Tag Archives: attack

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

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

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/

More:
Internet Service Providers Under DDOS Attack in Mumbai, Probe Ordered

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/

See more here:
US Congress websites recovering after three-day DDoS attack

Overwatch Servers Went Down After Alleged DDoS Attack

Infamous hacker group Lizard Squad is thought to be at it again, this time taking down Overwatch servers and leaving players unable to join and remain in a session. Over the past week, Blizzard has been experiencing some problems with Battle.net that have made it difficult for players to use the service as intended with games like Overwatch . Now, there’s word that these issues might have been caused by a DDoS attack launched by members of hacker group Lizard Squad. Some users are reporting that they are unable to log in to Battle.net. Others are able to enter, but find themselves kicked out of multiplayer matches in Overwatch for seemingly no reason. Ordinarily, issues like these would be brushed off as being part and parcel of the modern online experience. However, a suspicious tweet from a known Lizard Squad member has led to the group being implicated, according to a report from VG247. The above tweet is being taken as proof that Lizard Squad member AppleJ4ck was involved with the attack. Some Overwatch players responded to his post to vent their annoyance about the situation — to which AppleJ4ck responded, “in a way, I’m doing y’all a favor.” This is not the first time that Lizard Squad has targeted organizations within the video game industry. The group rose to prominence back in 2014, when a coordinated attack brought down the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live over Christmas, causing massive headaches for the companies involved. Of course, the attack was not an unmitigated success for the group, as the high-profile hack made Lizard Squad an immediate target for authorities. Just days later, a 22-year-old alleged to be a part of the organization was the subject of a raid by police in the United Kingdom. However, the strength of a group like Lizard Squad is the fact that they are spread all over the world. Individual members can be found and brought to justice, but it’s difficult to make a concerted attempt to stamp out its activity outright. If the situation is hard on the authorities, then it’s even more challenging for a company like Blizzard. The overwhelming popularity of Overwatch means its hard enough for the company to keep Battle.net afloat at the best of team, never mind when there are hackers on the prowl. Unfortunately, criminal elements like Lizard Squad are part and parcel of the modern online experience. Companies like Blizzard have to take these groups into consideration when operating a service like Battle.net — hackers have the power to ruin the experience for the rest of us, and the only defence is a robust level of security. Source: http://gamerant.com/overwatch-servers-down-ddos-attack-846/

More:
Overwatch Servers Went Down After Alleged DDoS Attack

Crypto e-mail provider ProtonMail pays ransom to stop DDoS attack, attack continues

Switzerland-based end-to-end encrypted e-mail provider ProtonMail has been on the receiving end of a heavy DDoS attack since Tuesday, November 3, and unavailable to its users for hours on end. Pro…

Continued here:
Crypto e-mail provider ProtonMail pays ransom to stop DDoS attack, attack continues

New DDoS attacks misuse NetBIOS name server, RPC portmap, and Sentinel licensing servers

Akamai has observed three new reflection DDoS attacks in recent months: NetBIOS name server reflection, RPC portmap reflection, and Sentinel reflection. In a reflection DDoS attack, also called a D…

View the original here:
New DDoS attacks misuse NetBIOS name server, RPC portmap, and Sentinel licensing servers

How Google saw the DDoS attack against Github and GreatFire

The recent DDoS attacks aimed at GreatFire, a website that exposes China's internet censorship efforts and helps users get access to their mirror-sites, and GitHub, the world's largest code hosting se…

Taken from:
How Google saw the DDoS attack against Github and GreatFire

Massive DDoS against GitHub continues

Popular web-based Git repository hosting service GitHub has been battling a massive DDoS attack – the biggest they have ever experienced – for the last four days. “The attack began around 2AM UTC o…

Visit link:
Massive DDoS against GitHub continues

Black hole routing: Not a silver bullet for DDoS protection

As ISPs, hosting providers and online enterprises around the world continue suffering the effects of DDoS attacks, often the discussions that follow are, “What is the best way to defend our networks a…

Read this article:
Black hole routing: Not a silver bullet for DDoS protection

New DDoS attack and tools use Google Maps plugin as proxy

Attackers are using Joomla servers with a vulnerable Google Maps plugin installed as a platform for launching DDoS attacks. A known vulnerability in a Google Maps plugin for Joomla allows the plugi…

More:
New DDoS attack and tools use Google Maps plugin as proxy