Tag Archives: hacking

How Hackers Make Money from DDoS Attacks

Attacks like Friday’s are often financially motivated. Yesterday’s attack on the internet domain directory Dyn, which took major sites like Twitter and Paypal offline, was historic in scale. But the motivation for the attack may seem opaque, since no valuable information seems to have been stolen. A group called New World Hackers is claiming credit, but giving conflicting accounts of their motives—and security experts have called them “impostors.” So why else might someone have done it? This class of hack, known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, has been around for a while. And while many DDoS attacks are indeed motivated by politics, revenge, or petty trolling, there’s frequently money involved. For instance, DDoS attacks are often used as leverage for blackmail. Once a hacking group has a reputation for being able to field a large and dangerous botnet to knock servers offline, they can demand huge ‘protection’ payments from businesses afraid of facing their wrath. In fact, they don’t even have to do the hacking in the first place—in one recent case, someone posing as a notorious cabal merely emailed blackmail messages and managed to pocket tens of thousands of dollars before they were exposed. In the current case, there are rumors that Dyn was a target of extortion attempts before the attack. And the hackers behind what may be the biggest DDoS attack in history could demand a pretty penny to leave other companies alone. A wave of impostors will likely give it a shot, too. There’s another, even darker money-driven application of DDoS attacks—industrial sabotage. Companies seeking to undermine their competition can hire hackers to take the other guys offline. DDoS services are often contracted through so-called “booter” portals where anyone can hire a hacker’s botnet in increments as small as 15 minutes. Researchers found last year that three of the most prominent booter services at the time had over 6,000 subscribers in total, and had launched over 600,000 attacks. (And despite the criminal reputation of Bitcoin, by far the largest method used to pay for DDoS-for-hire was Paypal.) But it’s unlikely that this was some sort of hit called in by a competitor of Dyn—that tactic seems to primarily appeal to already-shady dealers, including online gambling operations. Finally, DDoS attacks can serve as a kind of smokescreen for more directly lucrative crimes. While a security team is struggling to deal with an army of zombie DVRs pummeling their system, attackers can grab passwords, credit card numbers, or identity information. In weighing possible explanations for Friday’s attack, it’s important to note the massive scale of the thing. Even if their claims of responsibility aren’t credible, New World Hackers’ description of about 1.2 terabits of data per second thrown at Dyn’s servers is both vaguely plausible and utterly mind-boggling. That’s around a thousand times as powerful as the huge 620 gigabit per second attack that knocked out a single website, Krebs on Security, last month. Dyn has also described the attack as sophisticated, arriving in three separate waves that targeted different parts of their systems. That kind of operation could have been pulled off by a gang of kids doing it for kicks—and maybe that’s the scarier scenario. But such a massive undertaking suggests bigger, and possibly more lucrative, motivations. Source: http://fortune.com/2016/10/22/ddos-attack-hacker-profit/

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How Hackers Make Money from DDoS Attacks

Media vulnerable to Election Night cyber attack

A hack on the AP and its results tally could have chaos-inducing consequences. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on security upgrades, U.S. media organizations have failed to properly protect their newsrooms from cyberattacks on their websites, communications systems and even editing platforms — opening themselves up to the possibility of a chaos-creating hack around Election Day. In just the past month, BuzzFeed has been vandalized, and both Newsweek and a leading cybersecurity blog were knocked offline after publishing articles that hackers apparently didn’t appreciate. Federal law enforcement is investigating multiple attacks on news organizations, and journalists moderating the presidential debates say they’ve even gotten briefings from the FBI on proper cyber hygiene, prompting them to go back to paper and pens for prep work. “We do a lot of printing out,” said Michele Remillard, an executive producer at C-SPAN, the network home to the backup moderator for all the debates. Journalists are seen as especially vulnerable soft targets for hackers. Their computers contain the kinds of notes, story ideas and high-powered contact lists coveted by foreign intelligence services. They also work in an environment that makes them ripe for attack, thanks to professional demands like the need for a constant online presence and inboxes that pop with emails from sources whom they don’t always know and which frequently contain the kinds of suspicious links and attachments that can expose their wider newsroom networks. Senior U.S. officials, current and former lawmakers and cybersecurity pros told POLITICO the threat against the media is real — and they fret the consequences. Specifically, the security community is worried The Associated Press’ army of reporters could get hacked and the wire service — the newsroom that produces the results data on which the entire media world relies — inadvertently starts releasing manipulated election tallies or that cybercriminals penetrate CNN’s internal networks and change Wolf Blitzer’s teleprompter. “It’s the art of possible is what really scares me,” said Tony Cole, chief technology officer of FireEye, a Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm that works with some of the country’s major television and newspaper companies. “Everything is hackable.” “No site is safe,” added Tucker Carlson, editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller. “If the federal government can be hacked, and the intelligence agencies have been hacked, as they’ve been then, can any news site say we have better cybersecurity than the FBI or Google?” The media have long been a spy’s best friend. Intelligence community sources say that foreign and U.S. agents use local newspapers to look for clues about their targets, and that strategy has only grown more sophisticated in an all-online era in which foreign intelligence is reportedly known to hover over a media company’s servers searching for any kind of heads-up on relevant stories inching closer to publication. Reporters on the campaign trail and back in their home bureaus said in interviews that they’ve become increasingly aware of their status as potential hacking victims. The spate of recent attacks — involving their sites and their competitors’ — are more than ample warning of what’s possible. Several journalists said they now use email and other communication with the expectation they’re being watched, and under the assumption that their messages can and will be hacked and shared publicly with the wider world. “We’re a bigger target than the 7-Eleven down the street,” said Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. “Presumably, we have really good, smart IT people who know what they’re doing, who are taking all kinds of precautions, who are acutely in tune with what the risks are and what the threats are.” There is perhaps no greater target in election journalism than the AP, the venerable wire service that will have more than 5,000 reporters, editors and researchers working across the country, tabulating results, calling races and feeding a much wider network of subscribers. Often other news outlets refer to the AP before making calls on races, and AP projections on the East Coast can have effects on West Coast voting, which closes hours later thanks to the time differences. Multiple sources in media, government and the security industry fretted about the effect if the AP were to get hit, and what that would do to their ability to get the news out. The AP will deploy reporters across the country to send up vote tallies, usually by phone, the  wire service  explained to The Washington Post in May. It also has multiple checks and balances in place to monitor for errors. But as with many other news organizations contacted by POLITICO, AP spokesman Paul Colford said the wire service’s policy is to refrain from making public comments about its security measures. “Given the extraordinary interest in the presidential election and thousands of other state and local contests, we would add that AP has been working diligently to ensure that vote counts will be gathered, vetted and delivered to our many customers on Nov. 8,” he said. Federal and state officials stress that even a successful hack on a major news outlet around Election Day would not affect the final results, which typically take weeks to certify. The vote tallies, after all, will be available on official sites and in many instances on special social media feeds. And if a news site did get defaced with incorrect information, the results would be more like a modern-day version of the famous ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline that President Harry Truman triumphantly held aloft the day after his 1948 reelection. Still, there is a widespread recognition — from the White House down to the local precinct level — that a hack on the media could be damaging given the role it plays in getting election news out to satisfy the country’s insatiable information appetite. Misinformation circulated in the early hours of Nov. 8 about the race’s trajectory, for example, could factor into a voter’s decision to even show up during the election’s final hours, especially in Western states. There’s also concern that false media reports spread via a hacked news account could be a potential spark for violence in an already exceptionally charged atmosphere. On the flip side, there’s a recognition that the media can help build public confidence in the final results, especially following a campaign that’s been engulfed in its closing weeks by Russian-sponsored hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman’s personal emails, and Donald Trump’s unfounded charges of vote rigging. “To the degree that foreign hackers could prevent the dissemination of good information around the election, that can be a problem,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The California congressman said he frets that media outlets, like many other industries, face “massive costs” in protecting themselves against cyberattacks with “no end in sight” to the potential risks. Schiff added that he is especially concerned about smaller news organizations without major IT budgets or the backing of larger parent companies. “They’re much more vulnerable,” he said. Cybersecurity experts say media spending to protect news organizations against cyberattack has grown substantially in the past three years, especially in the wake of North Korea’s attack on Sony Pictures in late 2014. The price tag for vulnerability audits and other techniques varies by the size of the newsroom and the surface area for potential attacks, but multiple sources said quarterly audits can easily cost $50,000 or more. Cyber experts and media officials from newsrooms across the country said they’re prepped to deal with a range of threats to their sites, including the kinds of malware that can infect a computer network and give hackers an entry point to manipulate a home site. They’re also building backup capacity in the event of a DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service, that tries to overwhelm a website or server with fake traffic. News sites, they note, are already prepping for monster traffic around the election, which can surge as much as 30 times compared with other big events this cycle, such as a debate or primary. At the staffing level, newsrooms have also been pushing for better cyber habits by hosting training seminars, requiring employees to take must-pass exams and requiring double-authentication before granting access to a newsroom’s internal filing system and social media accounts. But cyber experts warn that all the preparatory work in the world can matter little for a news organization if it’s facing an attack from a more sophisticated actor. “If all of a sudden your adversary becomes a nation-state, like Sony or the DNC with Russia, you see those kind of procedures aren’t worth a darn,” said Robert Anderson, a former senior FBI cyber official and a managing director at the Navigant consulting firm. The press has indeed been a familiar target for hackers. In 2013, hackers hit the AP’s Twitter account and posted a false report about a bombing at the White House, sending the stock market into a five-minute spiral. In more recent incidents, a USA Today columnist wrote an article in February admitting he was hacked midair while using his commercial flight’s WiFi, and the New York Times reported in August that its Moscow bureau was targeted by what were believed to be Russian hackers. Newsweek blamed hackers for a DDoS attack that took down its site last month soon after it published an article about Trump’s company allegedly violating the U.S. embargo against Cuba through secret business dealings in the 1990s. And BuzzFeed had several articles on its site altered earlier this month after it ran a story identifying a person allegedly involved in the hacking of tech CEOs and celebrities. “I’m sure that lots of newsrooms are having this conversation right now, particularly as we get closer to the election and people have a lot more to lose when things don’t go their way,” said Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity blogger and former Washington Post reporter whose site went down last month after a major DDoS attack that he says was spawned by his reporting about the arrest of two Israeli hackers. With the threat of hackings against the media reaching such a heightened pace, many election observers urged both reporters and the reading public to take a deep breath as the results start coming in. “If Twitter is reporting that Jill Stein wins South Carolina, that should probably give you pause,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/media-vulnerable-to-election-night-cyber-attack-229956

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Media vulnerable to Election Night cyber attack

Why a massive DDoS attack on a blogger has internet experts worried

Someone on the internet seems very angry with cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. On 20 September, Krebs’ website was hit with what experts say is the biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in public internet history, knocking it offline for days with a furious 600 to 700 Gbps (Gigabits per second) traffic surge. DDoS attacks are a simple way of overloading a network router or server with so much traffic that it stops responding to legitimate requests. According to Akamai (which had the unenviable job of attempting to protect his site last week), the attack was twice the size of any DDoS event the firm had ever seen before, easily big enough to disrupt thousands of websites let alone one. So why did someone expend time and money to attack a lone blogger in such a dramatic way? Krebs has his own theories, and the attack follows Krebs breaking a story about the hacking and subsequent takedown of kingpin DDoS site vDOS, but in truth nobody knows for certain and probably never will. DDoS attacks, large and small, have become a routine fact of internet life. Many attacks are quietly damped down by specialist firms who protect websites and internet services. But the latest attack has experts worried all the same. Stop what you’re doing DDoS attacks first emerged as an issue on the public internet in the late 1990s, and since then have been getting larger, more complex and more targeted. Early motivations tended towards spiteful mischief. A good example is the year 2000 attacks on websites including Yahoo, CNN and Amazon by ‘MafiaBoy’, who later turned out to be 15-year old Canadian youth Michael Calce. Within weeks, he was arrested. Things stepped up a level in 2008 when hacktivist group Anonymous started an infamous series of DDoS attacks with one aimed at websites belonging to the Church of Scientology. By then, professional cybercriminals were offering DDoS-for-hire ‘booter’ and ‘stresser’ services that could be rented out to unscrupulous organizations to attack rivals. Built from armies of ordinary PCs and servers that had quietly been turned into botnet ‘zombies’ using malware, attacks suddenly got larger. This culminated in 2013 with a massive DDoS attack on a British spam-fighting organization called Spamhaus that was measured at a then eye-popping 300Gbps. These days, DDoS is now often used in extortion attacks where cybercriminals threaten organizations with crippling attacks on their websites unless a ransom is paid. Many are inclined to pay up. The Krebs effect The discouraging aspect of the Krebs attack is that internet firms may have thought they were finally getting on top of DDoS at last using techniques that identify rogue traffic and more quickly cut off the botnets that fuel their packet storms. The apparent ease with which the latest massive attack was summoned suggests otherwise. In 2015, Naked Security alumnus and blogger Graham Cluley suffered a smaller DDoS attack on his site so Krebs is not alone. Weeks earlier, community site Mumsnet experienced a DDoS attack designed to distract security engineers as part of a cyberattack on the firm’s user database. At the weekend, Google stepped in and opened its Project Shield umbrella over Krebs’ beleaguered site. Project Shield is a free service launched earlier in 2016 by Google, specifically to protect small websites such as Krebs’ from being silenced by DDoS attackers. For now it looks like Google’s vast resources were enough to ward off the unprecedented attack, but it’s little comfort to know that nothing short of the internet’s biggest player was the shield that one simple news site needed. With criminals apparently able to call up so much horsepower, the wizards of DDoS defence might yet have to rethink their plans – and fast. Source: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/09/29/why-a-massive-ddos-attack-on-a-blogger-has-internet-experts-worried/

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Why a massive DDoS attack on a blogger has internet experts worried

Blizzard’s Battle.net Servers Knocked Offline By Another DDoS Attack

Blizzard Entertainment became a victim of yet another distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as its Battle.net servers were knocked down on Sunday, Sept. 18. The DDoS attack that rendered Battle.net’s servers offline was waged by hacking group PoodleCorp. Owing to the attack, Battle.net, which runs several popular games such as  World of Warcraft ,  Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft  and  Overwatch  to name a few, was left handicapped even as angry users took to social media to vent their ire. Gamers on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were all affected by the outage. Blizzard Entertainment acknowledged the situation on its official Twitter account. “We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games,” wrote Blizzard in a tweet. The DDoS attack on Battle.net lasted for half an hour after PoodleCorp took to Twitter to state that it would halt the attack and restore the servers if the tweet below was retweeted 2,000 times. The blackmail (ransom note?) found favor with a majority of gamers as they were only too willing to retweet to have access again to the games they were playing. As promised, PoodleCorp stopped the attack once the 2,000 retweet milestone was reached. This is not the first time Blizzard Entertainment has come under the mercy of PoodleCorp. Earlier in August, we reported that it was hit with a PoodleCorp DDoS attack, which disrupted gameplay for users of Battle.net until network engineers addressed the issue. Back then however, the hacking group did not ask for retweets. Blizzard Entertainment has been the victim of a spate of DDoS attacks in the past few months. In June, an attack took down its servers as well. The outage was attributed to Lizard Squad member AppleJ4ck, who claimed responsibility and cautioned that the hack was a small part of some “preparations.” Aside from the DDoS attack, Blizzard has been having a terrible week anyway. On Sept. 14, 16 and 18, the company suffered from technical issues that prevented or delayed users from logging in and joining the game servers. However, for now, Blizzard Entertainment can breathe easy as the technical problems Battle.net was encountering owing to the DDoS attack from PoodleCorp have been resolved. Source: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/178300/20160919/blizzards-battle-net-servers-knocked-offline-by-another-ddos-attack.htm  

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Blizzard’s Battle.net Servers Knocked Offline By Another DDoS Attack

HSBC Website Suffers DDoS Attack

OurMine Hacking group conducted a massive DDoS attack on HSBC websites forcing the sites to go offline in UK and the USA! The official domain of HSBC (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) came under massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on 12July affecting domain in UK and the USA. The DDoS attack was conducted by OurMine hacking group which previously made headlines for hacking social media accounts of high-profile tech celebrities including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai but this is the second DDoS attack  after WikiLeaks last week. Currently, the reason for targeting HSBC bank is unknown though according to SoftPedia the cyber attack was stopped within few hours after one of HSBC’s staffs contacted the attackers. “Hello, We stopped the attack of HSBC Bank! a staff of HSBC Talked with us,” stated the hackers on their official blog. Screenshot shared by attackers shows HSBC’s UK and US domains are down! It is unclear if the bank was targeted for ransom or just for fun, however, this is not the first time when HSBC faced such attacks. In January 2016 hacktivists from New World Hacktivists (NWH) claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on HSBC’s mobile servers on payday. As far as OurMine is concerned, it is the same group who hacked  Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai Quora account which was also linked to his Twitter account, the group also hacked Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg Twitter and Pinterest accounts and last but not the least the official Twitter account of Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey was also taken over by the same group. DDoS attacks have been increasing with every passing day . In the past, DDoS attacks were conducted just for fun or to shut down servers but now hackers attack sites for ransom and keep them down until a ransom is paid. The ProtonMail DDoS attack is a fine example of how these attacks are becoming another online mafia to steal money. At the time of publishing this article, both targeted sites were reachable. Source: https://www.hackread.com/hsbc-website-suffers-ddos-attack/  

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HSBC Website Suffers DDoS Attack

Did your UK biz just pay £1,500 to stop a DDoS? You’ve been had

Empty threats from faux hackers doing the rounds again What kind of a grifter pretends he’s going to DDoS you? The kind that easily makes off with a lot of cash, it seems. “Hackers” who have been making empty DDoS threats while posing as the Armada Collective appear to have have moved on.…

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Did your UK biz just pay £1,500 to stop a DDoS? You’ve been had