Tag Archives: dos attacks

Great Firewall of China blasts DDoS attacks at random IP addresses

An upgrade to China’s Great Firewall is having knock-on effects all over the internet, with seemingly random sites experiencing massive traffic spikes. One site owner in North Carolina, Craig Hockenberry, has written up how, after he looked into why his mail server was down, he found 52Mbps of search traffic piling into his system: 13,000 requests per second, or roughly a third of Google’s search traffic. The post goes into some detail over howHockenberry managed to deal with the firehose-blast of requests, all of it coming from China and much of it trying to find Bittorrents or reach Facebook. Short version: he blocked all of China’s IP blocks. Hockenberry is not the only one dealing with a sudden flood of requests, though. There are numerous reports of sysadmins finding that their IP address has appeared in front of the headlights of the Chinese government’s censorship juggernaut, causing them to fall over and forcing them to introduce blocking measures to get back online. After a number of different theories about what was happening, including focussed DDoS attacks and “foreign hackers” – that suggestion courtesy of the Chinese government itself – the overall conclusion of the technical community is that bugs have been introduced into China’s firewall. Particularly, something seems to have gone wrong in how it uses DNS cache poisoning to redirect users away from sites the government doesn’t want them to see. Poison China uses a weak spot of the DNS system to intercept requests coming into and going out of the country. If it spots something it doesn’t like – such as a request for “facebook.com” or “twitter.com” – it redirects that request to a different IP address. For a long while, China simply sent these requests into the ether – i.e. to IP addresses that don’t exist, which has the effect of causing the requests to time out. However, possibly in order to analyze the traffic more, the country has started sending requests to IP addresses used by real servers. Unfortunately, it seems that there have been some configuration mishaps and the wrong IP addresses have been entered. When one wrong number means that a server on the other side of the world suddenly gets hits with the full stream of millions of Chinese users requesting information, well then … that server falls over. The situation has had a broader impact within China. Tens of millions of users weren’t able to access the Web while the government scrambled to fix the problem. According to one Chinese anti-virus vendor, Qihoo 360, two-thirds of Chinese websites were caught up in the mess. China’s DNS infrastructure experts started pointing the finger at unknown assailants outside its system. “The industry needs to give more attention to prevent stronger DNS-related attacks,” said Li Xiaodong, executive director of China’s Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). Your own medicine The reality, however, is that China has seen the downside to its efforts to reconfigure the basic underpinnings of the domain name system to meet political ends. The network is designed to be widely distributed and route around anything that prevents effective communication. By setting itself up as a bottleneck – and an increasingly huge bottleneck as more and more Chinese users get online – the Chinese government is making itself a single point of failure. The slightest error in its configurations will blast traffic in uncertain directions as well as cut off its own users from the internet. For years, experts have been warning about the “balkanization” of the internet, where governments impose greater and greater constraints within their borders and end up effectively breaking up the global internet. What has not been covered in much detail is the downside to the countries themselves if they try to control their users’ requests, yet make mistakes. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/26/great_firewall_of_china_ddos_bug/

View article:
Great Firewall of China blasts DDoS attacks at random IP addresses

The Dirty hit by DDoS attack

The FBI is on the hunt for hackers who shutdown Nik Richie ‘s website The Dirty … and the reality star tells us he’s hemorrhaging money. The Dirty has been down for weeks after a team of hackers began hitting the site with a DDoS attack — which basically floods a server with so many requests it shuts down. Nik tells us he contacted FBI investigators and they’re on the case. Richie says he’s lost $250-300K this month alone in Super Bowl ads he couldn’t deliver. He’s also losing out because of cancelled appearances because he promotes them on his site. Nik is blunt … “These hackers are hypocrites. My website promotes free speech. F****** losers.” Source: http://www.tmz.com/2015/01/20/the-dirty-hacked-nik-richie-fbi-investigation-ddos-attack/

Continue Reading:
The Dirty hit by DDoS attack

City of Fort Lauderdale Spends $430,000 on Cyber Security After DDoS Attack from Anonymous

After getting hacked by cyber activist group Anonymous last month for its homeless laws, the City of Fort Lauderdale beefed-up its cyber security network with a hefty $430,000 worth of improvements. But city officials say it wasn’t the Anonymous attack that made them spend almost half a million dollars on computer upgrades – they were planning on doing it anyways. Back on December 1, hacktivists attacked the city’s main website – fortlauderdale.gov – and the Fort Lauderdale PD’s website – flpd.org – with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) hack, which bombarded the websites with so much traffic that they had to shut down. The attack only lasted a few hours, however, and the sites were back up by evening.   In a video warning of the attack, a masked hacker wearing the Guy Fawkes mask that has become synonymous with Anonymous demanded that the city drop the three controversial ordinances in the next 24 hours. “It has come to our attention that Mayor John P. Seiler has become an embarrassment to the good law-abiding citizens of Fort Lauderdale,” the hacker says. “You should have expected us, Mayor John Seiler.” City officials hope the new upgrades will be able to prevent this and other types of attacks in the future. But Seiler is quick to point out that these plans were in the works before a group of hackers in plastic masks made good on a threat to shut down an entire city’s web presence if laws against feeding homeless people weren’t struck down. “Certainly, Anonymous probably expedited the work that needed to be done and probably exposed some areas that needed to be addressed,” Seiler tells the Sun-Sentinel . “I wouldn’t say that [the expense] was all tied to Anonymous in any way, shape, or form.” The vast majority of Fort Lauderdale’s computer upgrade bill is going for consulting and oversight. From the Sentinel : City manager Lee Feldman broke down the emergency expenses: $366,989 for specialized security consulting and oversight services; $45,398 for software licenses to manage and control computer activities; and $17,907 for hardware to strenghten the computer infrastructure. The City of Fort Lauderdale is just one of the latest victims of Anonymous’ DDoS attacks. Past victims include credit card giants Visa and Mastercard, as well as online payment system Paypal, which lost almost $6 million in 2010. The reason for the hack was because Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal decided to stop allowing people to donate to Wikileaks via its systems. Two of the three hackers, who are from the United Kingdom, were caught and sentenced to prison terms of seven months and eighteen months. And Fort Lauderdale isn’t the first city to be targeted by Anonymous DDoS attacks, either. That distinction is shared with Albuquerque’s police department, whose website was crashed in March, 2014 in retaliation for the police-killing of James Boyd, an unarmed, mentally ill homeless man who was shot to death. Source: http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2015/01/city_of_fort_lauderdale_spends_430000_on_cyber_security_after_hacktivst_group_anonymous_attack.php

View article:
City of Fort Lauderdale Spends $430,000 on Cyber Security After DDoS Attack from Anonymous

LizardSquad’s DDoS tool falls prey to hack, exposes complete customer database

If you conceive a fire, you better prepare yourself to stray away from its flames. Maybe LizardSquad failed to learn this elementary lesson and underestimated the consequences that a rising popularity brings along. LizardSquad, the hacker group that earned its fame from Playstation and XBox web portals hack, last month mentioned the intentions behind its notorious activities saying that it just wanted to catch a little attention for its tool dubbed “Lizard Stresser”. Lizard Stresser is a tool developed by Lizard Squad which holds the potential to execute similar DDoS attacks that the group made on PlayStation and Xbox websites. Now reports have surfaced that the tool that was supposed to hack other websites, has fallen prey to a powerful attack, revealing all of the customer’s information who registered themselves to get access to the tool. Well, Lizard Squad isn’t the only player in this arena, that’s evident. A copy of the Lizard Stresser customer database obtained by KrebsOnSecurity says that it has more than 14,241 registered users during its first month of operation. Another interesting fact noticed from the hack and the leak is that Lizard Squad saved all registered usernames and passwords were in plain text. The registered clients are now under a potential threat as much as the sites they paid to take down. Their identities are not a secret anymore. Source: http://thetechportal.in/2015/01/18/lizardsquads-ddos-tool-falls-prey-hack-exposes-complete-customer-database/

Read this article:
LizardSquad’s DDoS tool falls prey to hack, exposes complete customer database

Outage that swept French news sites ‘was not a DDoS’

The outage looks to be linked to issues with the hosting provider rather than cyber criminals. Reports that major French news sites were taken offline this morning by a massive DDoS appear to be inaccurate. News websites including that of media group Mediapart; daily newspaper Libération; political magazine L’Express; and ZDNet.fr suffered significant outages on Friday morning. Problems began at around 8.30am CET and lasted for approximately an hour. It was initially feared the outage could be a DDoS linked to the recent Charlie Hebdo attack, where 10 journalists and two police officers were killed. According to reports citing Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military, DDoS attacks have been carried out against thousands of French websites by “Islamic hacker groups” following the Charlie Hebdo attack. However, in the case of today’s incident, the cause is thought to be a more straightforward one. Oxalide, the hosting provider used by the news companies, tweeted this morning that it was investigating the cause of the incident which went “right to the heart of our network”. Around an hour later, the company’s Twitter account said that the cause of the problem had been identified and that some services were beginning to become functional once again. Over an hour later, the company confirmed that a DDoS was not thought to be behind the attack. The company added that it will provide an update as to the cause of the outage to customers by early afternoon. According to a report published this week by European security body ENISA (European Agency for Network and Information Security), the number of DDoS attacks businesses suffered last year has significantly since 2013. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/outages-that-swept-french-news-sites-was-not-a-ddos/

See the original post:
Outage that swept French news sites ‘was not a DDoS’

Anonymous launching DDoS attack against the Montreal Police for Their Treatment of Homeless People #OpSafeWinterMTL

Members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous have launched new protests in reaction to the dismantling of a homeless camp at Viger Square in downtown Montreal as part of a project they started last year dubbed #OpSafeWinterMTL. The group has executed one distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) and occupied the square for a short time; members are calling for a permanent moratorium on police winter raids of homeless encampments. On January 7, without warning and in the middle of a cold snap—temperatures had dropped under -22 degrees Fahrenheit during the night—city crews bulldozed the encampment while SPVM officers watched. Last week, in an interview with the CBC, Montreal police spokesman Laurent Gingras argued that it’s a matter “of cleanliness, of public health,” and that the City had mostly collected garbage and soiled needles. “There was some good stuff in there,” said Jacques, 49, who returned to Viger Square on Monday after camping at the site for about three months. CBC’s footage from the dismantling clearly shows bulldozers piling up mattresses, blankets, pillows and sleeping bags. “This is all they have,” an Anonymous activist told VICE, outraged at how the Montreal government destroyed and confiscated all their belongings—including winter gear provided by Op Safe Winter Montreal activists on December 23. “This has nothing to do with public health, it has to do with aesthetics,” the activist said. “What’s actually a hazard is still on the floor,” They pointing out that used syringes were still lying around in a corner of the destroyed encampment site. The encampment is located in the lower downtown area, right across the street from the new Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Montréal (CHUM) construction site and half a kilometer from City Hall and the tourist-friendly Old Montreal—leading some to believe that the camp’s removal had more to do with optics than public health and safety. Brutally removing the homeless population is nothing less than “an act of war against the poorest of the poor,” the activist told VICE. “The encampment was tolerated for a long time,” another Anonymous activist added, saying there was no reason to dismantle it in the middle of winter. SPVM Commander Vincent Richer insisted, however, that “the interventions that were made, in the context of extreme cold weather, were made with regards to the safety and health of homeless people.” He also noted that interventions with homeless people were made in partnership with health services and with the Old Brewery Mission, and that the material the city bulldozed was soiled and caught in the ice. In response to the city’s raid on the Viger Square homeless encampment, Anonymous launched a call for an occupation of the site and threatened the city of Montreal with attacks on its cyber infrastructure. “Anonymous will not stand by and allow the SPVM (Montreal police) and the City of Montreal to attack homeless camps in the middle of winter,” the hacktivist group stated in a January 11 press release. “We love this camp,” said one #OpSafeWinterMTL activist. “We want to help. We’ve got people ready to build a kitchen,” the other added. Two SPVM officers came by early Monday afternoon and took down all the signs that had been put up around the square. They told the activists that the occupation would not be tolerated. “Encampments have always been forbidden,” an officer named Fradette told both activists before she and her partner went to check out the site where homeless people had already started setting up a new camp. When the activists were told they would be evicted by nightfall, Anonymous launched a DDoS attack on the SPVM’s website, and successfully brought it down just before 5 PM. In recent years, Montreal police have been criticized for their questionable handling of the homeless population. A year ago an SPVM officer was caught on video threatening to tie a homeless man to a pole in the biting cold of January. A 2012 study showed that homeless people counted for 25 percent of all tickets gave out by the SPVM in 2010—a 7 percent increase from 2006. At Viger Square, Jacques told VICE, “Every week we get harassed by police… That’s not right.” SPVM officers have also been involved in the killing of several homeless men in mental health crises. A public coroner’s inquiry was launched this week into the shooting of Alain Magloire, who was gunned down on February 3, 2014, just a few blocks north of Viger Square. With an estimated homeless population of around 30,000, the homelessness crisis in Montreal is serious. In an attempt to alleviate the problem, last fall the city adopted an action plan on homelessness, which includes “reinforcing the exercise of citizenship.” “Raiding encampments and destroying precious cold weather gear belonging to the homeless is an act of war against the poorest of the poor,” Anonymous declared in its statement on Sunday, accusing Montreal of neglecting the needs most vulnerable population. The action plan adopted in September 2014 does involve creating a position of “homeless people’s protector” who would engage in regular consultation with homeless people and launch public consultations into issues of social profiling by the SPVM. But the watchdog for homeless people’s rights has yet to be appointed—and apparently Anonymous is attempting to step into that role instead. Source: http://www.vice.com/read/anonymous-has-targeted-montreal-police-for-their-treatment-of-the-homeless-283

See original article:
Anonymous launching DDoS attack against the Montreal Police for Their Treatment of Homeless People #OpSafeWinterMTL

The Evolution of Web Application Firewalls

Technological advances related to computing and the Internet have affected every one of us. The Information Revolution that the Internet has made possible is affecting society just as dramatically as the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions of the past, but there is an unpleasant side to progress. Criminal use of the Internet, or hacking, is an unavoidable part of information technology development. Hackers have gained unauthorized and undesirable access to information, sometimes with far-reaching consequences. Innovations in hacking have in turn led to the development of protection methods and devices commonly known as web application firewalls (WAF) . An application firewall is a form of firewall which controls input, output, and/or access from, to, or by an application or service. It operates by monitoring and potentially blocking the input, output, or system service calls which do not meet the configured policy of the firewall. A Web Application Firewall does much more than a consumer’s computer firewall. Consumer-level applications work by blocking software access to certain ports. Web applications such as Apache, WordPress and Microsoft’s Office all require an extra level of protection against malicious users. WAFs offer this extra protection and work by analyzing all data passing through them and checking its conformity to pre-set rules. A WAF fulfills a web-user’s need to protect both internal and public web applications, whether locally (on-premises) or remotely (cloud-hosted), against unauthorized access attempts. These attacks revolve around hacking and illegal access to web applications. According to statistics, every year, cyber attacks are increasing by 30%, while successful breaches are increasing at twice that rate, 60% a year: In plain English, more attacks are getting through. Basic consumer-level cyber security measures are essential and are an urgent call on companies’ financial resources, but these are not enough. If a company has a website then that website must be protected using a WAF against unauthorized intrusion by hackers. The need to protect customers’ data is even more important than the need to keep the website live. If there is a security breach the negative effects of the attendant publicity and loss of trust are immeasurable. So how have application firewalls been evolving? Web application firewalls have been evolving rapidly and becoming more sophisticated with the objective of protecting websites and customer data from increasingly sophisticated attacks and unauthorized access. Hackers’ methods have become more devious and WAF sophistication has increased correspondingly as part of the information security industry’s fight back against criminals stealing data and malicious hacking. The more evolved and developed WAF solutions are capable of preventing attacks and unwanted intrusion on any website. Modern web application firewalls generally have default settings that give no false negatives and errors and all modern WAFs are designed to work perfectly without the need for any user knowledge of source code. A WAF has become crucial in detecting and preventing any attack that that is masquerading as network access by a legitimate user. Understanding interactions Web Application Firewalls need to do much more than just see the code: They need to be able understand every line of code passing through them and to evaluate any risk that it represents. This risk evaluation ability enables a WAF to analyze visitors based on reputation behaviors. The old adage of prevention being the best cure still holds true and is very relevant here. Instead of blocking an attack as and when it occurs, a WAF should see it coming by understanding and tracking visitor behavior. It should be proactive. More than In-Depth Inspection From the historical perspective of web application firewalls, they have always performed an in-depth inspection of any access routes to the protected sites. However, the modern evolution of web application firewalls comes with more than in-depth inspection of access routes in the sense that modern WAFs are deployed in-line in the form of reverse proxies. These are crucial in preventing any form of access log collection that may be used later to audit the protected site or perform any form of analysis on the protected web applications. Simplicity of use is vital, so the modern web application firewall has evolved to the extent that it can be deployed out of the box with no user setting changes necessary. New-age WAFs such as those from the aforementioned Incapsula are constantly learning and are able to stop threats that have never been seen before by analysis of their code and finding similarities to previous threats. They are updated frequently and monitoring is available on some plans to ensure maximum protection for your site and your customers. Modern firewalls have enabled an increase in firewall features that revolve around transparent proxy and bright modes, which can enable WAFs to easily integrate with other network security technologies such as vulnerability scanners, protection applications, distributed denial of service prevention, database security solutions, and web fraud detection. Another major noticeable evolution has to do with the fact that modern WAFs are perfectly packaged to include content caching, as well as web access management modules, which are specially designed to provide simple sign-in features, especially for distributed web applications. Concluding thoughts There are massive advances going on in the field of web application firewalls. Modern firewalls are perfectly devised to provide maximum protection against hacking, easy detection and filtering of both known and unknown threats, while at the same time, minimizing false alerts. Are you aware of the level of protection that your web application firewall offers? Does it protect you against a DDOS attack? Does it protect your customers’ login and credit card details adequately? Source: http://tech.co/evolution-web-application-firewalls-2015-01

Visit site:
The Evolution of Web Application Firewalls

Anonymous vows to take down jihadist websites to avenge ‘Charlie Hebdo’ victims #OpCharlieHebdo

Hacker group Anonymous has vowed to avenge those killed in the deadly attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by taking down jihadist internet sites and social media accounts. In a video uploaded to the Anonymous Belgique YouTube channel, a figure wearing the group’s signature Guy Fawkes mask condemned the attack that killed 12 individuals, which includes eight journalists. The video description addresses the message to “al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terrorists.” “We are fighting in memory of these innocent people today who fought for freedom of expression,” stated the disguised person in the video. The group integrated a link to anonymous data sharing internet site Pastebin with a list of Twitter accounts it claims are linked to jihadists. The group is using the hashtag #OpCharlieHebdo to urge other customers to assistance them take down the accounts by reporting them to Twitter, or participating in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack – a practice normally used by the hacker group. “Anonymous should remind each citizens (sic) that the press’s freedom is a fundement of the democracy. Opinions, speech, newspaper articles with no threats nor pressure, all these issues are rights you can’t modify,” read a statement posted to Pastebin by the group Thursday. “Expect a massive reaction from us, simply because this freedom is what we’ve been often fighting for.” Read A lot more: Each ‘Charlie Hebdo’ suspects killed as police storm constructing Wednesday’s attack in Paris has not been linked to ISIS – numerous reports have suggested it is much more most likely to be connected to the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. On Friday, Charlie Hebdo suspects Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Stated Kouachi, 34, had been killed just after police stormed the constructing exactly where they were holed up for extra than five hours. The third suspect Hamyd Mourad, 18, surrendered to police early Thursday. Source: http://www.finditwestvalley.com/world/anonymous-vows-to-take-down-jihadist-websites-to-avenge-8216charlie-hebdo8217-victims-h46362.html

Read More:
Anonymous vows to take down jihadist websites to avenge ‘Charlie Hebdo’ victims #OpCharlieHebdo

German government sites faced DDoS attacks

A German official says Chancellor Angela Merkel’s website and several other German government sites have been blocked, and a pro-Russian organization has claimed responsibility. A pro-Russian organization calling itself CyberBerkut claimed on its website Wednesday to have blocked the official sites of Merkel and the German Parliament ahead of a visit to Berlin by Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Merkel has been a leading figure in attempts to calm the Ukraine crisis. Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said several government websites were unreachable Wednesday morning because of a “serious attack clearly caused by a multitude of external systems” — what is known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. Seibert says the attack is still being analyzed, and he did not say who was believed to be responsible. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/01/07/world/europe/ap-eu-germany-merkel-cyberattack.html?_r=0

Read More:
German government sites faced DDoS attacks

Scandinavian banks hit with DDoS attacks

The new year started poorly for Finnish bank OP Pohjola Group and its customers: the latter have been prevented from executing their online banking transactions by a DDoS attack that targeted the bank’s online services starting on the last day of 2014. “OP’s services experienced some problems on New Year’s Eve due to data communications disruptions. The disruptions were caused by a denial-of-services attack. The attack flooded OP’s data communications systems and prevented customers’ banking. During the disruption, online services were not available and cash withdrawals could not be made from ATMs. There were also some difficulties in card payments,” the bank shared on the second day of the attack. “The disruption was detected at about 16.30 on New Year’s Eve. The services started to function again at times and were completely restored and available to customers after midnight. Nevertheless, further disruptions are possible as the corrective measures are still ongoing and the security level of data traffic has been raised for the time being. Customers abroad may still have difficulties in logging in to OP’s online services.” The attack is still ongoing, and OP’s services were not the only target. The Finnish division of the Nordea bank and the Danish Danske Bank have also experienced online service slow-down or disruption. While the latter is yet to comment on the matter, Nordea has confirmed they have been targeted by unknown DDoS attackers and have called in the police to investigate. The cause of the attack is still unknown, they said. Nordea’s customers were still able to use the online banking service, but the service was slowed down. OP Pohjola Group’s customers, on the other hand, were unable to use the service altogether for many hours during the last six days, as the bank managed to restore it occasionally. They, along with its service company Tieto, are cooperating with the authorities and investigating the attack. In the meantime, the bank has set up a telephone service number that can be used by customers who cannot access their online services and have urgent banking business. They have also pledged to compensate customers for any fees they many have incurred and losses they may have suffered as a result of their inability to access the bank’s online services during the attack. Source: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=17785

Read this article:
Scandinavian banks hit with DDoS attacks