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International Middle East Media Center back on-line after DDoS Attack

The website of the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) is back online after the Palestinian news service, under the auspices of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People, was forced off-line by a DoS attack and apparently let down by Hosting provider Bluehost. IMEMC and other new media came under increased attack during the Gaza war, while mainstream media were bleeding viewers, listeners and readers to new, alternative and independent news services. A several hundred percent increase in readers of news about the Gaza war may, ultimately, have prompted the UK parliament’s recognition of Palestine. The IMEMC website is under constant attack of one sort or the other, but these attacks increased significantly since the Gaza war, said the editor-in-chief Saed Bannoura to nsnbc. IMEMC’s website ultimately succumbed to a DoS attack on October 14, after the end of armed hostilities, but against the backdrop of the Swedish recognition of Palestine and the UK parliament’s yes vote to the recognition of Palestine on October 13. IMEMC, nsnbc, and a number of other new, independent or alternative media experienced a marked increase for the Palestine – Israel discourse. While nsnbc only registered a minor increase in daily readers, it noticed a marked increase in the number of read articles pertaining Palestine, Israel, and the related international discourse. IMEMC, which specifically covers Palestine and the Palestinian – Israeli discourse, experienced a significant increase in its number of readers and read articles. Saed Bannoura noted that IMEMC also experienced an increased interest in IMEMC’s Facebook page and Twitter account, adding, however, that there was a particular increase in interest for the IMEMC website. Bannoura said: “Our readership increased from two million hits per month to ten million hits per month … We have seen more and more reprints of our articles, and also, Abby Martin of Russia Today, was repeatedly quoting the IMEMC website, our statistics and our reports in her TV coverage” Saed Bannoura noted that IMEMC and other independent media often have people on the ground where major mainstream media are merely repeating the reports from establishment news agencies. It is noteworthy that the IMEMC website succumbed to the DoS attack on October 14, one day after the UK Parliament voted in favor of the recognition of Palestine and only two days after nsnbc published an article that documented an unprecedented level of harassment of alternative media, including IMEMC, nsnbc, Voltairenet, New Eastern Outlook, Land Destroyer Report, Infowars, Drudge Report and others. Mainstream media like the BBC, CNN and other were increasingly forced to adjust their coverage. This ”adjustment” and the flight away from the mainstream to alternatives is likely to have been a significant contributing factor to the landslide in public opinion in the UK, that led to the recognition of Palestine by the UK parliament. Speaking about the decades-long vilification of Palestinians and the misrepresentation of the Palestinian – Israeli discourse in Blockbuster Hollywood movies and mainstream media, Saed Bannoura said: “Well, it’s an unfortunate reality that most of the international media agencies are largely corporate owned and line-up with corporate lobbies. Therefore their coverage is poor to none, regarding Palestine issues, especially when it comes to Palestinian rights”. Another aspect of the involvement of strong corporate and government interest in media coverage is that alternative, internet-based media, are dependent on Hosting providers who often are in direct or indirect corporate relationship with, or dependent on business with major corporations which are known for their cooperation with intelligence agencies. One example is the well-documented cooperation between Google, Microsoft, Apple, and the U.S.’ National Security Agency. IMEMC’s now previous Hosting service, Bluehost, said Saed Bannoura, let IMEMC down when it was subjected to the DoS attack instead of providing any actionable help. Bannoura stressed, “that is their job, that is what we are paying them for”. It is noteworthy that Bluehost has a partnership with SiteLock, which also was involved in a harassment case pertaining nsnbc and others. October 18, nsnbc attempted to contact Bluehost via chat and phone. A sustained attempt to acquire the contact details of a media spokesperson or anyone who could speak on behalf of Bluehost failed. Also repeated direct calls to its violation of terms of service department were consistently answered by an answering machine, saying, “I’m sorry, that’s not a valid extension. Thank you for calling”. IMEMC has migrated the website to another hosting provider for now. Editor-in-chief Saed Bannoura agrees that alternative, new, and independent media could and maybe ought to form some kind of alliance with regard to negotiating with safe and ethical hosting service providers. The IMEMC website is on-line again, but the new media are likely to remain vulnerable as long as they don’t stand united against censorship and harassment. Source: http://www.imemc.org/article/69429

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International Middle East Media Center back on-line after DDoS Attack

Reflection DDoS Attacks Using Millions of UPnP Devices on the Rise

After successful in launching reflection and amplification Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks by abusing various protocols such as DNS, NTP and SMTP, hackers are now abusing Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) – part of the UPnP protocol standard – to target home and office devices, researchers warned. SSDP is a network protocol based on the Internet Protocol Suite that comes enabled on millions of networked devices, such as computers, printers, Internet gateways, Router / Wi-Fi access points, mobile devices, webcams, smart TVs and gaming consoles, to discover each other and automatically establish working configurations that enable data sharing, media streaming, media playback control and other services. FLAW IN UPnP USED IN AMPLIFICATION DDoS ATTACK Prolexic Security Engineering & Response Team (PLXsert) at Akamai Technologies have issued a warning that the devices use in residential or small office environments are being co-opted into reflection and amplification distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since July that abuse communications protocols enabled on UPnP devices. “ The rise of reflection attacks involving UPnP devices in an example of how fluid and dynamic the DDoS crime ecosystem can be in identifying, developing and incorporating new resources and attack vectors into its arsenal ,” the advisory states. “ Further development and refinement of attack payloads and tools is likely in the near future. “ The weakness in the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) standard could allow an attacker to compromise millions of its consumer and business devices, which could be conscripted by them to launch an effective DDoS attack on a target. Attackers have found that Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) – protocol used to exchange sensitive information in a decentralized, distributed environment – requests “can be crafted to elicit a response that reflects and amplifies a packet, which can be redirected towards a target.” This UPnP attack is useful for both reflection attacks, given the number of vulnerable devices, and amplification as researchers estimate that it can magnify attack traffic by a factor of 30, according to the advisory. OVER 4.1 MILLIONS DEVICES VULNERABLE According to the security researchers, about 38 percent of the 11 million Internet-facing UPnP devices, i.e. over 4.1 million devices, in use are potentially vulnerable to being used in this type of reflection DDoS attack. “ The number of UPnP devices that will behave as open reflectors is vast, and many of them are home-based Internet-enabled devices that are difficult to patch ,” said Akamai security business unit senior vice president and general manager Stuart Scholly. “ Action from firmware, application and hardware vendors must occur in order to mitigate and manage this threat .” MAJOR TARGETED COUNTRIES South Korea has the largest number of vulnerable devices, followed by the United States, Canada, and China, according to the advisory. This isn’t the first time when a security flaw in UPnP has allowed attackers to target home and business devices, back in January 2013, a flaw in UPnP exposed more than 50 millions computers, printers and storage drives to attack by hackers remotely. Source: http://thehackernews.com/2014/10/reflection-ddos-attacks-using-millions_16.html

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Reflection DDoS Attacks Using Millions of UPnP Devices on the Rise

How Russian hackers used Microsoft PowerPoint files to hack NATO computers

The ‘Patch Tuesday’ fixes included a patch for a vulnerability that a Russian Hacker team was using to target NATO. These attacks target high-profile organizations so you don’t have much of a reason to be worried (but please update!). So, no need to panic, this is just an interesting scenario that sheds some light on how computers can be compromised. The Russian team is called ‘Sandstorm Team’ and has been targeting organizations in Russia, the European Union, and United States since 2009. This attack used malicious PowerPoint documents. The Sandstorm Team crafted these PowerPoint files to install a malware called ‘Black Energy’ when opened. The malware installed is ‘bot-based’ and uses a plugin architecture that can be used for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, credential theft, or spam. Then, in a ‘spear-fishing’ attack, they sent these files to the employees of NATO and different telecom and energy companies. A ‘spear-fishing’ attack is when the attacker pretends to be a trustworthy source to trick the victim into opening malicious files, in this case, PowerPoint files which installed malware. Normally, you don’t want to run exe files that you don’t trust as they execute unrestricted code. But a PowerPoint file should just open a PowerPoint, so it’s safe, right? Wrong. You should never open files that are from questionable sources. This particular attack used a vulnerability in OLE that allowed the attacker to execute any command, which was used to install the malware through the mere opening of the PowerPoint file. OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding, and is used in cases such as linking an Excel report in a PowerPoint document. This way, when the Excel report is updated, so is the data that shows up in the PowerPoint. It is a very useful feature, but the attackers found a vulnerability that lets them use it to install malware. This vulnerability in the OLE has now been patched. This was a ‘zero-day,’ which are attacks where the attacker finds a vulnerability first and be able to exploit it before anyone has any knowledge about it, let alone has a chance to fix it. These types of attacks happen all the time, and the only way to fix one is to detect the malware exploiting it and then patch the vulnerability. To help ensure the safety of your own system, don’t click on anything you don’t trust, and install updates as soon as possible. Source: http://www.winbeta.org/news/how-russian-hackers-used-microsoft-powerpoint-files-hack-nato-computers

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How Russian hackers used Microsoft PowerPoint files to hack NATO computers

Hong Kong Protests: Anonymous Hackers Leak Chinese Government Data, Shutdown Websites

Hundreds of phone numbers, names, IP addresses and email addresses from Chinese government websites have been leaked online by the hacktivist collective Anonymous in support of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Anonymous first threatened the attack last week through its ‘Operation Hong Kong’ affiliated branch, promising to leak government email address details and to shut down state websites through a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Over the weekend, shortly after a government statement condemning the threat of attack, personal details taken from the Ningbo Free Trade Zone in Zhejiang province and a job-search site were released by the group. “We cannot be with you on the streets. We cannot fight the police that are arresting you. But they cannot arrest an idea,” Anonymous said in a statement. “We have effectively hacked and shutdown government websites and their supporters. Some noticeable Chinese and Hong Kong government domains and networks have already acquired American services for their domains.” The group claims that such actions by the Chinese government prove that the attacks carried out “cannot be handled” and that the involvement of US-based providers prove that US corporations are complicit in supporting Beijing policy. The hacker group first announced its support for the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong at the beginning of October, stating in a video at the time: “The time has come for democracy for the citizens of Hong Kong.” Five suspected members of Anonymous have since been arrested in the region in connection with hacking attacks. Due to the secretive nature of Anonymous, some security experts have said that it is difficult to prove that these attacks actually stem from them, rather than western governments. Protests in the former British colony started last month after Beijing decided it was to screen candidates for the first election in the territory in 2017. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/hong-kong-protests-anonymous-leaks-chinese-government-data-1469747

InSerbia News under DDoS attack from Serbia

Internet portal InSerbia News was unavailable on Saturday for a few hours due to a DDoS attack. The attack was committed from IP addresses in the range that belongs to internet providers in Serbia, which says that the attack was not performed using “infected” computers (botnet) throughout the world, but that it was organized and maybe coordinated attack for which were used only computers from Serbia. InSerbia wrote on October 7th about “Valter” program, which could also have been used for an attack on InSerbia portal. The way the network of people who use “Valter” is organized, and all of them are from Serbia, increases suspicion that the same software was used against us this time. Because of the situation we are forced to block all IP addresses from Serbia, so visitors from this country must pass “Captcha” check before they enter the website. We apologize to our readers because of this measure. After blocking access to IP addresses from Serbia, the server continued to function normally. At the moment this article is being written (4pm CEST), the attack is still in progress. Source: http://inserbia.info/today/2014/10/inserbia-news-under-ddos-attack-from-serbia/

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InSerbia News under DDoS attack from Serbia

Researcher makes the case for DDOS attacks

When you start with the premise that capitalism is illegitimate it’s easy to dismiss other people’s property rights. To some people, a political mission matters more than anything, including your rights. Such people (the Bolsheviks come to mind) have caused a great deal of damage and suffering throughout history, especially in the last 100 years or so. Now they’re taking their mission online. You better not get in their way. Molly Sauter, a doctoral student at the Berkman Center at Harvard (“exploring cyberspace, sharing its study & pioneering its development”), has a paper calling the use of DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks a legitimate form of activism and protest. This can’t go unchallenged. Sauter notes the severe penalties for DDOS attacks under “…Title 18, Section 1030 (a)(5) of the US Code, otherwise known as the CFAA” (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). This section is short enough that I may as well quote it here verbatim: (5)(A) [Whoever] knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; (B) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or (C) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage and loss. There are other problems with the CFAA with respect to some legitimate security research and whether it technically falls afoul of the act, but that’s not the issue here. Sauter goes on in some detail with the penalties under Federal law for violating this act and, no argument here, they are extreme and excessive. You can easily end up with many years in prison. This is, in fact, a problem generally true of Federal law, the number of crimes under which has grown insanely in the last 30 or so years, with the penalties growing proportionately. For an informed and intelligent rant on the problem I recommend Three Felonies a Day by Harvey Silverglate. Back to hacktivist DDOS attacks. She cites cases of DDOS attacks committed against Koch Industries, Paypal, the Church of Scientology and Lufthansa Airlines, some of these by the hacktivists who call themselves Anonymous. In the US cases of the attacks against Koch, Paypal and the Church, the attackers received prison time and large fines and restitution payments. In the Lufthansa case, in a German court, the attacker was sentenced to pay a fine or serve 90 days in jail; that sentence was overturned on appeal. The court ruled that “…the online demonstration did not constitute a show of force but was intended to influence public opinion.” This is the sort of progressive opinion, dismissive of property rights, that Sauter regrets is not happening here in the US. She notes, and this makes sense to me, that the draconian penalties in the CFAA induce guilty pleas from defendants, preventing the opportunity for a Lufthansa-like precedent. This is part and parcel of the same outrageous growth of Federal criminal law I mentioned earlier; you’ll find the same incentive to plead guilty, even if you’re just flat-out innocent, all over the US Code. I would join Sauter in calling for some sanity in the sentencing in the CFAA, but I part ways with her argument that political motives are a mitigating, even excusing factor. Sauter’s logic rises from a foundation of anti-capitalism: …it would appear that the online space is being or has already been abdicated to a capitalist-commercial governance structure, which happily merges the interests of corporate capitalism with those of the post-9/11 security state while eliding democratic values of political participation and protest, all in the name of ‘stability.’ Once you determine that capitalism is illegitimate, respect for other people’s property rights is no longer a problem. Fortunately, the law protects people against the likes of Anonymous and other anti-capitalist heroes of the far left. I would not have known or cared about Sauter’s article had it not been for a favorable link to it by Bruce Schneier. Schneier is a Fellow at the Berkman Center. Progressives and other leftists who think DDOS, i.e. impeding the business of a person or entity with whom you disagree in order to make a political point, should consider the shoe on the other foot. If I disagree with Schneier’s positions is it cool for me to crash his web site or those of other organizations with which he is affiliated, such as the Berkman Center, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and BT (formerly British Telecom)? I could apply the same principle to anti-abortion protesters impeding access to a clinic. I’m disappointed with Schneier for implying with his link that it’s legitimate to engage in DDOS attacks for political purposes. It’s worth repeating that Sauter has a point about the CFAA, particularly with respect to the sentences. It does need to be reformed — along with a large chunk of other Federal law. The point of these laws is supposed to be to protect people against the offenses of others, not to protect the offender. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/researcher-makes-the-case-for-ddos-attacks-7000034560/

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Researcher makes the case for DDOS attacks

.Anonymous threatens China, Hong Kong authorities with website blackout for DDoS attacks

Anonymous, the nebulous online activist group that uses hacking to further causes it supports, has threatened a major blackout of Chinese and Hong Kong government websites, and to leak tens of thousands of government email address details. The group, under the banner of ‘Operation Hong Kong’ or ‘#OpHongKong’ and ‘#OpHK’ on Twitter, said on Friday it will launch a mass effort against Chinese government servers to bring down their websites via Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Saturday. DDoS attacks attempt to cripple networks by overwhelming them with Internet traffic. “Here’s your heads up, prepare for us, try to stop it, the only success you will have will be taking all your sites offline,” an Anonymous statement posted online said. “China, you cannot stop us. You should have expected us before abusing your power against the citizens of Hong Kong.” Demonstrations in Hong Kong have seen the use of tear gas, violent clashes and mass disruptions to business and traffic as people campaign for the right to democratically elect the Asian financial hub’s leader. Hong Kong’s refusal so far to negotiate with protesters, and a police reaction that many labelled as heavy-handed, has sparked widespread condemnation that has now spread to Anonymous, which often campaigns for civil liberties by attacking people or institutions it sees as opponents of those rights. “If this is true, it will show that the Chinese government is a victim of internet hacking,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei at a daily news briefing. “ China has consistently stressed our opposition to all internet hacking attack activities. We rebuke the acts of this organisation.” The Chinese government’s Hong Kong Liaison Office also said its website had been attacked twice on Wednesday and Thursday, blocking visitors to the site for a time. “This kind of internet attack violates the law and social morals, and we have already reported it to the police,” it said, adding that the website was running normally again. Among the websites Anonymous said it would target are those of China’s Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Justice and Hong Kong police. “Prepping for massive DDoS attacks, Database dumps, etc… Will be destroying #China Government,” wrote one Anonymous participant on Twitter. China’s Defence Ministry, in a statement sent to Reuters, said its website was subject to numerous hacking attacks every day from both home and overseas. “We have taken necessary steps to protect the safe operation of the Defence Ministry website,” it added. The State Internet Information Office, China’s internet regulator, declined to comment. The Ministry of Public Security declined to immediately comment by telephone. The Hong Kong Police Force was not available for immediate comment. The Ministry of Justice said it was not aware of the threat from Anonymous, and that its website wasn’t its responsibility to maintain. The Legal Network Media Beijing Company, which maintains the Ministry of Justice site, said it had not had official notice about any attack, nor had it detected any attacks on the website so far. “If there are future hacking attacks, we have confidence they can be resolved,” said a technician at the company who gave his surname as Zhong. Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/10/10/uk-china-hongkong-internet-idUKKCN0HZ0KY20141010

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.Anonymous threatens China, Hong Kong authorities with website blackout for DDoS attacks

The History of DDoS Attacks as a Tool of Protest

Although the web is only a quarter of a century old, it already has a rich history as a platform for worldwide protest. One common tool used by online activists is the distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS: a technologically crude tactic that involves sending so many requests to a target website that it crashes. In recent years, politically motivated DDoS attacks have been launched on the websites of financial giants and local government departments. This year, websites affiliated with the football World Cup were brought down in protest against FIFA. “DDoS has been around as an activist tactic probably since the early 90s,” Molly Sauter, a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and doctoral student at McGill University, told me. Sauter is the author of the upcoming book The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism and Civil Disobedience , which details the history of the DDoS attack from an obscure, insular activity carried out by artists and intellectuals to a hallmark of 21 st century protest. The earliest example of a DDoS attack that Sauter found in her research was implemented by the Strano Network, an Italian collective that launched an attack in 1995 to protest against the French government’s nuclear policy. Back then, DDoS attacks were laborious, manual affairs, requiring participants to constantly remain at their computer. And because having an internet connection was relatively expensive, they couldn’t last for long. The attack in this case only endured for about an hour. The next major milestone was the use of DDoS by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Originating in the 90s, and attracting the attention of the media by the end of the decade, the hacktivist group described DDoS as akin to a “virtual sit-in.” One thing that separated them from their predecessors was their use of tools developed in-house, which allowed anyone outside of the organisation to join in. Their kit, called FloodNet, directed a user’s traffic to a target predetermined by the EDT, which included the websites of politicians and the White House. Those wishing to join the “sit-in” simply selected their target from a drop down menu, clicked attack, and relaxed while FloodNet automatically bombarded the offending server. The well-known hacker collective Anonymous took this idea of crowd-sourced activism further, and popularised the idea of voluntary botnets. Often used by criminals, a botnet is a large number of systems, all linked together, which give whoever is in charge of them a whole lot of processing power to wield. DDoS is incredibly simplistic, at a purely technological level. By using the hacker-designed software Low Orbit Ion Cannon, and its subsequent upgrades, participants could connect their computer to a vast network and have it donate resources to DDoS attacks. And that pretty much brings us up to today. “DDoS is incredibly simplistic, at a purely technological level,” Sauter said. “While there might be individual innovations in ways of masking or multiplying traffic, it’s not actually going to get much more advanced than that.” But it’s not just the technical details of DDoS that have mutated over the years. The scale of attacks using the device has developed, too. “Groups have become better at attracting, acknowledging and manipulating media coverage in order to attract more participants,” Sauter explained. While earlier groups just did their own thing, Anonymous managed to engage those outside of their immediate cohort more readily. With their iconic imagery, popular Twitter accounts and evocative videos, the media had a lot of material to work with. The press lacked any sort of official spokesperson of Anonymous to talk to—“So they just tended to reproduce these artifacts in media coverage, which did the work of recruitment for Anonymous,” Sauter observed. “Anonymous didn’t have to do a lot of ‘active’ outreach. That was being done for them.” What actually constitutes a ‘successful’ DDoS attack has also changed. “In the 90s, you could sit in front of your computer with your friends, go to whitehouse.gov, click refresh a bunch of times, and you had a significant chance of the website crashing,” said Sauter. An industry has since emerged to offer protection from DDoS attacks, so crashing a major service today is rarer, though still possible with some serious fire-power. But there’s another way to measure the success of DDoS actions than just website down time. Sauter explained that, when it comes to activism in general, “The logic of change is that you have an action, you get covered in the press, then politicians and the public react to the press coverage, not so much the action itself.” This overall impact is perhaps more important than how long a specific website is technically inaccessible. As Sauter said, “The question of what success means is fairly up in the air.” Some argue that DDoS as a protest tool should be formally recognised as political speech, and enjoy the same free-speech protections as street marches, for example. Jay Leiderman, a criminal defense lawyer, has argued that DDoS is a first amendment issue in defence of the “PayPal 14,” a group of WikiLeaks supporters involved in a DDoS attack against the e-commerce business. Attorney Stanley Cohen, who represented one of the accused, described the act as an “electronic sit in,” and members of Anonymous also created a petition, pushing for politically motivated DDoS to be legalised. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND OTHER TYPES OF ORGANISED LAW BREAKING ONLINE ARE STILL CONSIDERED VERY MUCH FRINGE ACTIVITIES. But DDoS can of course also be used for much less sympathetic purposes. “The biggest problem that activist DDoS faces in terms of its fight for legitimacy is criminal DDoS,” said Sauter. “DDoS is a very popular tactic in terms of harassment, extortion and other criminality.” For example, botnets for DDoSing purposes are reportedly already being created to exploit the Shell Shock bug, a recently revealed weakness in Linux and Unix operating systems. Furthermore, Sauter suggested that online activism in general still isn’t really accepted because it remains an alien concept to many people. “Civil disobedience and other types of organised law breaking online are still considered very much fringe activities because there isn’t an understanding that civil disobedience is something that you can do on the internet,” Sauter said. “That I hope is something that will change, but it will take a legal challenge.” But Sauter feels that political DDoS will continue to gain popularity when it comes to activism, and that it might even have something more to give. Whether it’s the Electronic Disturbance Theater protesting against neoliberalism, or Anonymous rising up to fight what they see as injustices, DDoS actions do not exist in a vacuum. Today, politically motivated DDoS is often part of a broader activist culture in the information age. Sauter suggested it could therefore introduce activists to other ideas, “such as information exfiltration, and leaking, and the construction of alternative infrastructures to replace the corporate-dominated and government-surveilled that are currently the main ways of socialising and communicating online.” In short, DDoS attacks in activist circles can be about more than just crashing a few servers. Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/history-of-the-ddos-attack

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The History of DDoS Attacks as a Tool of Protest

Telegram under 150Gbps DDoS attack

Cross platform messaging app Telegram has been a target of massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks for two days in a row over the weekend with the largest in tune of 150Gbps. The DDoS attacks started on Saturday – September 27 – and according to Telegram the scale of the attack was in tune of tens of Gbps. “A DDoS attack on Telegram in progress, tens of Gigabitsec. Users in some countries may have connection issues. We’re working on it, folks!” tweeted Telegram. Prior to the official confirmation, users started complaining of connectivity issues as well as not being able to send messages successfully. These complaints were picked up by Telegram administrators and upon investigation they zeroed it down to DDoS attack. Telegram soon managed to recover from the attack, but DDoS perpetrators launched another massive attack and this time in tune of of 150Gbps. “Detecting a 150+ Gbit/s DDoS now, an attack three times as large as yesterday’s.” tweeted Telegram. Users are still complaining about connectivity issues and there has been no confirmation from Telegram on whether they have been able to resolve the issue or not. Source: http://www.techienews.co.uk/9718714/telegram-150gbps-ddos-attack/

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Telegram under 150Gbps DDoS attack

DDoS Attacks Target Online Gaming Sites, Enterprises

DDoS traffic volume was up overall with a third peaking at over 500Mbps and more than five percent reaching up to 4Gbps, according to NSFOCUS. A continuing trend of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that are short in duration and repeated frequently has been revealed by the NSFOCUS 2014 Mid-Year Threat report. In parallel, high-volume and high-rate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were on the upswing in the first half of 2014. DDoS traffic volume was up overall with a third peaking at over 500Mbps and more than five percent reaching up to 4Gbps. In addition, findings showed that over 50 percent DDoS attacks were above 0.2Mpps in the first half of 2014, increasing from around 16 percent. More than 2 percent of DDoS attacks were launched at a rate of over 3.2Mpps, according to the report. “The DDoS attack is a relatively easy attack method to be employed with noticeable effects among other network attacks. When online service is stopped, the impact and damage it causes is very apparent and straightforward,” Xuhua Bao, senior researcher at NSFOCUS, told eWeek. “Attacks with high frequency make it hard for attack’ targets to respond to instantly, increasing the difficulty of the defense level.” The longest single attack lasted nine days and 11 hours, or 228 hours, while the single largest attack in terms of packet-per-second (pps) hit at a volume of 23 million pps. More than 42 percent of attack victims were targeted multiple times while one in every 40 victims was repeatedly hit more than 10 times. The highest frequency of attacks experienced by a single victim was 68 separate DDoS attacks. “Today, DDoS attack methods have become highly instrumental and resourceable. When an attacker plans to launch a DDoS attack on a specific target, there are plenty of DDoS attack tools and resources available online to be purchased and used,” Bao said. “With the rise of hacktavism in recent years, DDoS attacks have become a means of protesting or expressing your own opinion, which is widely used by some hacker groups.” The report revealed HTTP Flood, TCP Flood and DNS Flood were the top three attack types, together making up 84.6 percent of all attacks. DNS Flood attacks held their place as the most popular attack method, accounting for 42 percent of all attacks. While the number of DNS and HTTP Flood attacks decreased, TCP Flood attacks grew substantially. More than 90 percent of attacks detected lasted less than 30 minutes, an ongoing trend the report said indicates that latency-sensitive websites, such as online gaming, e-commerce and hosting service should be prepared to implement security solutions that support rapid response. The survey also indicated an increase in Internet service providers (ISPs), enterprises and online gaming sites as targets. Attacks targeting ISPs increased by 87.2 percent, while attacks on enterprises jumped by 100.5 percent and online gaming by 60 percent. “The online gaming industry has been a target of DDoS attacks and are mainly profit-driven. The nature of online gaming relies greatly on the Internet service and often there is a huge amount of money involved making them extremely sensitive to attacks,” Bao said. “When they are being attacked, there are obvious and direct economic losses, as well as the loss of the resources from players, which leads to malicious competition and extortion.” Source: http://www.eweek.com/small-business/ddos-attacks-target-online-gaming-sites-enterprises.html

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DDoS Attacks Target Online Gaming Sites, Enterprises