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Bitly faces complete shutdown of services due to DDoS attack

Online URL shortening services provided by Bitly are down due to a DDoS attack and engineers were trying to solve the issues at the time of publishing Online URL shortening service provided by Bitly was under a major DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attack) on Wednesday. The website states the problem on a banner on their site and a tweet was put out by the company that its services would be restored eventually. Bitly’s internal team of engineers are working on fixing the problem. We are currently working to mitigate a DDoS attack. Some of our site may be unavailable, but we’re working to restore full functionality. — Bitly (@Bitly) February 26, 2014 Services to the links was resumed a little later, however damage from the attack was still being worked on at the time of publishing this article. Bitly, informs on their website, “All links are working after mitigating an earlier DDOS attack. Some link metrics may still be delayed.” Update: All links are working after mitigating an earlier DDOS attack. Some link metrics may still be delayed. — Bitly (@Bitly) February 26, 2014   What is DDoS attack?  – Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. – Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of efforts to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet. – As clarification, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are sent by two or more persons, or bots. – DoS (Denial of Service) attacks are sent by one person or system.   The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008 and is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens more than one billion links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email services and is relied for accuracy and reliability. No doubt, this caused some what of a furor online with people even going so far as to refer to this attack as the ‘death of the internet’. #bitly is down. The internet is dying — iwyg (@_iwyg_) February 26, 2014 Why are so many #Bitly links failing to open today?? What’s up @hootsuite ?? — Slaweezy (@Slaweezy) February 26, 2014 On no #bitly is down and I haven’t had my fix of web based stats yet for the day #marketingbreakdown — Steve Scheja-Terry (@Von_Steve) February 26, 2014 The web is collapsing! #bitly is down! — Ben R. Hodges (@BenHodgesH2O) February 26, 2014

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Bitly faces complete shutdown of services due to DDoS attack

Theresa May Home Office website DDoS attack: Man charged

A man is being charged with attacking websites belonging to the Home Office and the Home Secretary Theresa May. Mark Lynden Johnson, 43, from Stoke-on-Trent, is being charged with encouraging or assisting an offence under the Computer Misuse Act. He is due to appear at Birmingham Magistrates’ Court on 12 March. Both websites were taken offline during attacks between 15 and 18 June 2012, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said. The websites were subjected to a Distributed Denial Of Service attack, also known as a DDoS attack, which prevented visitors accessing them, a CPS spokesperson said. A DDoS attack floods a webserver with so many requests that it can no longer respond to legitimate users. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-26341874

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Theresa May Home Office website DDoS attack: Man charged

Apple Daily in Hong Kong and Taiwan hit by DDoS attack

Apple Daily said its websites for both Hong Kong and Taiwan were hit by DDoS attacks on Saturday. IP addresses reveal that attacks originated from China, Russia, and France, according to Michael Yung, CIO of Next Media, the parent company of Apple Daily. Starting 1pm on Saturday, traffic to the Next Media website became increasingly huge that access to Apple Daily and other contents of the firm was significantly slow, Yung said, adding that audiences could only view text content via the newspaper’s mobile app. The firm’s website was restored at 6pm after several hours of fixing, Next Media said. According to Yung, small-scale attacks to the Next Media website are frequent but much more severe ones come before the June 4 commemoration and July 1 protest every year. Next Media said the attack is an act of harming freedom of press and but that won’t stop the organization from defending it. While Anonymous reportedly confirms that the attack came from the mainland Chinese government, Next Media said the identity of the attacker remains unknown at the moment because IP addresses identified could be fake. There’s also speculation that the attack’s related to Sunday’s “Free Speech, Free Hong Kong” protest organized by the Hong Kong Journalists Association. The protest is a response to recent moves that are seen as compromising editorial independence and freedom of speech. Of late, Commercial Radio fired its outspoken host Li Wei Ling while Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao replaced its existing chief editor with a Malaysian journalist who’s not known to the local community and media industry. Source: http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=F7551BB6-DF9A-6D69-EBD70AD566B9147F

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Apple Daily in Hong Kong and Taiwan hit by DDoS attack

Cyber attacks: preventing disruption to your website

 One of the largest ever cyber attacks took place this month and it has been cited that it was the shape of things to come.  But it is not all doom and gloom – there is plenty that businesses can do to prepare for the future. Start by thinking about the impact of your website being down for a day to three days and how it would affect current and prospective clients and the reputation of your brand.  Google  is usually the first port of call when checking out products and services, so chances are high that any disruption to your web experience won’t be favourably looked upon by prospects. Cyber criminals will often inject malware into legitimate websites with the goal of getting innocent users to click on it, which will automatically trigger a download and can lead to all sorts of problems for the user.  As the website owner, you may be completely unaware, but this is something that Google is cracking down on. If a website is spotted hosting malicious links, Google can blacklist it, meaning it will not show up in searches and it will temporarily remove it from the Google index, which badly affects SEO.  Browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox etc will also flag insecure or risky websites and that may scare away potential customers.  It may take weeks of effort to get removed from blacklists and re-indexed. If this wasn’t bad enough, the risk is actually two-fold.  There are some would-be attackers that will threaten to hold your website to ransom.  In this case, they will identify the holes in your website and blackmail you into paying them in order for them not to get your website blacklisted. The best way to avoid getting blacklisted, or indeed blackmailed, is to have the website checked for malware and other infections.  And it is also highly recommended to have your website scanned for known vulnerabilities. This will ensure that there are no “holes” that attackers can exploit to install malware or create watering holes for unsuspecting customers. Another issue to avoid falling victim to is a DDoS attack.  DDoS attacks bombard a website with so many external communication requests that it floods the system and overloads the server to such a point that it can no longer function, leaving the website paralysed and unable to transact business. Attacks of this nature are on the rise and it’s fair to predict that this year will be no exception to this trend.  The best start is to have a plan in place- whether it is a hardware solution  that takes days to install and requires a higher up-front cost; or a provider who offers DDoS protection services that can be up and running in as little as a few hours for a monthly cost. In addition, it’s worth noting that some good DDoS protection services will offer a caching component that will allow bursts of legitimate traffic to your website without negatively impacting on the server.  Because it will automatically balance the load coming in, it keeps the website available to handle large amounts of requests with no disruption to your user base. So, make sure you do your research when choosing the best option for your website. Bear in mind that, while you can get a protection service in an emergency situation, as with so many things, the best offense is a good defence, so businesses should make sure that they have a proactive DDoS solution in place to avoid disruption to your web presence. Top tips: 1) Run malware detection and anti-virus on your website to spot and clear any existing infections 2) Enlist the services of a vulnerability scanner to identify and fix any exploits in your website 3) Have proactive DDoS protection in place; either in the form of hardware or a managed service 4) Have load balancing in place to ensure your website can handle increases in transactions Source: http://www.itproportal.com/2014/02/21/cyber-attacks-preventing-disruption-your-website/

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Cyber attacks: preventing disruption to your website

Namecheap Is In The Middle Of A DDoS Attack

If any of your favorite sites don’t seem to be working right now, don’t panic — it’s not just you. Namecheap, the host of some 3 million-plus domains, is reporting that they’re currently undergoing a Distributed Denial Of Service attack of unknown origins. If that sounds like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to you, here’s all you need to know: a Distributed Denial Of Service (or DDoS) attack is, generally, when an attacker floods its target with so much traffic that it’s unable to respond to legitimate requests. Namecheap, a company that helps make it so that you can type URLs (like WhateverWebsiteHere.com) instead of IPs (like 192.168.0.1), is currently facing an attack like this, making it quite hard for them to do their job. The attackers appear to be focusing on some of Namecheap’s primary DNS servers. As a result, many domains that are hosted on Namecheap will be unable to resolve, and other features that rely on their nameservers (like email) might not work. The company is actively battling the attack, and are hoping that they’ll have everything locked down within the next hour or so. In the meantime: if your domain is hosted on Namecheap and is having difficulties resolving, Namecheap recommends temporarily switching it to their backup DNS system. Update: Namecheap tells us that the situation now seems to be under control. See their full response to this attack below. Namecheap gained many a fan back in 2011, when the company launched a campaign called Move Your Domain Day in response to competitor GoDaddy’s then-support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act. This, along with many other pressures, eventually lead GoDaddy to recanting their support for the bill. Update: Here’s the official response and breakdown of the attack from Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall and VP Matt Russell: Today is one of the days that as a service provider who strives to deliver excellence day in and day out, you wish you never had. At around 15.55 GMT / 11.55 EST, a huge DDoS attack started against 300 or so domains on our DNS platform. Our DNS platform is a redundant, global platform spread across 3 continents and 5 countries that handles the DNS for many of our customers. This is a platform meticulously maintained and ran, and a platform that successfully fends off other DDoS attacks on an almost-daily basis. Today, however, I am compelled to announce that we struggled. The sheer size of the attack overwhelmed many of our DNS servers resulting in inaccessibility and sluggish performance. Our initial estimates show the attack size to be over 100Gbps, making this one of the largest attacks anyone has seen or dealt with. And this is a new type of attack, one that we and our hardware and network partners had not encountered before. We responded with our well-practiced mitigation plan while also enabling our backup system for those with affected domains. It took us around 3 hours to fully mitigate the attack, working closely with our hardware and network vendors. At this moment in time, 99% of our services are back to normal. I’d like to take this time to apologize to those customers affected. I also wish to iterate that we will learn from this attack and come back stronger, and more robust. We are bringing forward a key DNS infrastructure enhancement program that will see us massively expand the size of our DNS infrastructure and our ability to absorb and fend off attacks like these. We remain firmly committed to delivering the absolute best service possible to our loyal customers. Richard Kirkendall CEO Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/namecheap-ddos/

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Namecheap Is In The Middle Of A DDoS Attack

MMO developer offering $14,000 reward for DDoS attack info

If you know a little thing or two about MMOs and a little more about DDOS attacks, you might be able to net yourself a near $15,000 bounty. Wurm Online, the MMO from Minecraft creator Markus Persson (no longer involved) and childhood friend Ralf Jansson, was hit by a DDOS attack yesterday and at the time of writing, it still remains down. Nobody so far has owned up to the attack, which was launched soon after a recent update. Presumably from the relative obscurity of the game, the DDOSer is a player, but there’s very little information on who they are or why they might have done it. However, in an attempt to find out more and ultimately catch and convict those responsible, the studio behind it, Code Club, is now offering a reward: “Shortly after today’s update we were the target of a DDOS attack and our hosting provider had to pull us off the grid for now,” it said in the announcement. “We will be back as soon as possible but things are out of our hands since their other customers are affected. As we wrote in a previous news post we are planning on changing hosting anyways which should improve things for the future. We can offer 10 000 Euro for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack.” DDOS attacks against large games has become more common over the past few years, since it usually garners a lot of attention and understandably annoys a lot of gamers. However the purpose beyond attention getting is often unclear, since it rarely impacts anyone more than the players. So what about it guys? Anyone here think they could track down a DDOSer? Source: http://megagames.com/news/mmo-developer-offering-14000-reward-ddos-info

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MMO developer offering $14,000 reward for DDoS attack info

Second Anonymous member sentenced for role in DDoS attack

The U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin, has sentenced Jacob Wilkens to 24 months of probation and ordered him to pay $110,932.71 in restitution for his role in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Koch Industries. Wilkens pled guilty to intentionally causing damage to a protected computer by assisting other members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous in launching a DDoS attack on the servers of Angel Soft bathroom tissue, based in Green Bay, in February and March of 2011. The attacks against Koch Industries were said to have lasted three days and resulted in several hundred-thousand dollars in losses. For his role in the same attack, Christopher Sudlik was ordered earlier this month to pay the same in restitution, as well as being sentenced to 36 months of probation and 60 hours of community service. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/second-anonymous-member-sentenced-for-role-in-ddos-attack/article/334490/

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Second Anonymous member sentenced for role in DDoS attack

Stack Overflow goes down for an hour on Sunday due to DDoS attack

Stack Overflow went out for about an hour on Sunday morning due to a DDoS attack, TechCrunch reported. Stack Overflow is a question and answer website focused on coding that programmers, both professional and amateur, rely on. Stack Exchange, the parent firm of Stack Overflow, told TechCrunch that the site went down because of a DDoS attack on its network provider. According to Webopedia, a DDoS attack or Distributed Denial of Service is a kind of DOS attack “where multiple compromised systems-which are usually infected with a Trojan-are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Victims of a DDoS attack consist of both the end targeted system and all systems maliciously used and controlled by the hacker in the distributed attack.” Stack Exchange added that the issue has already been “partially mitigated” and the platform is already operational. A 100% free site that does not require any registration, Stack Overflow allows anybody to ask and answer a question. Users vote on the best answers and they then go up to the top. Posts about the outage began to hit micro-blogging site Twitter and Hacker News at about 11 am Pacific Time Sunday. The notes, often humorous, of programmers served as a testament to the importance of the platform to a lot of people, the report said. Some of the Twitter posts about the outage featured in the TechCrunch report included one from Adam (@adamjstevenson) which said, “Stack Overflow being down reminds me how badly I need Stack Overflow in my life.” Another one came from pickett (@pickett) which said “Well, stackoverflow is down.  Might as well pack it in and take the day off.” Vineet Shah (@vineetshah), meanwhile, posted “Came to work on a Sunday and Stack Overflow is down EVERYBODY PANIC.” Source: http://www.vcpost.com/articles/21665/20140216/stack-overflow-goes-down-for-an-hour-sunday-due-to-ddos-attack.htm

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Stack Overflow goes down for an hour on Sunday due to DDoS attack

Exchange Halts Payouts as DDoS Attack Pummels Bitcoin

A second major bitcoin exchange suspended withdrawals on Tuesday, amidst widespread attacks on the vast software system that drives the digital currency. Bitstamp, an exchange based on Slovenia, says that it suspended Bitcoin withdrawals due to “inconsistent results” from its online bitcoin wallet caused by a denial-of-service attack, according to a post on the exchange’s Facebook page. “Bitcoin withdrawal processing will be suspended temporarily until a software fix is issued,” the post reads. The news comes a week after the Tokyo-based exchange Mt. Gox suspended Bitcoin payouts, blaming a known bug in the bitcoin software. At the time, outside observers turned the blame on Mt. Gox’s accounting software, but it turns out that the company isn’t the only exchange struggling to cope with the bug. That a known issue like this could lead to the suspension of payouts on two of the world’s most popular bitcoin exchanges underscores the immaturity of bitcoin and the ongoing growing pains of the the world’s most popular digital currency. These growing pains are not just technical, but political. As Bitstamp battles against these attacks, it’s also worth noting that the Slovenian exchange is not listed as a money services business with FINCEN, the U.S. agency that registers money transmitters — even though it accepts US customers. Bitstamp did not respond to a press inquiry from WIRED. But according to Andreas Antonopoulos, the chief security officer with bitcoin wallet-maker, Blockchain, the effects of this week’s attack should be temporary. “It’s a griefer attack,” he says. “All it does is slow down these exchanges.” But the company could eventually run into serious problems with regulators in the U.S. FINCEN expects even foreign-based money transmitters to register if they service US customers. A Bored Teenager With a Computer? Bitstamp’s technical issues came to light after someone — nobody knows who, exactly — started flooding the worldwide bitcoin network with thousands of bad transaction records. Because of a flaw in the bitcoin protocol, it’s possible for the bad guys to create two unique transaction identifiers — called hashes — for legitimate transactions on the network. The official bitcoin ledger, or blockchain, is not fooled by these so-called “malleable transactions”, but some badly written wallet software could be confused. “It’s like creating a fake receipt,” says Antonopoulos. In theory, someone could try and use one of these fake receipts to try and trick an exchange into believing that a bitcoin transfer had not gone through, but a look at the blockchain would clear things up, he explains. It turns out that a small number of these bad transactions have been broadcast in the background of the bitcoin network for some time now, but after Mt. Gox went public with its problems, someone cranked up the volume. “Some joker is rewriting thousands of bitcoin transactions and rebroadcasting them,” says Jeff Garzik, a core developer on the bitcoin software. “It’s not a ‘massive and concerted’ attack, probably just a bored teenager with one computer.” Antonopoulos, who is working with other bitcoin companies to coordinate a response to the attack, says he’s spoken with five exchanges (not including Mt. Gox) about the issue, and that three of them are unaffected by the issue. None of the five exchanges that Antonopoulos has spoken with appear to have lost money because of the issue, he says. Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/bitcoin-ddos/

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Exchange Halts Payouts as DDoS Attack Pummels Bitcoin

Largest ever DDoS attack

CloudFlare said that the attack was close to 400Gbps in size, making it bigger than last year’s DDoS attack against anti-spam outfit Spamhaus, which was measured at just over 300Gbps. Confidentiality stopped CloudFlare from revealing the identify of the customer under attack, and there were few details on how many other companies had been affected. The DDoS attack did, however, seem to pose a bigger threat on European networks, with French hosting outfit OVH later reporting that it had fended off a 350Gbps attack. It’s not known if the same attacker was responsible.   Company CEO Matthew Prince responded to the news by saying on Twitter that “someone’s got a big, new cannon” and the attack was the “start of ugly things to come”.   While the size of this attack is likely to draw the headlines, it’s worth noting that hackers carried out the DDoS attack by using NTP reflection and amplification techniques, which are increasing common for overwhelming target servers by sending more data packets than switches can support.   The attack technique has been seen in relatively recent hacks against online gaming services like Steam, League of Legends and Battle and essentially aims to push big traffic to the target’s Network Timing Protocol (NTP) server.   In this instance, attackers used NTP reflection to exploit a weakness in the UDP-based NTP, which connects to the Internet to synchronise clocks on machines. The hackers then spoofed the IP address of the target, and sent DNS queries to open DNS resolvers that will answer requests from anywhere. As a result, overwhelming levels of traffic were sent back to the NTP server. CloudFlare has a detailed blog post on NTP reflection attacks.   Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Akamai Technologies, told SCMagazineUK.com that this method of attack troubles unpatched DNS servers, and said that is attractive to attackers because it can reflect huge traffic back to the target. He added that it’s also favourable to the attacker because UTP is “easily spoofed” and because it’s hard for victims to see who is behind the intrusion.   “The main reason for using NTP as an attack tool is that it increases traffic by 100 or 200 percent. It’s a great reflection index and makes for a very effective tool if you’re an attacker.   “At 400Gbps, it’s conceivable that the attack is being run by a small botnet outputting 20Gbps to 30Gbps of traffic,” he added.   McKeay, and other industry commentators, have advised IT administrators to patch and upgrade their NTP servers in light of this attack, although the Akamai exec admitted that some can assume that NTP servers are safe.   “NTP servers are often stable and so haven’t often been looked at before. [IT departments] are having to now.”   IT administrators are advised, in light of this attack, to patch and upgrade their NTP servers and to check management rights.   Speaking recently to SCMagazineUK.com , Visiting Professor John Walker, of Nottingham Trent University, warned that DDoS attacks will continue to be a big threat in 2014, and added that, since company divisions struggle to get their heads around the issue, the firm itself struggles to establish an effective defence strategy.   “Since they see the issue solely from their perspective, they cannot hope to develop an effective strategy to deal with this security problem,” he said at the time.   A previously unknown division of the UK Government was recently accused of launching DDoS attacks against hactivisim groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec, while a report from the end of last year revealed that most UK companies ignore DDoS threats. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/cloudflare-spots-largest-ever-ddos-attack/article/333480/

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Largest ever DDoS attack