Probation, comm service for poachers turned gamekeepers The three brains behind the Mirai malware, which infects and pressgangs Internet-of-Things devices into a botnet army, have avoided jail.…
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No, the Mirai botnet masters aren’t going to jail. Why? ‘Cos they help Feds nab cyber-crims
US-CERT has released a new technical alert on malware used by Hidden Cobra, a threat actor whose activities they believe to be directed by the North Korean government. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been documenting malware used by the group for a while now. This time, they warn about Joanap, a remote access tool (RAT) that is used “to establish peer-to-peer communications and to manage botnets … More ? The post DHS, FBI warn about malware tied to North Korean threat actor appeared first on Help Net Security .
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DHS, FBI warn about malware tied to North Korean threat actor
National PR service circulates—then pulls—release highlighting campaign to crash government website BY: Morgan Chalfant January 14, 2017 4:56 am A leading public-relations service blasted and then removed a news release this week highlighting a campaign to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump by crashing WhiteHouse.gov. PR Newswire, a global news-release distribution service, circulated a release on Thursday highlighting a campaign launched by Protester.io, a digital protest organizing platform, to “take down” the White House website next Friday in protest of Trump’s inauguration. “On January 20th, hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to Washington, DC to march in protest of the inauguration of Donald Trump. Millions more around the country will be joining the cause from home. If you can’t make it to Washington DC on inauguration day, you can still participate by occupying whitehouse.gov online,” the release read. “Why is it important to participate? Isn’t this just another election? We haven’t lost our democracy yet, but it is most definitely under threat. The only way we’re going to defend and revive our democracy is by mobilizing.” Protester.io describes itself as a platform that helps individuals “organize protests like a crowdfunding campaign.” A description of the Inauguration Day protest on its website, named “Occupy WhiteHouse.gov,” instructs interested parties to go to the White House website on Jan. 20 and refresh the page as often as possible throughout the day. The page also includes instructions for protesters to “automate” page refresh so that their computers do this automatically. “When enough people occupy www.WhiteHouse.gov the site will go down. Please join us and stand up against this demagogue who is threatening our democracy and our security,” the protest page states. Shortly after blasting the news release, PR Newswire issued a correction, changing the headline of the release from “Protester.io Launches Campaign to Take Down WhiteHouse.gov on Inauguration Day” to “Protester.io Launches Campaign to Voice Your Opinion at WhiteHouse.gov on Inauguration Day.” Later, the news-release service removed the press release entirely. PR Newswire was purchased by Cision, a global public relations software company based in Chicago, for $841 million from British business events organizer UBM in 2015. PR Newswire is based in New York and distributes public relations messages for companies largely located in the United States and Canada, according to the New York Times. When contacted, a spokesman for Cision confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that the original release had been modified and later removed entirely “after further evaluation.” “The issuer modified the original release at our request, but after further evaluation, we ultimately decided to remove the release in its entirety and have requested that the rest of our network remove the content as well,” Stacey Miller, director of communication for Cision, wrote in an email Friday afternoon. An organizer for the protest did not respond to a request for comment. Federal investigators have probed what are called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, which block users from websites by overloading them with traffic. Such attacks brought down Twitter, Spotify, and Amazon last October, prompting investigations by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. It is unclear whether the planned “Occupy WhiteHouse.gov” protest campaign would constitute a DDoS attack. Attempts to reach the FBI on Friday were unsuccessful. Several protests have been organized around Inauguration Day, including the “Women’s March on Washington” that is expected to draw some 200,000 women to the nation’s capital on Jan. 21, the day following Trump’s inauguration. Fox News reported that protesters are also planning to blockade security checkpoints at the inauguration and organize a “dance party” outside the home of Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Source: http://freebeacon.com/culture/protest-aims-take-whitehouse-gov-inauguration-day/
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Protest Aims to ‘Take Down’ WhiteHouse.Gov on Inauguration Day
In coordination with Europol’s European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3), the FBI conducted a series of interviews and arrests Dec. 5-9 aimed at reducing the number of young people acting as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)-for-hire hackers. “DDoS tools are among the many specialized cyber crime services available for hire that may be used by professional criminals and novices alike,” said Steve Kelly, FBI unit chief of the International Cyber Crime Coordination Cell (IC4). “While the FBI is working with our international partners to apprehend and prosecute sophisticated cyber criminals, we also want to deter the young from starting down this path.” Law enforcement agencies participated from Australia, Belgium, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the combined effort led to 34 arrests and 101 suspects interviewed and cautioned. The effort mainly targeted hackers under 20 who were suspected of paying for services that would maliciously flood an online target with so much data that users would be unable to gain access. The operation also marks the kick-start of a campaign in all participating countries to raise awareness of young people getting involved in cyber crime and to point those people toward positive outlets for their hacking skills. “Today’s generation is closer to technology than ever before, with the potential of exacerbating the threat of cyber crime,” said Steven Wilson, Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). “Many IT enthusiasts get involved in seemingly low-level fringe cyber crime activities from a young age, unaware of the consequences that such crimes carry. One of the key priorities of law enforcement should be to engage with these young people to prevent them from pursuing a criminal path, helping them understand how they can use their skills for a more constructive purpose.” Europol also identified that young hackers are most likely to be responsible for crimes in which they hack to take control or information from a computer, create or use malware and viruses, and carry out DDos attacks. “No law enforcement agency or country can defeat cyber crime alone,” an FBI statement said. “This demands a collective global approach.” Source: https://www.meritalk.com/articles/fbi-tries-to-curb-young-ddos-hackers/
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FBI Tries to Curb Young DDoS Hackers
The website was offline for roughly four hours on 1 December. Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks suffered a mysterious outage on the morning of 1 December for roughly four hours, two days after posting its release of a searchable database of 60,000 emails from US government contractor HBGary. The website reportedly went down at around 4:00am (GMT), with some social media users quickly speculating it was the result of yet another distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) assault – a form of cyberattack that sends waves of traffic at a web server in order to force it offline. By 9:00am (GMT) the website had fully resurfaced. “WikiLeaks is offline. Page no longer exists?!” one user wrote. Another said: “@WikiLeaks is down right now. Could be DDoS attack.” Meanwhile, a well-known account linked with Anonymous added: “Rule 41 happens and the first thing that goes down? WikiLeaks, of course, is currently unreachable.” Rule 41 is the newly-passed law in the US that permits the FBI and other agencies to conduct hacking-based investigations on multiple computers with a single warrant. Despite the claims of Anonymous, there is nothing to suggest it was related to any problems with WikiLeaks’ website. IBTimes UK contacted WikiLeaks for comment however had received no response at the time of publication. The outage comes after a slew of politically-charged leaks from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the personal email inbox of John Podesta, a close aide to Hillary Clinton. In October, Julian Assange, the founder of the organisation, claimed that unknown forces within the “DC establishment” had attempted to disrupt WikiLeaks’ operations via cyberattack after it released a collection of emails from the DNC. “The US DC establishment – which believes that Hillary Clinton will be the winner of the election – tried to find different ways to distract from our publications,” he said at the time, adding: “They started attacking our servers with DDoS attacks and attempted hacking attacks.” Later, on the morning of 7 November, after publishing 8,000 more DNC emails, WikiLeaks issued a series of updates to its four million-strong follower base about yet another attack. It said: “ WikiLeaks.org was down briefly. That’s rare. We’re investigating.” Later, it added: “Our email publication servers are under a targeted DoS attack.” Most recently, Assange renewed his effort to be allowed to exit the Ecuadorian embassy in London after a United Nations (UN) panel reinforced an earlier ruling that he was being arbitrarily detained. The decision came down after an appeal by the UK government. “Now that all appeals are exhausted I expect that the UK and Sweden will comply with their international obligations and set me free,” Assange said in a statement. “It is an obvious and grotesque injustice to detain someone for six years who hasn’t even been charged with an offence.” Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-website-suffers-mysterious-outage-sparking-rule-41-hacking-conspiracy-1594392
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WikiLeaks website suffers mysterious outage sparking Rule 41 hacking conspiracy
It’s just a ‘temporary inconvenience’, says agency The public-facing website for the UK’s National Crime Agency has wobbled today under a Distributed Denial of Service Attack.…
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UK’s ‘FBI’ hit by DDoS barrage
C&C malware factory The FBI has teamed up with security vendors to disrupt the operations of Dridex banking Trojan.…
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FBI takes down Dridex botnet, seizes servers, arrests suspect
The UK's National Crime Agency is spearheading an onslaught against the Dridex (aka Bugat, aka Cridex) banking malware and the criminals that wield it. “Dridex malware, also known as Bugat and Crid…
At this point in time, the existence of a botnet comprising of tens of thousands of compromised routers and other IoT devices is not news. Nevertheless, this latest one mapped by researchers is a spec…
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Unexpectedly benevolent malware improves security of routers, IoT devices
The increasing number and size of DDoS attacks and their costly and devastating effects on brand perception have not passed unnoticed by North American businesses, most of which have heightened their …
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DDoS threat recognized by all members of the C-suite