Monthly Archives: March 2015

DDoS attack temporarily blocks seattletimes.com

A denial-of-service attack, in which perpetrators flood a targeted website with requests that overwhelm the site’s servers, is believed to have caused Monday morning’s outage. A cyberattack took down The Seattle Times website for about 90 minutes Monday morning. Seattletimes.com was unavailable from about 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. as a result of a denial-of-service attack, company spokeswoman Jill Mackie said. “The Seattle Times website experienced technical problems Monday morning due to an external attack that appears to have targeted other sites,” Mackie said in a statement. “We continue to monitor the situation and apologize for any inconvenience this caused readers.” Denial-of-service attacks are designed to flood a website with requests, essentially overwhelming the site’s servers and preventing it from responding to other users. The result is a site that grinds to a halt or runs so slowly that it becomes unusable. Such attacks on their own aren’t designed to damage a target’s computer systems or steal files. The attacks, a fixture of Internet security threats for decades, have been blamed on culprits ranging from political operatives to young, tech-savvy hackers connected by social media. The ease with which such attacks could be orchestrated was illustrated in 2000 when a 15-year-old Canadian boy, working under the alias “Mafiaboy,” was able to temporarily bring down the websites of Yahoo, CNN and Amazon.com, among others. Mackie said The Seattle Times’ information technology staff believes Monday’s attack on the website was carried out by a cyberattack group that calls itself Vikingdom2015. The group is said to have targeted several government and media websites, including those of the Indiana state government and the Bangor (Maine) Daily News, with denial-of-service attacks. IBM security researchers said the group was formed from former members of the Team Cyber Poison hacker group, and began attacking websites this month. Source: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/cyberattack-temporarily-blocks-seattletimescom/

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DDoS attack temporarily blocks seattletimes.com

Half of companies under DDoS attack have critical data stolen

Neustar surveyed IT professionals from across EMEA to understand the impact of DDoS attacks. 40 percent of companies estimate hourly losses of over £100,000 at peak times during a DDoS outage,…

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Half of companies under DDoS attack have critical data stolen

Day FOUR of the GitHub web assault: Activists point fingers at ‘China’s global censorship’

Code repository warns of ‘evolving’ attacks With the GitHub distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack nearing its fifth day of bombardment, the code-sharing upstart said it is holding up well under fire.…

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Day FOUR of the GitHub web assault: Activists point fingers at ‘China’s global censorship’

Rutgers Suffers Foreign DDoS Attack

On Monday morning, Rutgers University was still trying to recover from a distributed denial of service (DDoS ) attack  that had been launched against it over the weekend, according to media reports. The attack, which began on Friday afternoon, interrupted Internet service for Rutgers students, faculty and staff, although no confidential information appears to have been leaked. The university’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) had managed to restore Internet service on campus as of Monday, although some services remained unavailable for users trying to access the systems from off-campus. On Sunday, Don Smith, Rutgers’ vice president of Information Technology, alerted students to the attack via e-mail. Attack Originated from Ukraine, China “The Rutgers University network has been under an extended distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack since Friday, Mar. 27,” the university wrote in a security briefing on its computing services Web site on Sunday. “Since the initial attack, there have been multiple follow-up attacks. OIT has been working to maintain access to the network and IT services around the clock since the attacks began, but as fast as one service is fixed another is targeted.” The FBI is investigating the attack, which is believed to have originated from China and the Ukraine, according to a report by the local New York NBC affiliate, citing a source at the university. The local Rutgers University police are also investigating the attack. In addition to causing Internet service to slow down or become completely unavailable, the attack also managed to take down the Rutgers homepage for 15 minutes over the weekend. The university’s Sakai platform, which is an online tool used by both students and faculty, was also unavailable for off-campus users as of Sunday afternoon. “Unfortunately, we have no ETA at this time for a permanent restoration of all affected services,” the university said on its Web site. “Normal service will be restored as soon as OIT is confident that the attacks are over.” Rutgers No Stranger to DDoS The attack is not the first the university has suffered. As recently as November, it experienced a similar DDoS attack that seemed to be timed to coincide with the period during which new students were registering for classes. During last year’s attack, the Rutgers network was shut down when a hacker flooded it with external communications requests. Like the most recent attack, the November attack is thought to have originated in Eastern Europe and China, according to a report on the Daily Targum, the university’s official student newspaper. Last year’s attack lasted only about 24 hours, however, unlike the current attack from which the school is still recovering. The day before the attack the school announced that it had been awarded $1.95 million by the federal government to develop a training program for the study of issues related to homeland security. Source: http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=1320044NONV0

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Rutgers Suffers Foreign DDoS Attack

Massive DDoS against GitHub continues

Popular web-based Git repository hosting service GitHub has been battling a massive DDoS attack – the biggest they have ever experienced – for the last four days. “The attack began around 2AM UTC o…

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Massive DDoS against GitHub continues

Botnets inflating Twitch audiences help broadcasters earn money

Most people dream about earning a living by doing something they enjoy. For some gamers, that dream is achievable by using Twitch, the game streaming service that offers gamers with a big-enough follo…

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Botnets inflating Twitch audiences help broadcasters earn money

GitHub recovering from massive DDoS attacks

The attacks were aimed at two GitHub-hosted projects fighting Chinese censorship Software development platform GitHub said Sunday it was still experiencing intermittent outages from the largest cyberattack in its history but had halted most of the attack traffic. Starting on Thursday, GitHub was hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that sent large volumes of Web traffic to the site, particularly toward two Chinese anti-censorship projects hosted there. Over the next few days, the attackers changed their DDoS tactics as GitHub defended the site, but as of Sunday, it appears the site was mostly working. A GitHub service called Gists, which lets people post bits of code, was still affected, it said. On Twitter, GitHub said it continued to adapt its defenses. The attacks appeared to focus specifically on two projects hosted on GitHub, according to a blogger who goes by the nickname of Anthr@X on a Chinese- and English-language computer security forum. One project mirrors the content of The New York Times for Chinese users, and the other is run by Greatfire.org, a group that monitors websites censored by the Chinese government and develops ways for Chinese users to access banned services. China exerts strict control over Internet access through its “Great Firewall,” a sophisticated ring of networking equipment and filtering software. The country blocks thousands of websites, including ones such as Facebook and Twitter and media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Bloomberg. Anthr@X wrote that it appeared advertising and tracking code used by many Chinese websites appeared to have been modified in order to attack the GitHub pages of the two software projects. The tracking code was written by Baidu, but it did not appear the search engine — the largest in China — had anything to do with it. Instead, Anthr@X wrote that some device on the border of China’s inner network was hijacking HTTP connections to websites within the country. The Baidu tracking code had been replaced with malicious JavaScript that would load the two GitHub pages every two seconds. In essence, it means the attackers had roped in regular Internet users into their attacks without them knowing. “In other words, even people outside China are being weaponized to target things the Chinese government does not like, for example, freedom of speech,” Anthr@X wrote. GitHub has not laid blame for the attacks, writing on Saturday that “based on reports we’ve received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content.” The attackers used a wide variety of methods and tactics, including new techniques “that use the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people to flood github.com with high levels of traffic,” GitHub said. In late December, China cut off all access to Google’s Gmail service, after blocking Facebook’s Instagram app, and the phone messaging app Line. A month prior, it appeared many non-political sites supported by the U.S. content delivery network EdgeCast Network were blocked. EdgeCast may have been a casualty because its cloud services are often used to host mirror sites for ones that have been banned. Source: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2903318/github-recovering-from-massive-ddos-attacks.html

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GitHub recovering from massive DDoS attacks

Indiana’s website taken out by DDoS in response to ‘religious freedom’ law

The state’s website was up and down for most of the early afternoon on Friday The state of Indiana is having a bad week. First, Governor Mike Pence signed a controversial “religious freedom” bill into law; earning the state a black eye for taking step backwards on civil rights. Now, twenty-four hours later, the state’s website was knocked offline by a group taking up another person’s protest against Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The group responsible for taking IN.gov offline has targeted 34 other state, local, tribal, and territorial government websites this month. Going by the name @YourVikingdom on Twitter, the group targeted Indiana’s website after another user suggested that a campaign against the state be mounted in response to recently enacted discriminatory law. Senate Bill 101, also known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was surrounded by controversy in the days leading up to its signing. Businesses and organizations on both sides of the debate, including religious groups such as The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) urged Gov. Pence to veto the bill. The problem most people have with the new law is that it opens the door for business owners to deny services to the LGBT community for religious reasons. The law, said to be nothing short of legalized discrimination, has caused business leaders to react, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who stated that employees and customers would no longer be sent to Indiana. Salesforce bought ExactTarget, an Indiana-based marketing software company, for $2.5B in 2013. “Today we are canceling all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination,” Benioff said via Twitter. There’s no way to prove it, but the DDoS attack against Indiana’s primary website might have been avoided. The group responsible has no real purpose. Despite their outlandish claims, the reality is they attack vulnerable infrastructures – or low-hanging fruit as it were – for fun. There is no cause for them to support, just their own amusement. All of their victims, especially the government websites, have little to no anti-DDoS protection. Indiana is no different. Yet, because of the backlash against Indiana over the ‘religious freedom’ law, @YourVikingdom took notice and flooded the website with traffic to the point that it collapsed. The site was able to recover, but the damage had already been done. Then again, the ‘religious freedom’ law might have been nothing more than an excuse. As low-hanging fruit, Indiana’s servers were always a possible target, especially given the established pattern set by @YourVikingdom. Indiana’s website was offline at 2:00p.m. EST, and recovered 45 minutes later, but remained sluggish for another half-hour while the Indiana Office of Technology worked to resolve the issue. Source: http://www.csoonline.com/article/2903314/business-continuity/indianas-website-taken-out-by-ddos-in-response-to-religious-freedom-law.html

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Indiana’s website taken out by DDoS in response to ‘religious freedom’ law

GitHub Still Battling DDoS Attack

San Francisco-based GitHub was taken out with a denial of service attack Wednesday. Scripts from the Beijing-based Baidu sent traffic coming to a page operated by GreatFire and a page with Chinese-translations of The New York Times. As is the focus of DDoS attacks, GitHub’s availability was knocked out as a result of the traffic caused. In morning tweets during the attack, GitHub informed followers that the attack was still going and getting worse, but that they were on top of dealing with it. As of two hours ago GitHub states that the DDoS attack is still being worked on. Meanwhile Baidu has said that it had nothing to do with the attack intentionally. The Chinese search engine titan also says that it is working security specialists to find out the cause of things. The company made certain to state that its security hadn’t been compromised during the attack on GitHub. Speculation in tech and security circles say that the attack was a means of strengthening China’s methods of web censorship by taking out sites that could allow for users to get around it. Baidu was simply used as a means of amplifying the attack due to how sizable it is and the amount of traffic it can produce. Source: http://kabirnews.com/github-still-battling-ddos-attack/8495/

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GitHub Still Battling DDoS Attack