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HSBC Falls in Latest Bank DDoS Attacks, What’s Next?

Capital One, HSBC, Bank of America, Wells Fargo are among the near-dozen financial Websites hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks over the past few weeks. These attacks have disrupted daily operations for banks and made it difficult for customers to take advantage of online banking services. A group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has claimed credits for most of the incidents and has named the institutions it will target a few days before launching the attacks. Even with the prior warning, Websites of some of the country’s largest firms have been affected: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Sun Trust, Regions Financial, Capital One, and BB&T. Capital One Bank was hit with two separate attacks, occurring on Oct. 9 and Oct. 16. HSBC was the latest one to be hit, as its Websites suffered online outages on Thursday. A different group, Fawkes Security, claimed credit, but it’s not clear at this point whether the HSBC incident was different from the attacks against other banks or not. “This denial of service attack did not affect any customer data, but did prevent customers using HSBC online services, including internet banking,” the bank said in a statement on its Website. What are DDoS Attacks? A group of computers send larger than usual volume of traffic data to Websites to tie up server resources. Websites can’t handle the high volume, either knocking it offline entirely or being available only sporadically. “You can picture a distributed denial-of-service attack as being something like 15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time. Nothing moves,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. Often in DDoS attacks, the computers used to bombard the targeted Websites with traffic have actually been hijacked. The computers are often infected with malware that give attackers control over the computer, usually without the owner’s knowledge. In these banking attacks, however, it appears that the perpetrators have hijacked servers instead of client machines, according to recent analysis by Radware. Difficult to Repel For banking customers, these DDoS attacks are just more annoying than damaging, While online systems have been intermittently unavailable, to date, it doesn’t appear that any customer or account information at any of the banks have been exposed because of the attacks. For financial institutions, they’ve been highly disruptive, as IT departments have to deal with significantly large attacks. “These are big, but we’ve seen this big before,” said Neal Quinn, chief operating officer of Prolexic, told Wired last week. “We’ve seen events this big in the past.” Even knowing that the attacks were coming, financial institutions have been unable to keep the attacks from knocking the sites offline. Each of the targeted banks experienced several hours of downtime, although Wells Fargo seemed to have weathered the crisis a little better than others. “I don’t want to minimize the potential damage it could cause to the industry,” Wells Fargo CFO Tim Sloan told Reuters, “But in terms of how the industry performed and how Wells Fargo performed in reaction to the recent efforts, we actually performed very well.” The bank will continue to invest in ways to defend against future DDoS attacks, according to Sloan, who called it as “a cost of doing business today.” Stay On Guard Even though each of the affected institutions have assured customers that no customer or account data has been compromised, security experts warn that it’s still too early to get complacent. DDoS attacks can often be a diversion so that IT teams don’t notice other malicious activity that may be happening at the same time. Gartner’s Avivah Litan told Government Info Security that she had anecdotal accounts of fraud slipping through banks’ overloaded call centers while the online channels are under attack. It wouldn’t be the first time DDoS attacks were used to distract overloaded administrators. Back in April 2011, Sony didn’t notice the attackers breaking into Sony servers to compromise over 100 million user accounts from the PlayStation Network, Sony Online Entertainment, and Qriocity music service because it was distracted by large-scale DDoS attacks overwhelming its servers, the company said in a letter to Congress. “We are assuming that the attackers are doing this to perpetrate fraud,” Mike Smith, a security evangelist with online security provider Akamai Technologies, told Bank Info Security . Smith was specifically referring to the fact that Capital One was targeted for a second time, which may mean that attackers are looking for different ways to try to compromise employees and get access to customer accounts. “That’s the assumption we are operating under at this point,” Smith said. Source: http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/none/304145-hsbc-falls-in-latest-bank-ddos-attacks-what-s-next

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HSBC Falls in Latest Bank DDoS Attacks, What’s Next?

More Banks Come Under Denial-of-Service Attack

Capital One and SunTrust came under attack this week using denial-of-service techniques that are evading defenses meant to blunt such attacks. Capitol One and SunTrust Banks have become the latest targets of hackers who have leveled attacks at U.S. financial institutions in alleged retaliation for the posting of a movie on YouTube that has offended some Muslims. On Oct. 8, a group calling itself the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters posted a message on Pastebin stating that Capital One, SunTrust Banks and Regions Financial would each suffer an eight-hour attack starting with Capital One the next day. Even with the advanced warning, the financial institutions suffered outages, with Capital One’s site frequently inaccessible during the eight-hour period. “Some Capital One customers experienced intermittent online access due to a large volume of traffic going to the Website and servers,” the bank said in a statement posted to its Web site. ”Other banks have experienced similar issues in recent weeks due to targeted efforts designed to flood online systems, also known as a distributed denial-of-service attack.” On Oct. 10, SunTrust Banks suffered some performance issues, as did Regions Financial the next day, according to media reports. The attacks are the latest data floods in a campaign that started in mid-September. Under the name “Operation Ababil,” a group of alleged Iranian protestors called for supporters to attack the Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. Yet the crowd-sourced hacktivism effort caused little damage. Instead, a second attack coming from hundreds—or at most, thousands—of compromised servers made up the most effective part of the data flood. Using compromised servers and customized malware, the attackers have hit targeted sites with between 70G bps and 100G bps of peak traffic, according to experts. The attacks—launched from servers used to publish corporate Websites and blogs but running vulnerable content management software—sent packets of data crafted to evade typical defenses, even those specifically designed to curtail denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. “They had far fewer machines involved and with much larger bandwidth,” Dan Holden, director of security for network-protection firm Arbor Networks, said of the earlier attacks. “These are Web or hosting servers that have been compromised and are obviously poorly administered.” Typical defenses against distributed denial-of-service attacks attempt to minimize the impact of an attack by intercepting the request as far away from the target Website as possible. By blocking attacks in other networks, the customer is not impacted by a massive influx of data. However, the latest attacks are using evasion techniques to get around standard denial-of-service defenses, said Phil Lerner, vice president of technology at security firm Stonesoft. By crafting the data to look like valid encrypted Web requests, the network packets are allowed to get through to the customers’ own computers to decipher the information. Even if that system blocks the request as invalid, the avalanche of data buries the computer, which can’t keep up. “DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] mitigation is not a cure-all,” Learner said. “You don’t have enough protocol decoding capabilities, and you are only doing partial defenses, or none at all, on the evasion detection.” Companies need to adopt security defenses that handle such evasion techniques, he said. In July, a researcher at cloud-security firm Qualys demonstrated that evasion techniques can cause problems for Web application firewalls (WAFs) as well. A variety of tricks, sometimes just adding a single character, could bypass the security offered by WAFs, according to the research. Source: http://www.eweek.com/security/more-banks-come-under-denial-of-service-attack/

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More Banks Come Under Denial-of-Service Attack

U.S. banks warned of another Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

Just as one type of attack against U.S. banks has subsided, the banks are being warned to get ready for another, called “Project Blitzkrieg,” aimed at online theft. Iran denies launching cyberattacks on U.S. banks The distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that briefly disrupted the online services of a half-dozen major financial institutions late last month — Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC Financial Services Group, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase — ended abruptly about two weeks ago, even though the group that claimed credit for them had threatened to continue them. Izz al-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, the military wing of Hamas, the Islamic party that governs the Gaza Strip, had said in a Pastebin message that the attacks would continue until a trailer of the independent film “Innocence of Muslims,” which they said insults the prophet Mohammed, was taken off the Internet. But now, says a blog post by Mor Ahuvia, cybercrime communication specialist at security firm RSA, another wave of attacks is looming, this one aimed at stealing big money. “A cyber gang has recently communicated its plans to launch a Trojan attack spree on 30 American banks as part of a large-scale orchestrated crimeware campaign,” Ahuvia wrote. “Planned for this fall, the blitzkrieg-like series of Trojan attacks is set to be carried out by approximately 100 botmasters. RSA believes this is the making of the most substantial organized banking-Trojan operation seen to date.” RSA said the gang leadership appears to come from Russia, and plans to use a “Gozi-like Trojan” that RSA is calling Gozi Prinimalka. Prinimalka is derived from the Russian word meaning “to receive.” “According to underground chatter, the gang plans to deploy the Trojan in an effort to complete fraudulent wire transfers via Man-In-The-Middle (MiTM) manual session-hijacking scenarios,” Ahuvia wrote. “If successfully launched, the full force of this mega heist may only be felt by targeted banks in a month or two. The spree’s longevity, in turn, will depend on how fast banks and their security teams implement countermeasures against the heretofore-secret banking-Trojan,” she wrote. Brian Krebs, who writes the blog KrebsonSecurity, said in a recent post that the RSA analysis “seemed to merely scratch the surface of a larger enterprise that speaks volumes about why online attacks are becoming bolder and more brash toward Western targets.” But he also said this particular threat could be a hoax — that there is some suspicion in the cybercrime world that it could be a sting operation by Russian law enforcement, since the announcement has been so public. Krebs said the threat appears to be coming from a series of posts on Underweb forums by a Russian hacker nicknamed “vorVzakone.” His name translates to “thief-in-law,” which Krebs said, “in Russia and Eastern Europe refers to an entire subculture of elite criminal gangs that operate beyond the reach of traditional law enforcement. The term is sometimes also used to refer to a single criminal kingpin.” Krebs said vorVzakone called the campaign “Project Blitzkrieg,” and according to a translation of one of his messages, said he hopes to recruit 100 botmasters to take advantage of authentication weaknesses in U.S. bank systems before they can improve their protection. The botmasters would have to qualify with an online interview and be trained, and would then get to share in the profits. In vorVzakone’s message, he said: “The development of the system took 4 years of daily work and around $500.000 was spent. Since 2008 by using this product not less than $5m was transferred just by one team.” Jason Healey of the Atlantic Council, a cybercrime expert and former White House security official, said it sounds to him like the group is “trying to be the Russian online equivalent of Ocean’s Eleven — call it Ocean’s Odinnadsat’ — or a group that wants to be seen in that light. They can get some cool points, either way.” Most security experts say the financial sector is the best prepared of any in the U.S. to deal with direct attacks. But these attacks will, of course, not be aimed directly at the banks, but at their customers. And vorVzakone also wrote that the operation will flood cyberheist victim phone lines while the victims are being robbed, in an effort to prevent account holders from receiving confirmation calls or text messages from their banks.” In an interview, Brian Krebs said cyber thieves, “almost always target the line of least resistance, and that is the customer. That doesn’t excuse the banks from their obligation to be constantly upgrading their defenses against such attacks. There are thousands of financial institutions in the U.S. and many of them are woefully behind in updating their customer-facing security measures.” He noted that banking law does not protect commercial and business customers at the same level as individual customers, and said banks need to do much better at flagging abnormal transaction behavior, such as, “a sudden addition of many new employees to an organization’s payroll, particularly if those people are spread all over the country geographically.” “You’d be amazed at how many times a month some bank lets this happen, and with disastrous results,” Krebs said. Still, if vorVzakone and his presumed colleagues are serious about their plan, why broadcast it so blatantly? Is that an indication that the whole thing may be a fraud? Krebs said there is reason for skepticism, noting in his blog post that vorVzakone even posted a homemade movie on YouTube, in which he. “introduces himself as ‘Sergey,’ the stocky bald guy in the sunglasses. He also introduces a hacker who needs little introduction in the Russian underground — a well-known individual who used the nickname ‘NSD.’” Krebs then quotes one Russian expert saying vorVzakone’s “language and demeanor is that of street corner drug dealer or a night club bouncer,” not someone who can organize and run a sophisticated cyberheist operation. Krebs himself is not quite as harsh, but said such projects “are announced all the time on the underground, but usually they are in fairly closed, secretive forums. The forums on which this project was announced were moderately secret, but it’s fairly unusual for miscreants to create YouTube videos of such projects and to promote them so openly.” Healey said the public bragging is a mistake. “To succeed with a Trojan, you want it to be somewhat secret with few people involved,” he said. “The few who are involved should be well known and trustworthy. That is the opposite of what Ocean’s Odinnadsat’ has done.” He said that and the fact that they are recruiting people who may be unknown to them “makes it more likely that the intel and threat companies, and law enforcement, can get the code beforehand.” Another problem that could undermine the operation is simple organizational weaknesses. “My sense is that such a project would require a decent amount of operational cohesion and security, and cooperation,” Krebs said. “From what I’ve seen of the underground, the more people you involve in a scheme, the more likely it is to fall apart.” But he said whether this threat is real or not, the need for protection is crucial. The best way for customers to avoid theft is to prevent their computer from being infected. “The trouble is,” Krebs said. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell when a system is or is not infected. That’s why I advocate the use of a Live CD approach to online banking. That way, even if the underlying hard drive is infected with a remote-access, password stealing Trojan like Gozi, your online banking session is protected.” Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/101012-us-banks-warned-of-another-263227.html?page=1

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U.S. banks warned of another Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

Rise in DDoS Attacks, Video Streaming, Over-The-Top Conte

NTT America, a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation(NTT Com) and a Tier-1 global IP network services provider, today issued its biannual state of the industry assessment of key trends shaping the broadband and IP transit industry. Michael Wheeler, executive vice president, NTT Communications Global IP Network, NTT America, said preparing Latin America for increased broadband data consumption is a priority, especially as Brazil readies for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Additionally, demand for real-time mobile content and the rise of sophisticated DDoS attacks are other key factors changing the Internet industry. Focus Increases on Developing Brazil’s Telecom Infrastructure as World Cup and Olympics Approach As Brazil prepares for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic Games, the biggest hurdle facing the country is developing its telecommunications infrastructure to improve Internet access and bandwidth capacity, according to Wheeler. Telebrás, Brazil’s state-owned service provider, is investing upwards of $400 million dollars (BRL) in the next few years to steer growth and development. As a result, domestic and international carriers are crucial in supporting the Brazilian government to meet the cellular and Internet data needs. These World Cup and Olympic events will represent the first time video content will originate from Brazil and be streamed out in such large numbers globally. NTT Communications was recently awarded a contract by Telebrás as one of two international carriers that will enable São Paulo residents to connect to international markets through a high quality network. NTT Communications was selected due to its direct access to major markets around the world and Point of Presence (POP) location in São Paulo. “Consumption of mobile video and other forms of over-the-top content will continue to grow exponentially through 2016. While most users don’t realize how demanding these service requirements are on providers, new technologies will be the driving force for developing the next-generation Internet services in both wireless and wireline,” said Wheeler. “Successful service providers will have an established infrastructure of high bandwidth, next-generation equipment and industry expertise to manage dynamic content demands.” Video Streaming and Chatting on Mobile Devices Soars; Demands Greater Expectations of Carriers The number of devices connected to IP networks will be nearly three times as high as the global population in 2016, according to a recent report from Cisco. Driven in part by the increase in devices and the capabilities of those devices, the same report concludes that IP traffic per capita will be the equivalent of all movies ever made crossing global IP networks every three minutes in 2016. In terms of consumer Internet traffic categories, Cisco estimated mobile video consumption to grow 83 percent through 2016, and online gaming is estimated to grow by 46 percent by 2016. “This generational consumption shift in Internet-based activities is changing how carriers design networks to provide the best possible user experience,” said Wheeler. “While most don’t realize how demanding these services are on providers, new technologies will be the driving force for developing the next-generation Internet services. Successful service providers will have an established infrastructure of high bandwidth, next-generation equipment and industry expertise to manage dynamic content demands.” Given the increase in over-the-top (OTT) content, the optimal network architecture that is flexible in shaping bandwidth for content distribution and delivery worldwide are fundamental to containing costs. The services Tier-1 providers offer are key to providing high-quality bandwidth and capacity to support the demand for OTT content. NTT Communications’ high level of redundancy, industry leading uptime and extensive network of peering partners can help customers prepare for this growth. DDoS Attacks Grow, Posing a Constant Financial Threat to Online Businesses With more than 7,000 attacks reported daily worldwide, distributed denial of service (DDoS) threats continue to rise in number, size, frequency and complexity. The business costs associated with DDoS attacks are substantial for any online entity. As research from industry reports indicate, monetary losses from a DDoS attack can range from $90,000 to $6.5 million per hour. Despite the growing threats, protection and mitigation efforts of many global companies, government entities and advocacy groups remain inadequate and antiquated. As DDoS attacks become more sophisticated, proper mitigation is critical. Wheeler urges businesses to prioritize a contingency plan for DDoS attacks. When companies select their mitigation service provider, it is important to understand the level and type of security support provided. “While many DDoS mitigation services are entirely automated, and as attacks become more sophisticated, the need for expert human judgment and monitoring are a necessity in determining the legitimacy of traffic,” said Wheeler. “At NTT America, our US based Security and Abuse Team is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, assuring that online assets and network availability are aggressively protected.” For immediate DDoS protection against your eCommerce site click here . Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/10/03/ntt-america-addresses-top-internet-trends-rise-in-/

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Rise in DDoS Attacks, Video Streaming, Over-The-Top Conte

Bank Of America Website Slows After Islamic Hacker Threats

Bank of America’s website experienced periodic outages Tuesday, possibly due to cyber attacks launched in retaliation for “Innocence of Muslims,” the amateurish film whose mocking portrait of the Prophet Muhammad has incited deadly riots throughout the Middle East. The attack was foretold by a Pastebin.com message posted earlier in the day. Allegedly authored by “Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam,” a reference to the military wing of Hamas, the posting also declared that the New York Stock Exchange would suffer a similar assault–a threat that has evidently gone unfulfilled. The posting blamed both the United States and the “Zionist Regime” for the offending film and promised continued aggression until the “erasing of that nasty movie,” which YouTube has blocked in volatile regions but which remains freely accessible elsewhere. The initial targets were chosen, the posting declares, because they “are properties of America-Zionist Capitalists.” Bank of America told Reuters that the website had suffered some problems but was available to customers. “We are working to ensure full availability,” Mark Pipitone, a bank spokesman told Reuters. Without specifically commenting about a possible denial-of-service attack, Pipitone said: “I can tell you that we continuously take proactive measures to secure our systems.” The New York Stock Exchange, operated by NYSE Euronext, declined to comment, Reuters reported. Bill Pennington, chief strategy officer at WhiteHat Security, said in an interview that Bank of America’s website problems do not necessarily verify the Pastebin claims. Stating that “it’s reasonable to believe it could be coincidence,” he cited the recent GoDaddy outage, which saw hackers attempt to take responsibility for what was in fact a series of internal technical errors. Nonetheless, he said the incident could have been a denial-of-service attack. “They’re pretty easy,” he stated. “You can rent computing resources from various botnets for almost pennies on the dollar.” Even if one lacks the technical sophistication to launch an attack, simply announcing malicious goals can be enough, he said. Groups such as Anonymous, for example, can take down a site not merely through the efforts of active members and sympathizers but also “a bunch of people watching, generating traffic” while they wait to see what happens. Additional risks, he said, include unaffiliated groups that “hop into” the fray, knowing that scrambling companies will find it “very difficult to pick out” attackers. Pennington cautioned that companies need to be aware that cyber attacks are part of “the landscape we live in today.” He said that many organizations have done their parts, declaring that security concerns–once the purview of “geeks in the IT department”–are now addressed by executives in boardrooms. Each second a site like Bank of America’s is offline, he explained, the company loses money, so “business people are starting to understand … what would actually happen if their site is largely unavailable for three days.” Security-minded companies can thwart DDoS attacks “to some extent,” he said, but “it’s really hard to build an infrastructure” that won’t be overwhelmed by a massive attack. “If a million people log on right now, they’re going to have a problem,” he stated. Efforts to block coordinated DDoS attacks are hampered by the relatively unimposing nature of the devices that hackers sometimes employ. A phone has less computing power than a laptop, for example, but Pennington said “if all it needs to do is make an http request every second, and you have all the phones in the world doing that, it becomes difficult to withstand. There’s only so much you can do.” Indeed, while it is unlikely that an attack could actually harness billions of phones, hackers and malware authors have continually carved out new methods for creating botnets and the brute computing force that comes with them. Even Macs, once all-but-immune to nefarious intruders, can be reduced to “zombie” machines via illicit toolkits that are so cheap as to remove all barriers to entry. Bank of America’s situation still poses more questions than answers, with only the perpetrators and, possibly, the victims fully aware of what transpired. Details should emerge in the coming days, but Pennington said businesses should expect more attacks, no matter the veracity of the Pastebin claims. “It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better,” he said. Source: http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/bank-of-america-website-slows-after-isla/240007581?cid=edit_stub_WST

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Bank Of America Website Slows After Islamic Hacker Threats

Tactics of an SQL Injection Attack

Over the last few months, I’ve started to see a common refrain from new customers coming onboard, indicating that they were getting DDOS’d with an SQL injection and needed protection. Each of these customers would describe different circumstances and impact to their websites, and the only similarity was that they all had backend databases to their websites. It made me take a deeper look into the attacks targeting some of these customers, to see if there was more to SQL injection than what the current understanding indicates. Here’s what I discovered as the most common methods for attacking a website database a) Crafted Code Injection – this technique falls within the conventional understanding, where an attacker will inject SQL statements via user input, cookies or server variables, in an attempt to have the rogue command passed to the backend database. If the database is not secured properly, the command may get successfully executed and lead to devastating results (eg. Dump of the database, data corruption, shutdown, etc.) b) Resource Exhaustion –arguments and commands are passed at a high enough frequency to simply overwhelm the database so it cannot process legitimate transactions. The illegitimate arguments that are being passed may be invalid or just nonsensical, and therefore not executed upon, but they still require the database to review the input before discarding. By injecting a flood of these types of requests, the CPU load of the backend database starts to increase to the point it stops responding. What we’ve seen with the Resource Exhaustion style attacks is that it often doesn’t take much in terms of packets or bits per second to make some of these database servers keel over. For those of you familiar with UDP/ICMP/SYN floods, which can be 10+ Gb/s and millions of packets per second (pps), you’ll be surprised to hear that Resource Exhaustion SQL Injections can be small as 200 kb/s as well as being only a few hundred pps, to debilitate a database and effectively bring a site down. Regardless of what attack technique is employed, we here at DOSarrest have been able to keep customers databases operational and intact under our protection. With our ability to mitigate these types of incursions, by employing features such as: i) Managing Arguments – checking and sanitizing which arguments get passed through to our customer ii) User Agent Verification – validation of http header fields to ensure that request are coming from an accepted list of browsers iii) Client Validation – proprietary algorithm ensuring that a visitor to a site is in fact a real user session iv) Connection Rate Limiting – discarding connections from sources that trip custom defined thresholds as well as many more, we are able to provide solutions unique to each customers setup and requirements. While we have been extremely successful in helping out our customers during these attacks, we still advise our customers to take preventative measures and use best case practices in designing their website code. In the next article, our Security Operations Manager, Sean Power, will be providing some useful tips and tricks in designing secure connections from your website to your backend database Jag Bains CTO DOSarrest Internet Security

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Tactics of an SQL Injection Attack

DDoS attack on GoDaddy takes down millions of websites

A massive DDoS attack struck GoDaddy’s name servers today, temporarily plunging thousands of websites into the internet abyss. “GoDaddy, the massive Web hosting company, went down on Monday, taking an untold number of websites with it,” reported CNN. Mashable.com reported, “The more problematic part is that any domain registered with GoDaddy that uses its nameservers and DNS records are also down. This means that even if you host your site elsewhere, using GoDaddy for DNS means it is inaccessible.” PC World reports: “In a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPGBZWGUE2g), secretive hacking group Anonymous has taken credit for the outage, claiming the move is a reaction to the company’s support of the U.S. government’s efforts “to censor and control the Internet,” through its support of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA).” But claiming Anonymous did this attack may be false, it turns out. The apparent attacker said, himself, that he was not affiliated with the Anonymous collective: “It is not Anonymous collective it’s only me. Don’t use Anonymous collective name on it, just my name,” wrote Twitter user Anonymous Own3r. (http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/09/10/every-godaddy-registered-site-…) Most likely scenario? A false flag cyber security attack in order to provide the excuse for Obama to sign a freedom-killing executive order focused on “cyber security.” The attack has taken down GoDaddy’s website, DNS servers, phone support and email accounts. It’s almost as if a nuclear bomb went off at GoDaddy headquarters. This attack appears to be hugely successful from the point of view of Anonymous hackers, although it’s not clear why GoDaddy was targeted in particular. GoDaddy manages 48 million domains spanning more than 9 million customers. The failure of its DNS likely means that millions of websites were taken offline. Domain Name Servers are a known vulnerability Domain Name Servers are a well-known vulnerability of the internet infrastructure. As this attack by Anonymous has masterfully demonstrated, DNS provides a centralized single point of attack that, if penetrated, can bring down literally millions of websites. DNS also provides a single point of government seizure, where rogue governments that hate free speech can take control over websites by commandeering their DNS records. For these reasons, you need to know how to reach NaturalNews.com even if DNS is compromised There is a workaround to DNS. You can bypass it and go straight to NaturalNews by simply entering the following “IP address” into your browser: 174.132.185.226 This is the equivalent of typing “NaturalNews.com” into your browser and it will work even if Domain Name Servers are being hacked or seized. This IP address will take you right to our website. It is our “digital address” recognized by all web browsers. WRITE THIS NUMBER DOWN on a piece of paper and carry it in your wallet or purse. Even if the Domain Name Servers are illegally seized by the government in an assault on the freedom of the press — or if they’re brought down by hackers as was demonstrated today — you can still use the IP address to reach us. If NaturalNews.com appears to be unreachable during a crisis event, revert to using the numbers instead of the name, and the site will likely respond. An even better way: Subscribe to our email newsletter An even better way to make sure you can hear from us is to subscribe to our FREE email newsletter (see subscription form below). Email is virtually impossible for anyone to block. Unless there’s a nuclear holocaust or something, we will always be able to email you with the latest alerts and information, even if our web servers are hacked or physically taken offline. Even if you don’t want to read our email newsletter each day, simply staying subscribed is valuable because we will be able to reach you with urgent alerts about what’s really happening. We don’t sell email addresses to anyone. Your privacy is completely protected, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Subscribing to our email newsletter is your way of allowing us to reach you even in a crisis, a seizure, or a hack attack. For fast DDoS protection against your eCommerce site click here . Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/037140_DDoS_attack_GoDaddy_Domain_Name_Servers.html

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DDoS attack on GoDaddy takes down millions of websites

Teenager who launched Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack on high profile websites says life is ‘serene’ offline

A Scots teenager who admitted hacking into the websites of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and other prominent organisations said life is “serene” without access to the internet. Jake Davis, 19, admitted conspiring to carry out a “denial of service” attack on the crime agency at Southwark Crown Court in June. He also admitted hacking the NHS website. Davis, from the island of Yell, faced five charges following a Met Police investigation into the hacking groups LulzSec and Anonymous. The groups have been linked to a number of cyber-attacks on government agencies and multi-national companies. LulzSec has also been linked to hacking attempts on Sony and The Sun newspaper. Davis told the Observer newspaper: “The last time I was allowed to access the internet was several moments before the police came through my door in the Shetland Isles, over a year ago. One of my co-defendants and I have also been indicted with the same charge in the United States, where we may possibly be extradited, and if found guilty I could face several decades in an American prison. “Now I am on conditional bail and have to wear an electronic tag around my ankle. I’m forbidden from accessing the internet. “I’m often asked: what is life like without the net? It seems strange that humans have evolved and adapted for thousands of years without this simple connectivity, and now we in modern society struggle to comprehend existence without it. In a word, life is serene. “I now find myself reading newspapers as though they weren’t ancient scrolls; entering real shops with real money in order to buy real products, and not wishing to Photoshop a cosmic being of unspeakable horror into every possible social situation. Nothing needs to be captioned or made into an elaborate joke to impress a citizenry whose every emotion is represented by a sequence of keystrokes.” He added: “Things are calmer, slower and at times, I’ll admit, more dull. I do very much miss the instant companionship of online life, the innocent chatroom palaver, and the ease with which circles with similar interests can be found. Of course, there are no search terms in real life – one actually has to search. However, there is something oddly endearing about being disconnected from the digital horde. “It is not so much the sudden simplicity of daily life – as you can imagine, trivial tasks have been made much more difficult – but the feeling of being able to close my eyes without being bombarded with flashing shapes or constant buzzing sounds, which had occurred frequently since my early teens and could only be attributed to perpetual computer marathons. “Sleep is now tranquil and uninterrupted and books seem far more interesting. The paranoia has certainly vanished. I can only describe this sensation as the long-awaited renewal of a previously diminished attention span.” He said people’s attentions spans had suffered since the advent of the internet. “A miracle cure or some kind of therapeutic brilliance are not something I could give, but I can confidently say that a permanent lack of internet has made me a more fulfilled individual. And as one of many kids glued to their screens every day, I would never before have imagined myself even thinking those words. “Before, the idea of no internet was inconceivable, but now – not to sound as though it’s some kind of childish and predictable revelation spawned as a result of going cold turkey – I look back on the transcripts of my online chats (produced as legal evidence in my case, in great numbers) and wonder what all the fuss was about.” He added that he hoped others involved in the hacker community could take a short break from the internet to see if they could feel similar effects adding he had “forgotten how easy it was simply to close a laptop lid”. For fast DDoS protection against your eCommerce site click here . Source: http://news.stv.tv/north/189464-teenager-who-hacked-major-websites-says-life-is-serene-without-web-access/

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Teenager who launched Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack on high profile websites says life is ‘serene’ offline

Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack stymies vote in Miss Hong Kong beauty contest

Residents of the island, a Special Administrative Region of China, are up in arms after plans for a popular vote in the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant were sidelined by a distributed denial-of-service attack that knocked the voting system offline. The attack on Sunday evening swamped systems used for the vote with millions of bogus votes – far more than contest organizers had anticipated. Organizers were forced to cancel the online vote and ask the pageant judges to elect the winner themselves, according to a story in The Standard . Hong Kong Station TVB issued a statement on Monday apologizing for the wrinkle in the first ever Idol-style vote for the island’s beauty queen, putting the blame on audience reaction that was more “warm” than expected. The voting snafu forced organizers to throw the decision to the pageant judges, who chose a winner based on the three finalists overall performance. (Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work, anyway?) According to a story in The Standard , however, the “overly warm” response from viewers was, in fact, a DDoS attack against the pageant’s Microsoft Azure cloud-based voting system that flooded the servers with millions of votes, knocking them offline. The RC station planned for around half a million viewers to vote during a 10-minute slot Sunday evening, but actual traffic far exceeded that, according to TVB’s deputy director for foreign affairs Tsang Sing-ming, who is quoted by the media. Another station official, TVB general manager Cheong Shin-keong, is quoted saying that the extra traffic was “deliberately made” and that the station had hired an outside firm to investigate. The controversy over the apparent DDoS attack was exacerbated by the judges’ decision to choose contestant Carat Cheung Ming-nga as the next Miss Hong Kong, rather than Tracy Chu Chin-suet, the public’s favorite, who was second runner-up, The Standard reported. A related contest to give a Mini Cooper car to an online voter, selected at random, was cancelled after the voting system went down. Immediately after the vote, Hong Kong’s Communications Authority was flooded with more than 400 complaints on Monday about the aborted voting. The incident was a black eye for Microsoft, as well. That company partnered with TVB, lending its Azure cloud based infrastructure to host the voting system. Outraged viewers also left comments on TVB’s webpage, castigating the station for its mistake, for its reliance on Microsoft and – not least – for picking the wrong gal. Once a British colony, Hong Kong transferred to China in 1997 and has been run as one of two Special Administrative Regions ever since, following a “one government, two systems” policy under which residents enjoy greater freedom of expression and political voice than their countrymen on the Chinese mainland. However, that system is slowly changing, with the Communist Party slowly exerting control over more facets of life on the island. In July, thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest changes to Hong Kong’s public schools and school curriculum that was seen as emphasizing Communist Party orthodoxy and downplaying Hong Kong’s unique history. Hong Kong being Hong Kong, the parallels between the aborted Miss Hong Kong vote and the island’s larger political context weren’t lost on viewers. “Prove in Hong Kong does not have universal suffrage!” wrote one viewer on the TVB website. For fast DDoS protection against your e-commerce site click here . Source: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/08/28/ddos-hong-kong-beauty/

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Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack stymies vote in Miss Hong Kong beauty contest

Keep Your Content Online in Case of a Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

San Francisco, CA – infoZine – Denial of service attacks – flooding websites with traffic in order to make them unavailable to the public – have become an increasingly popular way to take down or block Internet content. A new online guide from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) outlines how website operators can fend off these attacks and keep their sites alive and accessible. “Denial of service attacks have been used by governments to silence online criticism as well as by activists protesting companies and organizations they don’t like,” said EFF Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York. “Major websites often have the resources to keep running during a denial of service attack, but smaller sites – such as those belonging to independent media or human rights organizations – are sometimes taken down permanently. Our online guide is aimed at leveling the playing field.” EFF’s “Keeping Your Site Alive” guide includes tips on choosing an appropriate webhost to provide the security and technical assistance needed to weather an attack. The guide also gives advice on how to back up and mirror content so it can be made available elsewhere in case the site is compromised, and includes tutorial videos with background information on the technical concepts involved. Denial of service attacks are an issue for websites across the globe, so EFF’s guide is available in many different translations, including Chinese, Russian, Persian, and Arabic. “Lack of resources or knowledge can mean some websites are more vulnerable than others,” said EFF International Freedom of Expression Coordinator Eva Galperin. “We want to give website operators around the world the tools they need to protect their content and stay online.” Source: http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/52927/

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Keep Your Content Online in Case of a Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack