Tag Archives: ddos-defense

Winning Poker Network $1M Guaranteed Tournament Cancelled After Apparent DDoS Attack

The Winning Poker Network (WPN) was forced to cancel its $1 million guaranteed prize pool tournament on Sunday, after an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack caused disruptions and connectivity issues for players participating in the event. While the tournament had been running for several hours, late registration was still open, so all players were refunded their buy-ins and entry fees in accordance with network policy. The tournament was an ambitious effort by WPN, a network that includes America’s Cardroom, to bring a major online poker tournament to US players. It was billed as the first $1 million event in American online poker in nearly four years, as the events of Black Friday had more or less put an end to such prize pools in the country. Cancelled Despite Strong Turnout With a $500 + $40 buy-in and entry fee, the tournament needed 2,000 players to meet the prize guarantee (without dipping into the entry fees), and it appeared likely to do so. When the tournament was finally cancelled, 1,937 players had registered, and there were still about 45 minutes left in the late registration period. According to reports, the event was cancelled after less than five hours of play, though some players have said closer to 5.5 hours had elapsed by the time it was officially cancelled. Given how long the tournament had been running, a substantial number of players had already been eliminated; on the TwoPlusTwo.com forums, some players said they had hoped for some sort of chip split or ICM chop among the remaining players, given the large stacks they had accumulated in the first few hours of play. CEO Addresses Issues, Defends Decisions After the tournament, WPN CEO Phil Payton streamed a broadcast live on Twitch.tv to address the cancellation. “Call it a conspiracy, call it what you want, a lot of online poker sites have had Internet connectivity issues,” a clearly disappointed and frustrated Payton said. Payton referenced the fact that tournament issues were caused by DDoS attacks last weekend, but had seemed to clear up in the days before the big event. Whoever was causing the Internet disconnections was waiting for the million,” Payton said. “The second that it started, it started.” According to Payton, he and his staff initially tried to fight through it, but eventually came to the conclusion that it simply wasn’t fair to players who might be disconnected during key hands. “There’s a lot of sites that [would say] let them push through it, and we make $80,000, and gg,” Payton said. “Well, you know what, I’ve got to sleep with myself at night, and I’m not going to do that. “If it happened again tomorrow, I’d do the same thing,” he added. As Payton referenced, there have been an increasing number of DDoS attacks across online poker and the Internet at large. Just days earlier, players were suspicious about the possibility of DDoS attacks being used to disconnect opponents for the benefit of a specific player. Swedish operator Svenska Spel also had to cancel some poker tournaments last month following similar attacks and a massive Internet collapse in Sweden just last week is also blamed on DDoS hackers. In the end, given that the issues gave some players an advantage, Payton said that he was happy to stand by his decision, even if it was unpopular. “It doesn’t matter if you like it or not,” Payton said in response to questions about the decision at the end of his broadcast on Twitch. “It was fair.” Source: http://www.cardschat.com/news/wpn-1m-tournament-cxld-ddos-attack-8827

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Winning Poker Network $1M Guaranteed Tournament Cancelled After Apparent DDoS Attack

London teen pleads guilty to SpamHaus DDoS attack

The London teen behind the massive denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on SpamHaus and Cloudflare has pleaded guilty. Technology blogger Brian Krebs reported over the weekend that 17-year-old Sean Nolan McDonough, also known by his hacker alias “Narko,” pleaded guilty on Dec. 10 to computer misuse and money laundering in connection with the attack. McDonough was arrested in September 2013 after he played a role in the March 19, 2013 DDoS attacks aimed at Spamhaus, a Dutch anti-spam group and international nonprofit. SpamHaus later moved its servers behind CloudFlare, which then pushed the attackers to devote their efforts toward the company’s network. The attack sent 85Gbps of traffic. The U.K. National Crime Agency told Krebs that, “court reporting restrictions are in place in respect to a juvenile offender, [and] as a consequence the NCA will not be releasing further detail.” Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/sean-nolan-mcdonough-narko-pleads-guilty/article/388387/

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London teen pleads guilty to SpamHaus DDoS attack

Sony Pictures not using Amazon Web Services to DDoS illegal file-sharing websites

Reports this week claimed Sony Pictures were carrying out denial of service attacks against certain websites which were sharing files stolen in the devastating cyber-attack against the studio. The sources speaking to Recode said that Sony Pictures was using Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud computing infrastructure in Tokyo and Singapore to flood websites which are sharing the files illegally, but this claim has now been denied by the company involved. A spokesperson for AWS has however categorically denied that this is the situation, telling IBTimes UK : AWS employs a number of automated detection and mitigation techniques to prevent the misuse of our services. In cases where the misuse is not detected and stopped by the automated measures, we take manual action as soon as we become aware of any misuse. Our terms are clear about this. The activity being reported is not currently happening on AWS. It is unclear if Sony Pictures is carrying out the attacks suggested by the sources speaking to Recode, and simply using another computing infrastructure, or if the studio is not actually carrying out these attacks at all. Martin McKeay, who works with cloud services provider Akamai, told ITSecurity Guru that there could be some truth in the speculation: “It has the potential for being true and not utterly impossible to be some truth to this, and I don’t think it is utterly impossible that they are doing it through some third party who is doing this via AWS,” he said. “There are some systems out there for doing load testing and some of them can be done through AWS and can generate traffic like that, but what is more likely is that they are feeding the torrent sites with false information and causing a DDoS in that way.” Tim Erlin from Tripwire told IBTimes UK that if there is truth to the rumour, it could spell even more trouble for Sony Pictures: “Taking the step to ‘hack back’ against perceived legitimate targets, based on their own assessment of guilt, presents a myriad of potential legal problems. If Sony manages to disrupt, intentionally or accidentally, a legitimate service in the process, they may be adding to their problems, rather than improving the situation.” Sony Pictures has not commented on these reports, but the company is still trying to get its systems back fully under its control since the studio was attacked by a group of mysterious hackers called Guardians of Peace almost three weeks ago. “ The movie of terrorism” The group, which claims to have stolen “tens of terabytes” of information from Sony Pictures, released the latest tranche of stolen documents on Wednesday. Along with releasing copies of Sony Pictures’ films, the leak includes personal and financial information of thousands of the company’s employees, internal emails from executive discussing high profile stars like Angelina Jolie and films like Jobs, the Steve Jobs biopic. The leaked data has also included highly sensitive information on actors’ salaries and the amount of money that it is being paid by Netflix for its films. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sony-pictures-not-using-amazon-web-services-ddos-illegal-file-sharing-websites-1479230

AbleGamers’ weird weekend of porn stars, charity and a worries over a DDoS attack [correction]

AbleGamers believe they became the target of a DDoS attack over the weekend after the charity founders declined to accept funds from porn star Mercedes Carrera because of her connection to the GamerGate movement, according to the gaming and disability charity. But Carrera tells Polygon she had nothing to do with the issues the site ran into over the weekend and that while she is a GamerGate supporter the live stream adult cam show is not connected to GamerGate. “In fact, I was unaware any of this was happening until checking my social media on Sunday,” she said. The disagreement started out as an offer by Carrera to help raise funds for AbleGamers, a website dedicated to gaming and disability. “I chose AbleGamers as I have become friendly with some disabled gamers and wanted to support the mission of providing alternatives in gaming for those who are not fully abled,” Carrera told Polygon. “I see the value in disabled gamers having an opportunity to experience a variety of actions they may not have access to in day to day life.” AbleGamers officials said they were initially open to the idea. “As a sex positive organization, our immediate response was ‘Absolutely,’” according to a post on AbleGamers. “We would be honored to be chosen.” But a thread about the fundraiser on Reddit raised concerns for AbleGamers. “In doing our due diligence we discovered the event organizer was putting together a GamerGate stream that would ‘for now’ be ‘a charity stream’ because they ‘cannot mention that it is a GG stream as it might shy away BZ (Brazzers) and others,’” reads a statement from the organization. According to a message on its official website, AbleGamers “became concerned by the lack of transparency in the original emails having made no mention of GamerGate. We became further alarmed as the post continued adding ‘GamerGate [h]as just weaponized porn.’” Carrera said that AbleGamers emailed the coordinators of the event and said they didn’t want to receive money from the fundraising because of what they read on the Reddit thread, including someone writing that “GamerGate had weaponized porn”. After announcing it would no longer be involved in the charity event, the AbleGamers website began having technical issues, according to site officials. AbleGamers representative Steven Spohn told Polygon that a DDoS attack was confirmed by the website’s host. “When we released our statement, we figured it was traffic,” says Spohn. “Our server is ‘charity level’ which means cheap and no DDoS protection. “When we started getting ‘cannot connect to service’ on the webpage, we called Liquid Web. Three different phone representatives said that it was in fact a DDoS. We relayed the information to our audience as it was happening. Our website is on a cloud server, sandboxed away from others. “So, were we?” Spohn continues. “Our host says so. Could they be wrong? Sure. If LW tells us three techs and their top admin were wrong, then we’ll agree we weren’t [victims of a DDoS attack]. Until then I’m sticking to we were DDoS attacked around 1pm Eastern on Sunday for about 30 minutes.” Carrera is adamant she had nothing to do with the issues, something she goes into in more detail in an open letter on Destructoid. She also said that the fundraiser has never been connected with GamerGate. “The live stream cam show adult content event happening January 2 is not connected to GamerGate,” she said. “However, as I have come out in support of GamerGate’s mission of ethics in journalism and resistance to censorship, it is not surprising that the two became conflated on Reddit. However the show itself is not intended to be a GamerGate sanctioned event. ” She added that the fundraiser is still happening and that a partnership is in the works for who will be the recipient of the money raised. Source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/9/7358899/ablegamers-gamergate-mercedes-carrera-ddos

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AbleGamers’ weird weekend of porn stars, charity and a worries over a DDoS attack [correction]

1&1 goes titsup, blames lengthy outage on DDoS attack

UK hosting company 1&1 went titsup late on Tuesday night and struggled to recover this morning, after claiming it had been the victim of a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The website collapsed shortly before 10pm yesterday, and it has taken 1&1 a full 12 hours to get its service back up and running. Readers who told the Reg about the outage said that the service had been flaky for several hours before it keeled over. 1&1 blamed the downtime on a DDoS attack in a tweet. However, although the website appeared to be returning to normal, 1&1 had yet to update its customers about the status of its system at time of writing. Customers were still griping about the mysterious outage this morning. Indeed, 1&1 was tight-lipped about the cause of the service disruption on its status page, which made no mention of a system security breach. Last month, Fasthosts blamed a five-hour outage it had suffered on a DDoS attack. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/1_and_1_hosting_firm_claims_ddos_attack_downs_website/

66 year old British Rock Guitarist jailed for taking part in 2010 Anonymous DDoS campaign called Operation Payback

Geoffrey ‘Jake’ Commander, a 66-years-old British rock guitarist and part of the Electric Light Band Orchestra (ELO), has been given a a jail sentence for joining the popular online hacktivists collective ‘Anonymous’ and taking part in the famous Operation Payback campaign in 2010 which brought down many financial websites. Washington Times quotes that, “Geoffrey “Jake” Commander, a rock guitarist who has played with the Electric Light Orchestra, George Harrison and Elton John, among others, walked unnoticed through the halls of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria early Friday afternoon” The sentence was given by the Alexandria District Court on Friday following the admission of guilty plea by ‘Jake.’ The ELO guitarist admitted to his involvement in the Anonymous operation at the hearing before the sentence was pronounced. He also promised the Judge never to return to the United States after his release. The authorities said that he could serve only ten days in prison, ‘Jake’ was earlier facing a likely prison sentence of ten years jail time in a federal prison. Operation Payback The Anonymous campaign called Operation Payback was a coordinated attack against the opponents of Internet piracy. Anonymous started the Operation Payback started as retaliation to DDoS attacks on torrent sites by anti piracy lobby. The Anonymous then allegedly took down many anti-piracy websites all over the world through coordinated DDoS attacks. After Wikileaks published the leaks of Diplomatic cables in December 2010, some banks withdrew banking facilities given to Wikileaks. Anonymous then turned the Operation Payback against such banks which had withdrawn the banking facilities. Geoffrey’s Role in Operation Payback. Reports indicate that Geoffery took part in the IRC chat administered by members of Anonymous collective and joined the 1000 members of Anonymous to launch a DDoS attack against MasterCard. He was alleged part of the Operation Payback for over 3 hours in which he he contributed to the amplification of the attack by using the LOIC (low-orbit Ion cannon) tool on his PC. MasterCard had reported later that it recorded a $1 million loss due to this DDoS attack. Geoffery was arrested in 2013 after he returned to the United States with his family, 3 years after the attack. Source: http://www.techworm.net/2014/12/66-year-old-british-rock-guitarist-jailed-taking-part-2010-anonymous-ddos-attack.html

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66 year old British Rock Guitarist jailed for taking part in 2010 Anonymous DDoS campaign called Operation Payback

Carbon Poker Crash and Possible DDoS Attacks Highlight Need for Legalization

Recent happenings at what was considered one of the more reliable and trustworthy offshore online poker rooms, Carbon Poker, is simply furthering the case for regulated online poker in the United States. Anyone calling for a ban of online gambling in the U.S. should pay particular attention to what has taken place at Carbon Poker over the past couple weeks, as these are the types of online poker operators that will survive a federal online gambling ban. If Sheldon Adelson gets his way, regulated sites like WSOP.com would be forced to shut down and sites like Carbon would continue to fill the void. In the past couple weeks the site experienced several significant problems that have left many players concerned about the safety of their accounts and their personal information, as well as with the overall integrity of the games at the site. Server crash leads to data breach The first issue occurred during one of the biggest tournament days in Carbon Poker’s history. On November 23, the Main Event of the Carbon Poker Online Poker Series, along with dozens of other tournaments at the site, were running when the Carbon Poker servers’ crashed, bringing everything to a screeching halt. Site-wide server crashes are rare, but they do happen. Unfortunately for Carbon, this was not a typical server crash, which is bad enough in its own right. According to multiple reports by poker players on social media sites and on the poker forums, the server crash not only caused widespread disconnections, but also caused hole cards to change mid-hand for players still able to log in and play, and even more worrisome, customers were inexplicably able to gain access to other players’ accounts when they tried to log back on to the site. Players reported that this first of its kind (to my knowledge) technical glitch, not only allowed them access to other Carbon Poker’s players accounts, but they were capable of gambling with those funds (including players that were active on the site when the servers crashed), as well as being able to see the accountholders sensitive personal information. A DDoS superuser? As concerning as the server crash and data breach were, things got even worse this weekend when, after several days of unexplained and consistent disconnect issues, widespread rumors began to take hold that targeted DDoS attacks were behind the ongoing technical issues, and were being used to win pots. Following pages of frustration over the ongoing disconnects, the DDoS rumors took hold with an out of left field (something that is not uncommon on 2+2) accusation: I found the hacker that is disconnecting the server. He builds big pots and once he min-raises he crashes the server and scoops the pot. His username is L4ss3m4jj4n. He did it to me a few times and took quite a bit from me at PLO. I then followed him and watched him do it to others. I emailed support so lets see what happens.” And from there it escalated: “Guys, I would normally say this is just somebody coming up with a wild conspiracy theory, but this is serious, everybody should open up this table, it’s table 24 in the $215/125k, something is super super fishy about the way L4ss3m4jj4n is playing, every disconnect has benefited him so far, it seems too obvious if you watch it for a few of the disconnects.” “second time i’m witnessing him betting in big pot and a disconnect taking place.” “Kh8s9d7h board he checks, phat1cat bets 1888 into 3750, l4ss3m4jj4n minraises to 3776 and disconnect.” In addition to the forum gossip, the potential DDoS superuser was also discussed/mentioned on social media by well-known poker players and poker commentators. Click here and also here. As the story began to unfold, over 100 players started monitoring this person’s play as it was being live-streamed on Twitch.com, and at the same time were furiously contacting Carbon Poker customer support en masse to have something done about the situation. You can read a good summary (for those that can’t handle 200 pages of 2+2 posts) of what took place at Carbon Poker/Merge Gaming here. It should be stated, that whether this was a concerted DDOS attack by some nefarious player(s), or if the sites are simply experiencing ongoing technical issues is unclear. What is clear is that unregulated sites make it much harder for players to be treated fairly and properly compensated when these things occur. It also shows the inability of players on unregulated sites to take their grievances to a regulatory body that oversees the site. The important takeaway is, if these types of issues are occurring at Carbon Poker, considered one of the top unregulated online poker sites still serving the U.S. market, what is happening at the other, more suspect, operators? Source: http://www.pokerupdate.com/news/networks-and-rooms/12083-carbon-poker-crash-and-possible-ddos-attacks-highlight-need-for-legalization/

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Carbon Poker Crash and Possible DDoS Attacks Highlight Need for Legalization

Hacker Group ‘Lizard Squad’ Hits Xbox Live and PlayStation Network with DDoS Attacks

A hacker group used distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against two giants in the gaming industry, causing widespread service outages among users. First, Lizard Squad, the self-professed “king of DDoS,” took down Xbox Live early last week. The ensuing outage lasted all of Monday night, with Microsoft support announcing that service had been restored on Tuesday. Shortly after the service interruption occurred, Lizard Squad tweeted “Xbox Live #offline” and announced that they would gift Microsoft a “wonderful” Christmas present this year. It would appear the group is living up to its promise. Later on Friday, Lizard Squad brought down Xbox Live again with another DDoS attack. Xbox 360 users were disproportionately affected by the group’s second attack against Microsoft that week, though Xbox One also experienced some problems. Then late last night on Sunday, Lizard Squad shifted its focus to Sony, which is still in the process of investigating a massive hack, and used a DDoS attack to bring down Sony Entertainment’s PlayStation Network (PSN). The group has also claimed responsibility for bringing down Sony’s online PlayStation store, replacing the homepage with the text, “Page Not Found! It’s not you. It’s the Internet’s Fault.” While service has been restored to PSN, the PlayStation store outage is still ongoing as of this writing. Sony is no stranger to Lizard Squad. The hacker group attacked the tech giant in August earlier this year, causing a massive service interruption among North American users. The group shortly thereafter tweeted that explosives were aboard an American Airlines flight on which Sony Entertainment President John Smedley was flying, causing the plane to be diverted. These recent attacks against Xbox Live and Sony are just the beginning, according to Lizard Squad. On Christmas Day, the hacker group has announced that it will bring down Xbox Live, only this time, it promises that the attack will irreversibly cripple the service, causing the outage to last “forever.” Whether the hacker group makes good on this promise remains to be seen. At any event, we can certainly expect additional attacks from Lizard Squad before this holiday season is over. Source: http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/top-security-stories/hacker-group-lizard-squad-hits-xbox-live-and-playstation-network-with-ddos-attacks/

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Hacker Group ‘Lizard Squad’ Hits Xbox Live and PlayStation Network with DDoS Attacks

Summary of DDoS Attacks this Holiday Season

A number of high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have taken place over the past few days, and it is expected that more will occur as we draw closer to the holidays. The attacks began early last week when a hacker who is associated with Anonymous orchestrated a DDoS attack against the websites for the Supreme Court of Canada and the Ottawa Police Forces. The DDoS attack was preceded by a hack against the City of Ottawa, during which the attacker replaced the website’s homepage with an image of a dancing banana. According to the hacker who has claimed responsibility for the attacks, the DDoS campaign was meant to respond to the arrest of a teen that had allegedly made more than 30 emergency 9-1-1 calls across North America. The hacker believes the teen was framed and is trying to help him clear his name. Following a busy Thanksgiving weekend, which included the Sony breach, Cyber Monday saw a DDoS attack against DNSimple, a domain management provider. The attack, which lasted approximately 12 hours, sustained traffic of up to 25Gbps and about 50 million packets per second sent to DNSimple’s servers. Finally, a DDoS attack launched on Tuesday by Lizard Squad, a group well known for this type of attack, succeeded in bringing down the servers at Blizzard Entertainment, a gaming enterprise known for the popular World of Warcraft computer game franchise. Just a day earlier, Lizard Squad had succeeded in using a DDoS campaign to bring down Xbox Live, much to the frustration of shoppers who had purchased the gaming console on Cyber Monday. The attacks on the Canadian government websites, DNSimple, and Blizzard Entertainment suggest that high-volume DDoS attacks are on the rise. In fact, Verisign, a Virginia-based security firm, has been tracking this trend throughout the third quarter. Over the course of its investigation, it has noted an increase of as much as 60 percent quarter-on-quarter in 2014 for some companies. Researchers at Verisign recommend that companies invest in advanced DDoS protection solutions. This is especially true as we approach the holidays, for this type of attack spikes around this time of year. And with Lizard Squad preparing for additional DDoS attacks, their advice could not be more perfectly timed. It looks like it’s going to be a busy holiday season. Source: http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/top-security-stories/ddos-attacks-ramp-up-for-the-holidays/

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Summary of DDoS Attacks this Holiday Season

DDoS attack takes down X-Box Live, FBI warns businesses of new hacking threats

Cyber Monday appears to be a good time for cyber attacks. A group calling itself Lizard Squad said it has taken down Xbox Live. The outage started Monday night and has gamers complaining that they can’t access their systems. The group posted a message to Twitter Monday evening: Cyber Monday appears to be a good time for cyber attacks. A group calling itself Lizard Squad said it has taken down Xbox Live. The outage started Monday night and has gamers complaining that they can’t access their systems. The group posted a message to Twitter Monday evening: The group appears to have launched a DDOS (distributed denial-of-service attack), a fairly common way to take a site offline. Gaming sites said the Lizard Squad has been attacking gaming services for several months, including Play Station, Destiny and several EA games. The group made similar threats to bring the sites down at Christmas. Meanwhile, the FBI is warning businesses that hackers are using malicious software to launch a series of attacks on the U.S. Over the weekend, Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked, resulting in five films, including the company’s new version of “Annie” being leaked online. The FBI sent out a confidential five-page memo to businesses Monday warning of the possibility of similar attacks, CNBC reported. The Sony attack is believed to have come from North Korea, which had threatened retribution for an upcoming film about its leader Kim John-un. North Korea has complainedthe film, “The Interview” – which includes a plot to assassinate the leader – was state-sponsored “terrorism.” North Korea has appealed to the United Nations to stop distribution of the film. The FBI is investigating the attack. Source: http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2014/12/ddos_attack_takes_down_x-box_l.html