Tag Archives: defend against ddos

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/

See more here:
Hacker Group ‘Lizard Squad’ Hits Xbox Live and PlayStation Network with DDoS Attacks

Fort Lauderdale Website Under DDoS Attack Again

The City of Fort Lauderdale announced Wednesday that it may have to disconnect its Internet service at different points due to another attempt at a denial of service attack on the city’s website. Fort Lauderdale recently saw its home page and the website for Mayor Jack Seiler both go through denial of service attacks at the hands of Anonymous. The hacker collective launched the DDoS attack to try to change the homeless feeding ordinance and other city rules. The Anonymous DDoS attack lasted for several hours during the first attack which kept the home page inaccessible for several hours. The city said Wednesday that it is working with its Internet Service Provider to mitigate risk and safeguard the system. However, the city said there may be service interruptions and intermittent website performance due to the possible new attack. Source: http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Fort-Lauderdale-Website-Under-Attack-Again-284672121.html

Read the original post:
Fort Lauderdale Website Under DDoS Attack Again

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/

See the article here:
Summary of DDoS Attacks this Holiday Season

The Conversation hit by DDoS Attack

Academia-meets-journalism website the Conversation was hit by a denial of service hacker attack this morning, preventing it from posting new articles or sending its daily email for around eight hours. The cyber attack was targeted at the site’s domain name server DNSimple and affected hundreds of sites across the world. It is believed to be related to the Cyber Monday sales which were going on in the US and UK at the time. In a note in today’s newsletter, sent at 2pm as opposed to the regular 6am, managing editor Misha Ketchell wrote: “Apologies for the long delay in sending today’s newsletter. Our website has been down since shortly after 6am thanks to a “denial of service” attack on our domain name server, DNSimple. “If that’s got you scratching your head, you’re not alone. A denial of service attack is easy enough to understand: it’s where malevolent hackers inundate a server with so many requests it ceases to function. “What’s confounding is why anyone would do something so pointless. In this case we think we’ve been caught up in a targeted attack to coincide with the Cyber Monday sales events in the US, as David Glance explains here. “For now the worst appears to be over and we are working on ways to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Thanks for your patience.” DNSimple is still currently experiencing issues across some of its domains due to the attacks, which are explained in more detail in a piece on The Conversation. Source: http://mumbrella.com.au/conversation-hit-denial-service-hackers-morning-265908

Link:
The Conversation hit by DDoS Attack

Google reels under DDoS attack

Google, it seems, has the eye of Sauron upon it. About 10:30 am IST, all of the monolith’s services went offline, including Gmail and the all important Google search engine. Since then, services have been restored one at a time. Google search and Gmail were resurrected around 11:20 am. while Google Drive and Gmail Chat only made their way back around 11:42 am. Panic was rampant on Twitter, as more and more people discovered they couldn’t log on, but it seems to be settling down now. So why was #GoogleDown? Well according to Digital Attack Map, ironically also a Google property, points to a possible DDoS attack on Google’s servers. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when a malicious group uses multiple systems to bombard a server with unnecessary traffic, in an attempt to make it crash. No credit taken by any hacker group and no comment yet from Google, as of this time. Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report-google-reels-under-ddos-attack-2040211

More here:
Google reels under DDoS attack

SK Internet down after DDoS Attack

SK Broadband, one of the largest providers of broadband Internet access in Korea, was attacked by the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) over the weekend, disconnecting its Internet services for about an hour. DDoS is a kind of cyberattack in which multiple compromised systems are used to target a single network or a machine and make it unavailable to users. On Saturday at 10:55 a.m., the traffic on SK Broadband’s DNS server soared up to 15 million packets per second (PPS), from its usual average of about 1 million PPS. PPS refers to the number of database transactions performed per second. The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said it blocked the cyberattack on SK Broadband and a smaller attack on LG U+ with the help of the Korea Internet Security Agency (KISA) and was able to normalize the service in 70 minutes. SK Broadband users near Seocho and Dongjak distrcts in southern Seoul were without Internet from 10:55 a.m. until 12:05 p.m. on Saturday. There was also a mild attack on LG U+, the nation’s third-largest mobile carrier, but it did not have a noticeable effect on the carrier or its users, according to the ministry. The investigative team at the Science Ministry has confirmed 1,030 Internet Protocol addresses used in the DDoS attack and is analyzing the SK’s DNS server log. SK Broadband said it is planning to collect and analyze the malware codes used in the attack after it identified zombie PCs among the users. “It’s not the first time that a mobile carrier has been attacked by DDoS. We are investigating where the attack came from and the exact causes,” said Lim Young-seok, a manager at SK Broadband. “It could take a month, as in the case of previous cyberattacks on banks.” However, information security companies suggested that the DDoS attack on the mobile carrier and the Internet service provider could be a prelude to a larger cyberattack. Increased malware activity was recorded ahead of massive cyberattacks on three Korean television stations and a bank on March 20 and a June 25 attack on the Blue House website. Bitscan, a local securities company, warned that malicious links are at their most active point this year. “As malwares hover between wired and wireless networks, PCs and mobile devices that are vulnerable to cyberattacks will likely see huge damages,” said a spokesman for Bitscan. Source: http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=2997940

Continue reading here:
SK Internet down after DDoS Attack

Oh Oh Oh, Tis the season for DDoS attacks

It’s that time of the year where some websites become extremely high valued targets. It happens every year around this time, this year has proven to be no exception. DOSarrest have seen in the past where some online merchants were completely devastated by DDoS attacks that can sometimes force them out of business. These unlucky merchants were down due to attacks that lasted for several days and all of their customers had made their urgent Christmas purchases on other sites. These are lost sales that will never return and to make things worse, the online merchant gets stuck with excess inventory that they can’t sell. Why does this happen at this time of the year ? The answer is simple its most likely your competition. What better way to punish your competitor, then to shut their doors during the busiest shopping time of the year. The importance of DDoS protection can save your business. You can’t afford it ? Think of the alternative, being down for 24-48 hours sometime between November 27 to December 15th. Could your business survive this ? These are all questions to ask yourself. Approximately 30% of DOSarrests’ customers use the service as a back-up, should they experience a DDoS attack they use the service, when there is no attack they run directly off of their own server(s). Today one of their customers had an attack and contacted DOSarrest letting us know they needed help. Everything was already setup on DOSarrests’ side, fully customized and previously tested for them. Their 24/7 support team guided them through the steps to take and the customer was down for only 45 minutes. 45 minutes is a lot but it could of been 6 hours or longer if they didn’t have something already setup in advance. This particular customer already had a plan in place, he knew what he had to do and what not to do and was thrilled to not suffer some protracted outage. Some of the higher end online merchants will be ringing up $400,000/day in sales at this time of the year. Down or crippled for 6 hours would really hurt. Ask Santa for a DDoS protection plan this Holiday season, just in case the Grinch visits. Mark Teolis General Manager for DOSarrest Internet Security.

Originally posted here:
Oh Oh Oh, Tis the season for DDoS attacks

What Can DDoS Attacks Mean for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

This weekend’s huge number of online shoppers could result in an influx of cyber crime. Two experts discuss how DDoS attacks can affect retailers and how marketers can prevent them. Online shopping is at an all-time high, with retailers expected to rake in more than $6.5 billion in revenue this weekend, the busiest of the year. But with all those people shopping, it’ll also be a busy weekend for the people who administer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. “You can almost think of [DDoS attackers] as pirates,” explains Lisa Joy Rosner, chief marketing officer at Neustar, an information services and analytics company headquartered outside Washington. “What they do is they create this fake overload on your system and stuff all this fake traffic on your site.” Whether DDoS attacks are designed to get a ransom from site owners (“pay up and we’ll stop”) or create a diversion, allowing hackers to sneak in and install data-stealing malware while the attention is on the attack, they rose 71 percent from 2012 to 2013, according to Neustar’s annual impact report. More than 40 percent of the study’s respondents report losses of at least $1 million per day while their sites were slowed down. DDoS attacks don’t only hurt brands financially. It only takes a quarter of a second to lose a customer and not much longer for people to flood the call centers. Unable to handle the volume of customer complaints, companies experience decreased brand confidence as a result. “When marketers make checklists of how to make it through the holidays, they have to think about everything, including the safety of the site and the contribution that makes to the customer experience,” says Rosner, who referred to DDoS attacks as digital armed robbery. Though 95 percent of companies have some form of DDoS protection, it’s not necessarily the right kind. Firewalls, routers, and intrusion prevention systems aren’t designed for attacks, and can ultimately accelerate outages by bottlenecking traffic. “Every connection, whether legitimate or not, will utilize a link in their cable, using memory in the firewall,” says Frank Ip, vice president of marketing and business development at Black Lotus, a San Francisco DDoS-mitigation service. “That eventually overwhelms the stability, so firewall is not a solution.” Ip says that botnets, or compromised Internet connections, are especially prevalent in India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, countries with huge populations of young mobile users who predominantly use Androids, which are more easily corruptible than iOS. Mobile users are more susceptible to unwittingly committing cybercrime because of free Wi-Fi that lacks encryption, though Ip points out that large retailers are generally too savvy for their websites to be similarly unprotected. “It’s the same protocol,” Rosner agrees. “They’re designed to go across devices, whether it’s a laptop or an iPhone or an iPad or Android or what have you. The same security is embedded across all different types of channels.” For marketers to protect their websites, it can be as simple as having equipment to deal with an attack or working with a third-party mitigator who does. Rosner says that it’s important to have an early-warning system to detect anomalies, such as a sudden influx of traffic from another country. Ip adds, “If you compare the intangible losses – customer goodwill, brand equity – it will be a small amount of money to put some preventative resources in place.” Source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2383707/what-can-ddos-attacks-mean-for-black-friday-and-cyber-monday

See more here:
What Can DDoS Attacks Mean for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

Sony Pictures Entertainment Disabled by Cyber Attack

The company’s corporate networks and email were taken offline following the attack. Variety reports that all Sony Pictures Entertainment employees were advised on Monday, November 24, 2014, not to connect to corporate email or corporate networks following a breach by hackers calling themselves “Guardians of Peace,” or #GOP. Deadline.com reports that Sony Pictures’ computers were still down worldwide as of the following day, November 25, 2014. According to The Verge, company computers were defaced with a message stating, “Hacked By #GOP.” “Warning: We’ve already warned you, and this is just a beginning,” the message adds. “We continue till our request be met. We’ve obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top secrets. If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world.” Below the message was a list of five links to zip files allegedly containing stolen data. A Reddit post examining the zip files reports that they contain several files named “private key,” along with Excel files named “passwords” and PDF files named “Diaz, Cameron – Passport.pdf” and “Angelina Jolie passport.pdf.” Another poster found what appears to be weekly Excel files backups of a 1Password database. In an email sent to The Verge, a GOP hacker claimed they were assisted by insiders at Sony, stating, “Sony doesn’t lock their doors, physically, so we worked with other staff with similar interests to get in,” the hacker added. HyTrust vice president Michele Borovac told eSecurity Planet by email that this appears to be yet another example of a massive insider breach. “While it’s possible that the statements made by the attacker are just bluster, the reality is that privileged user credentials can give a hacker the keys to the kingdom,” she said. “Organizations must take steps to gain control and maintain visibility over these administrative ‘super user’ accounts if they want to prevent — or at least contain — these types of attacks,” Borovac added. A Courion survey recently found that IT managers are overconfident about their ability to prevent insider breaches, while a SpectorSoft survey found that 61 percent of IT professionals say they’re unable to deter insider threats. A recent eSecurity Planet article offered advice on how to defend against such threats. Incapsula security researcher Ofer Gayer told eSecurity Planet that the Sony attack is a hard blow for the company, particularly coming so soon after Sony’s networks were taken offline by a DDoS attack in August 2014. “As we’ve seen, these attacks can have a devastating effect on a company, its employees and its clients,” Gayer said. “Releasing private data (dubbed ‘d0xing’ in internet slang) or losing it all completely takes a dangerous step forward from plain old data theft, and as these types of attacks gain popularity, CISOs will be under heavier pressure to prevent them.” Source: http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/sony-pictures-entertainment-disabled-by-cyber-attack.html

More:
Sony Pictures Entertainment Disabled by Cyber Attack

DDoS attacks: Will Black Friday see upturn in web site attacks?

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the busiest online shopping season heading into full swing, it’s a favourite time for cybercriminals hoping to cash in on the holiday hoopla. “The amount of breaches and stolen identities went up drastically in October, November and December of last year,” said Alexander Rau, national information security strategist with Symantec Canada. “There’s more online shopping going on. People are crazy about Black Friday (Nov. 28, the day after the American Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday, people want to get the best deal in the fastest time. “If there’s a lot of traffic, that’s where the attackers and the hackers go to try to steal information if they can.” It’s not only about stealing credit card credentials — that aspect of online chicanery, while still prevalent, is only a small part of cybercrime. On the consumer side, more important to criminals now is the ability to compile entire dossiers on their victims, so when the stolen credit card data is no longer usable they still have enough personal data to carry out sophisticated identity theft scams, which can include buying cars, taking out mortgages in their victims’ names and other fraud. Companies are under increasing attacks for all manner of gain. In the hectic shopping season, keeping transactions secure is only one part of the challenge. Distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks can take down websites by overloading them with bogus traffic. While DDoS attacks are common in games such as Minecraft, in which competitors use them to gain an edge, or in business or for political protest, unscrupulous website operators can also use them to take a retail competitor offline during the busiest online shopping days of the year. “A distributed denial of service attack basically means that someone, in that case the attacker, is flooding a service like a web server with just garbage traffic,” said Candid Wueest, a security researcher with Symantec Security Response and author of a recent report on the evolution of DDoS attacks. “You can compare it in real life to heavy rain, and your flood drains can’t cope with all the water coming in. Now someone opens the floodgates and sends a lot of water toward you. So you’re going to be underwater and not responding to any requests, even the one from the shopper that you actually want to.” Wueest said 2014 has seen an increase of 183 per cent of just one type of attack. “They are getting stronger but sometimes also shorter,” he said. “We know sometimes to take down an online service, often it’s enough to take it down for a few minutes or a few hours, and then the word will spread and people will start shopping at a different location. It’s not uncommon that we see it during seasons like the Black Friday shopping weekend.” In the lead up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Wueest said already some sites are being targeted by extortionists. In the digital world, protection money is demanded as the price of leaving a website online. “What they’ll do is inform the companies, the online shops, previous to the weekend, they’ll tell them, ‘Look, you’re either going to pay us $800 … and if you don’t do it we’re going to take down your business for a few hours.’ “In the end, it’s a classical extortion, which you obviously shouldn’t respond to but it’s hard because in the online world, it can damage your brand and obviously your sales if you’re not available during the peak hours.” Where is the computing power coming from to launch these attacks? If your computer is infected with a virus, it could be what is referred to as a bot, assembled into a botnet army under the command and control of the attacker. You don’t have to be a computer genius to launch an attack. Now for the price of a Starbucks eggnog latte you can get a website taken down for an hour. “There are services which offer it for as little as $5 for one hour, meaning you pay $5 through any online currency like bitcoin or something else and they will make sure that your competitor, your enemy for online gaming, or maybe a newspaper that you didn’t like is taken off for one hour, one day or even one week,” Wueest said. For consumers, there are other things to worry about besides whether or not their favourite online shopping site is available. Identity theft is becoming more and more sophisticated and data breaches — in which companies such as Target and many others have lost personal and financial information on their customers — can leave a ticking time bomb. Long after your credit card is cancelled and you’ve let the credit-monitoring service expire, the personal data about you could be assembled in new ways to make money. “There’s a number of things that people can do to protect themselves from a lot of these different kinds of scams that are going to take place during the holidays. They do every year. This year nobody expects it to be any different” said Bob Hansmann, director of product security for Websense, a computer security company. “Essentially you want to keep your eye out for deals that look too good to be true — they typically are. Any links inside an email or even some web pages — you’re going to want to be a little wary of it. “Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date. If you’re using a Windows machine, make sure it’s patched. Make sure you’re following the normal be-careful kinds of maintenance things, and that can eliminate a lot of these kinds of risks.” Source: http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2014/11/24/ddos-as-a-service-will-black-friday-see-upturn-in-web-site-attacks/

Original post:
DDoS attacks: Will Black Friday see upturn in web site attacks?