unable to disclose data on these communications. Court orders through out Brazil have previously ordered a ban on WhatsApp for similar reasons during criminal investigations in December 2015, February and May 2016, according to reports. The website of the Court of Rio de Janeiro is fully restored and functional at the time of this post. WhatsApp service in Brazil has also been restored to users through out the country. Source: http://www.batblue.com/anonymous-launches-ddos-attacks-rio-court-website/

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Anonymous Launches DDoS Attacks Against Rio Court Website

US Congress websites recovering after three-day DDoS attack

Library of Congress among the victims to go temporarily offline. Several websites owned and operated by the United States Congress are recovering from a three-day distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The DDoS campaign began on July 17 when the websites for the Library of Congress (LoC) began experiencing technical difficulties. A day later, the websites went temporarily offline: During the attack, Library of Congress employees were unable to access their work emails or visit any of the Library’s websites. Softpedia reports the attackers ultimately overcame initial defense measures to escalate their campaign. Specifically, they brought down two additional targets: congress.gov, the online portal for the United States Congress; and copyright.gov, the website for the United States Copyright Office. On Tuesday morning, things started to get back to normal. Some email accounts were functioning, writes FedScoop, but other online properties by the LoC remained offline. As of this writing, the three government portals affected by the attack are back online. Tod Beardsley, a senior research manager for Boston-based cybersecurity firm Rapid7, feels that denial-of-service attacks remain popular because of how difficult it is for a target to mitigate a campaign while it is still in progress. As he told FedScoop : “DoS attacks that leverage DNS as a transport is a common mechanism for flooding target sites with unwanted traffic for two reasons. [First,] DNS traffic is often passed through firewalls without traffic inspection, since timely responses to DNS are critical for many networked environments. [And] second, DNS nearly always uses User Datagram Protocol, or UDP, rather than Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and UDP-based protocols like DNS are connectionless. As a result of this design, it’s easier for attackers to forge data packets with many fake source addresses, making it difficult to filter good data over bad.” Network filtering devices can help, but only if a company decides to buy one. Perhaps the Library of Congress didn’t own such a device or lacked a service provider with expertise in mitigating DoS/DDoS attacks. There’s little companies can do to protect against DDoS attacks, as script kiddies with a few bucks can rent a botnet online to attack whichever target they choose. With that in mind, organizations should prepare for these attacks by investing in DDoS mitigation technologies that can in the event of an attack help accommodate and filter attack traffic. Source: https://www.grahamcluley.com/2016/07/congress-website-ddos/

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US Congress websites recovering after three-day DDoS attack

Slew of WP-based business sites compromised to lead to ransomware

If an approach works well, there is no reason to change tack, and the masters of the SoakSoak botnet are obviously of the same belief. A year and a half after they have been spotted compromising WP-based websites through vulnerabilities in the Slider Revolution (“RevSlider”) plugin and redirecting visitors to the malware-laden SoakSoak.ru website, they are at it again. “Websites are often compromised by botnets that scan websites for vulnerable software or application plugins,” Invincea’s … More ?

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Slew of WP-based business sites compromised to lead to ransomware

Whitepaper: Does your DDoS protection strategy address the changing threat landscape?

When it comes to DDoS attacks, you need a protection strategy that quickly adapts to the increasing sophistication of today’s attackers and the other current changes and trends in the DDoS threat landscape. Find out: What are the newest trends in Network and Applicative DDoS attacks What are the implications on your DDoS protection strategy How Incapsula’s DDoS Protection service addresses the new protection requirements. DDoS Downtime Calculator Incapsula’s DDoS Downtime Calculator is designed to … More ?

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Whitepaper: Does your DDoS protection strategy address the changing threat landscape?

Pokémon Go Servers Suffer Downtime, Possibly Due to DDoS Attacks

With server issues, Pokémon Go players may have had trouble catching much this weekend and it wasn’t merely due to the tremendously popular game crashing a lot on account of a massive new roll-out. A hacker group has claimed responsibility for the server outage, with DDoS attacks. A hacking group known as PoodleCorp has claimed responsibility for Pokémon Go servers crashing on Saturday, an attack which coincided with a roll-out of the tremendously popular game in 26 new countries. While its claim is yet to be verified, the hacking group has notable targeted several YouTube profiles, including the most followed YouTuber of them all, Pewdiepie. The claim was made via a social media post [1] on PoodleCorp’s Twitter account: PokemonGo #Offline #PoodleCorp The group also re-tweeted another post from the supposed leader of the group, who implied that another bigger attack was also coming. The poster wrote [2] : Just was a lil test, we do something on a larger scale soon . Several users took to social media to complain about the outage during a time when the gaming phenomenon is catching on like wildfire around the world, sending Nintendo share prices skyrocket by 86% in a week’s time. I’m really pissed off that Pokémon Go is down because a group of killjoys decided it would be fun to hack the servers and take them offline. — Meg Bethany Read (@triforcemeg) July 16, 2016 Pokemon GO got DDoS ‘d and DDOS became a trending topic lmao Earlier this week, a security researcher discovered a potentially major security flaw [4] win the application. The augmented reality game has captured the imagination of people around the world, wherein players capture virtual Pokemons before collecting and using them to battle other Pokemons captured by other players. Released on July 7, ten days ago, the application has already been downloaded over 10 million times on Apple and Android devices. A new roll-out saw the game now available in 34 countries, including Australia, the United States and almost all of Europe. Source: http://need-bitcoin.com/pokemon-go-servers-suffer-downtime-possibly-due-to-ddos-attacks/

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Pokémon Go Servers Suffer Downtime, Possibly Due to DDoS Attacks