Category Archives: DDoS Vendors

What are the DoS and DDoS attacks that brought down the census?

Experts believe that the electronic assault on the census site was a DDoS attack – a kind of electronic army that attacks an enemy’s website on every flank using millions of computers as soldiers. About 2000 of these attacks occur every day across the world, said DigitalAttackMap, a website that monitors such attacks. Only days ago, this type of attack shut down US Olympic swimming Michael Phelps’ commercial website, SCMagazine , which specialises in IT security, said. It said the attack happened fresh after Phelps’ gold medal-winning performance in the men’s 4×100 metre freestyle relay at the Rio Games. One hacking expert told Time magazine that any celebrity or high-profile site should expect these attacks. “Each celebrity on our target list will be either hacked or DDoSed,” a representative of hacking group New World Hackers said. Xbox, US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and the BBC have been among New World Hackers’ recent targets. DigitalAttackMap, a joint venture between Google Ideas and network security firm Arbor Networks, said these attacks had hit online gaming sites, newspapers and banks; Greek banks were crippled this year. Yet its site doesn’t show a DDoS attack on the ABS census site on Tuesday, bolstering claims by some that the attack didn’t take place. The DigitalAttackMap tracks DDoS attacks on a daily basis. The red flare over Brazil shows a serious DDoS attack. Photo: DigitalAttackMap.com The Australian Bureau of Statistics said its census site was hit four times by denial of service (DoS) attacks. A DoS is a broad term for attacks that attempt to crash an online system so that users cannot access it. Some IT and cybersecurity professionals speculated that a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was to blame. A DDoS is a type of DoS attack in which hackers attempt to crash a system by flooding it with bots – or Trojan – accounts. DigitalAttackMap said attackers cripple websites, such as the ABS’ census site, by building networks of infected computers, known as botnets, by spreading malicious software through emails, websites and social media. Once infected, these machines can be controlled remotely, without their owners’ knowledge, and used like an army to launch an attack against any target. Some botnets are millions of machines strong. DigitalAttackMap says these botnets can generate huge floods of traffic to overwhelm a target. “These floods can be generated in multiple ways, such as sending more connection requests than a server can handle, or having computers send the victim huge amounts of random data to use up the target’s bandwidth. Some attacks are so big they can max out a country’s international cable capacity.” Adding to many people’s fears about the security of the census website before the attack, the information gained from these sites during an attack is sold on online marketplaces that specialise in information gained from these DDoS attacks, DigitalAttackMap said. “Using these underground markets, anyone can pay a nominal fee to silence websites they disagree with or disrupt an organisation’s online operations. A week-long DDoS attack, capable of taking a small organisation offline, can cost as little as $150,” the website said. Source: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/what-are-the-dos-and-ddos-attacks-that-brought-down-the-census-20160809-gqowwp.html

Anonymous DDoS Brazilian Government Websites Because Rio Olympics

ANONYMOUS IS CONDUCTING CYBER ATTACKS ON BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT DOMAINS AND PORTALS AGAINST RIO OLYMPICS CLAIMING THE EVENT IS AFFECTING NATIVES ON A LARGE SCALE! The online hacktivist Anonymous Brazil is targeting Brazilian government websites to register their protest against the ongoing Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. In their recent attack yesterday when millions around the world were watching Rio Olympics opening ceremony the hacktivist were busy conducting cyber attacks on the government websites forcing several of them to go offline. The targeted websites include the official website of the federal government for the 2016 Games (brasil2016.gov.br), Portal of the State Government of Rio de Janeiro (rj.gov.br), Ministry of sports (esporte.gov.br), Brazil Olympic Committee COB (cob.org.br) and the official website of the Rio 2016 Olympics (rio2016.com). In the second phase of their attack, Anonymous leaked personal, financial and login details from domains like Brazilian Confederation of Modern Pentathlon (pentatlo.org.br), o fficial Site of the Brazilian Handball Confederation (brasilhandebol.com.br), Brazilian Confederation of Boxing (cbboxe.com.br) and Brazilian Triathlon Confederation (cbtri.org.br). The leaked CSV files also include hashed passwords of site’s registered users. That’s not all; Anonymous is also claiming to have leaked personal details of Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Governor of Rio de Janeiro, Minister of Sport, President of the Brazilian Olympic Committee and three businessmen who Anonymous claims are involved in corruption. Also, Anonymous is urging people to use Tor onion browser and conduct DDoS attacks on Brazilian sites. Although such cyber attacks and data leaks will not stop the Olympics but the hacktivists vow to continue with their operations to unmask the elite as stated in the video below: Hello Rio de Janeiro. We know that many have realized how harmful it was (and still is) the Olympic Games in the city. The media sells the illusion that the whole city celebrates and commemorate the reception of tourists from all over the world, many of them attracted by the prostitution network and drugs at a bargain price. This false happiness hides the blood shed in the suburbs of the city, mainly in the favelas thanks to countless police raids and military under the pretext of a fake war. Poverty is spreading throughout the city, forcing entire families to leave their homes and traditional neighborhoods on account of high prices of rent and / or removals made by a corrupt city hall and serves only the wishes of the civil construction. We already manifested in other communications our repudiation to the realization of megaevents in the middle of the glaring social inequalities in this country. Still, even after so many words, so many manifestos or protests on the streets (all always fully supervised by repression, if not repressed with brutal violence) looks like the goverment will continue ignoring the voices of their own people. Therefore, we will continue with our operations to unmask the numerous arbitrary actions of those who are state and therefore its own population enemies. This is not the first time when Anonymous Brazil has protested against a mass sports event in the country, back in 2014 Anonymous conducted protests on the streets against Fifa world cup forcing the government to ban on the Guy Fawkes mask in Rio but in return hackers defaced FIFA Brazil World Cup website with a viral protest footage. At the time of publishing this article; all targeted sites were restored however if you are interested in keeping an eye on Anonymous Brazil’s cyber attacks check out their Facebook page. Source: https://www.hackread.com/anonymous-ddos-brazilian-government-websites/

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Anonymous DDoS Brazilian Government Websites Because Rio Olympics

DDoS Attacks: Cybercriminals Are More Homegrown Than You Think

Researchers from the FBI and a private security company say many of the distributed denial of service attacks emanate from the West. BLACK HAT USA – Las Vegas – The stereotype of the seedy cybercriminal from Russia or Eastern Europe may no longer be valid. FBI agent Elliott Peterson told Black Hat attendees this morning that when it comes to the most recent DDoS attacks, the vast majority come from North America, Western Europe and Israel. And many are 16 to 17-years of age or in their mid-20s. “Many use their nicknames on Skype or Twitter and they are heavy users of social media,” said Peterson. Peterson and Andre Correa, cofounder of Malware Patrol, shared much of their recent research on DDoS attacks at a briefing session here this morning. They focused much of their research on amplification and reflection attacks, booters/stressers and IoT and Linux-based botnets. Peterson said the amplification and reflection attacks get a good rate of return: a hacker can send one byte and get 200 in return. The bad threat actors now sell amplification lists that criminals can easily buy over commercial web interfaces. The booters and stressers are inexpensive, they cost roughly $5 to $20 a month and require very little technical knowledge for the criminal to deploy. And on the IoT front, botnets are creating scanning hosts for default credentials or vulnerabilities. A bot is then automatically downloaded and executed. Over the past several months, Peterson and Correa have compiled more than 8 million records. They said last month, the leading DDoS type was SSDP at Port 1900. “This was kind of interesting since most people may think that NTPs were the leading cause of DDoSs, but they scored much lower because many NTP servers have been patched of late,” said Correa. Peterson said some of the criminals are just total scam artists. “They just take your money and don’t do the attack,” he said. “On the other hand, there are also some sophisticated players offering turnkey DDoS services. They provide attack scripts, amp lists and good customer service, sometimes up to six people on hand. Other findings: most attacks are in the 1-5 Gbps range, with the highest DDoS observed at 30 Gbps. Source: http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/ddos-attacks-cybercriminals-are-more-homegrown-than-you-think-/d/d-id/1326508

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DDoS Attacks: Cybercriminals Are More Homegrown Than You Think

Cybersecurity: Financial Institutions Fret over DDoS Attacks

Financial institutions, especially the banks, are getting more worried about the increasing rate of a new cyber attack called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), that has caused huge financial losses running into billions of naira to banks. Financial institutions expressed worries about further loss of funds to DDoS attacks at a security forum organised by MainOne and Radware in Lagos this week and called for technology solutions that would address the threat. During a panel session, Head, Infrastructure Services at Skye Bank, Mr. Tagbo Nnoli, said banks suffered major attacks last year from DDoS attacks on banks and that since then, the banks started seeking solutions to address the issue. Aside DDoS attacks, Nnoli said banks also suffered attacks from phishing and social engineering last year, resulting to huge financial losses. Head, Industry Security Services, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBBS), Mr. Olufemi Fadairo, who confirmed that banks suffered huge financial losses to cyber attacks last year, however said the rate of losses due to online attacks, were beginning to reduce in 2016, following proactive measures taken by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the NIBSS to address financial losses to cyber attacks. According to Fadairo, “NIBSS tries to protect organisations and in the past five years, there has been improvement on financial security. We do benchmarking to find out any disruption of a normal pattern of an organisation. By January 2016, we discussed about DDoS attacks on banks where 63 per cent of banks said such attacks would increase, if not mitigated on time.” Following the threat, we decided to focus on data companies like MainOne that provides data solution for the financial sector, Fadairo said. The Chief Information Security Officer at MainOne, Mr. Chidi Iwe, however raised the hopes of financial institutions at the forum, when he revealed that MainOne had partnered RadWare, a global security company to mitigate DDoS attacks in the country’s financial sector, by redirecting organisation’s traffic to the MainOne DDoS mitigation platform, from where it keeps organisation data fully protected at all times and maintaining the normal operations of organisations on-premises infrastructure. He said the service could detect and mitigate zero-day attack within 18 seconds. According to Iwe, over 50 per cent of enterprise companies globally, suffered DDoS attacks at the end of 2015, and Nigerian businesses are growing in recent yeas and the focus of attacks is gradually shifting to the Nigerian space. Although he said most attacks were not reported publicly in the past, but that there has been over 600 per cent growth in reporting attacks in Nigeria in recent times, based on CBN regulation. Two weeks ago, there was DDoS Attacks in Nigeria. Attacks have caused organisations over $500 billion in recent years, and DDoS attacks are predicted to be on the rise, Iwe said. He however assured financial institutions that the security solution service agreement it signed with Radware in 2016, would address insecurity issues with DDoS attacks. MainOne solution therefore monitors DDoS attacks and create alert for the company using the solution, he said, while listing the benefits of the solution to include online reporting, which allows customers to log online to find out what the trends are. The MainOne solution also offers training for customers in partnership with Radware to boost customer experience. He said capital expenditure CAPEX and operational expenditure OPEX, are completely eliminated by the solution. The Security Solution Architect at Radware, Mr. Eran Danino, while explaining how DDoS operates, said it first attacks firewalls, destroys it before replicating itself into other components. He said most organisations are not ready to mitigate DDoS attack because they either have saturated internet pipes, or they lack the security skills to detect and mitigate attacks. “What we do at Radware is to mitigate the attacks, just as the attackers change their attacking plans regularly,” Danino said. He explained that there was need for organisations to choose the best protection and draw up a checklist to find out the assets that must be protected first. He said Radware uses two approaches to mitigate DDoS attacks, through hybrid solution and full cloud service solution by protecting data from the cloud. Source: http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/08/04/cybersecurity-financial-institutions-fret-over-ddos-attacks/

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Cybersecurity: Financial Institutions Fret over DDoS Attacks

Overwatch,’ ‘Warcraft’ Servers Sidelined By DDoS Attack From Hacking Group PoodleCorp

Blizzard was hit with a DDoS attack that made its servers inaccessible, disrupting gameplay for Battle.net users on Aug. 2. Someone from Blizzard’s customer support team posted on the Battle.net forums to acknowledge the attack, saying network engineers are on the case, working to address the issue. The problem has since been resolved, but according to a tweet from Blizzard’s North American customer support team, reports of World Server Down in World of Warcraft are being investigated. In a tweet, hacker group PoodleCorp claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack. It’s not clear who is PoodleCorp exactly, but some Battle.net users have surmised that some of the hacking group’s members could be players who were recently banned from Overwatch , and thus now out for revenge. Whoever they are, PoodleCorp appears to be a busy group. A day before the DDoS attack on Blizzard, the hackers apparently took on Pokémon GO , marking their second takedown of the mobile game after first attacking it on July 16. Pokémon GO servers were also down for several hours on July 17, but OurMine, another hacking group, took the credit for that attack. In an interview via Twitter DM, PoodleCorp’s leader, @xotehpoodle, told Mic that they targeted Pokémon GO because it’s popular right now. Also, they’re doing what they’re doing because nobody can stop them. “We do it because we can, nobody can stop us and we just like to cause chaos,” said the hacking group’s head, who added that their botnet is worth more than Niantic. Over the summer, PoodleCorp also claimed responsibility for hacking League of Legends and popular YouTubers. Earlier in June, Blizzard also experienced a major outage as another DDoS attack took out its servers. Twitter user AppleJ4ck, said to be tied to hacking group Lizard Squad, claimed responsibility for the attack and mocked Blizzard, saying the attack was part of some “preparations.” As PoodleCorp has claimed responsibility for the most recent outage, does that mean that there’s more to come given what AppleJ4ck’s been preparing for has not come to fruition? In the past, Lizard Squad had been connected to disruptions on Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network. When angry gamers swarmed the hackers’ Twitter accounts, PoodleCorp and AppleJ4ck replied with similar messages, saying anyone who gets upset over a game should get a life and that they’re doing everyone a favor by knocking them offline. Source: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/172361/20160803/overwatch-warcraft-servers-sidelined-by-ddos-attack-from-hacking-group-poodlecorp.htm

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Overwatch,’ ‘Warcraft’ Servers Sidelined By DDoS Attack From Hacking Group PoodleCorp

Security testing platform for app-aware infrastructures

At Black Hat USA 2016, Spirent Communications will be presenting CyberFlood, a security and performance testing platform suitable for complex testing scenarios. With CyberFlood, users can ensure that their security and performance testing addresses their unique environments by emulating realistic traffic volume, threats, and attack scenarios including fuzzing, malware, and DDoS attacks. Designed with team testing in mind, CyberFlood’s intuitive web UI extends easy-to-use best practices for faster, repeatable, and more accurate testing. Users can … More ?

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

Internet Service Providers Under DDOS Attack in Mumbai, Probe Ordered

“Thus, an attack on ISPs is an attack on the nation”. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Mumbai are facing an unprecedented attack by hackers which has reduced surfing speeds in the city. Inspector General of Police (Cyber Crime) Brijesh Singh said, “Some unknown people are involved in crashing the ports of Internet Service Providers by making lakhs of requests at a particular terminal at a particular time, which we call “Distributed Denial Of Service”. According to the post on The Hindu, IGP (Cyber Crime) Brijesh Singh said, ‘An FIR has been filed with the Cyber police station in BKC under sections 43 (F) and 66 of the Information Technology Act. They also said the attack was still being carried out. “We have registered an FIR and started tracking down the operators who are trying to crash the servers or ports of ISPs”, he said, adding that the attack has slowed down the internet services and affected subscribers of ISPs. “We are investigating the matter”. Other than this, it’s not clear which ISPs are affected although this reddit thread claims that Airtel is the primary ISP being DDoSed, which distributes broadband to other smaller companies, leading to network blockages across a wide range of ISPs. The attack, however, still continues. The resources behind the attack have to be considerable. “Kindly bare with us as we are trying to solve this problem in very short period with the help of high skilled technicians. please be with us and let’s fight against these hackers (sic)”. As of Monday morning, small and medium ISPs are still struggling to provide uninterrupted service to users. IT expert Vijay Mukhi says, “The idea of a DDoS is to make a computer or a server very slow so that anyone who uses an ISP’s services can not connect. All a hacker has to do is buy enough infected IP addresses and use them for a DDOS attack”. Typically, DDoS attacks are targeted at big websites or platforms with the intention of taking them down or blocking access to them. Source: http://nanonews.org/internet-service-providers-under-ddos-attack-in-mumbai/

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Internet Service Providers Under DDOS Attack in Mumbai, Probe Ordered

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