Category Archives: DDoS Criminals

Curriculum Protests: DDoS attacks launched on official, pan-blue Web sites

In what it said was support for the ongoing curriculum protests, hacker group Anonymous Asia yesterday launched a third wave of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the Web sites of two political parties and a government ministry. The Web sites of the New Party, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the KMT Taipei branch office and the Ministry of Economic Affairs were attacked for more than an hour. According to reports by Storm Media Group, Anonymous launched its first wave of DDoS attacks under the name “Anonymous #Op Taiwan” on Friday last week by locking down the Presidential Office and Ministry of Education Web sites for five hours. A notice released by the group said: “We are everywhere and nowhere. Taiwan’s police are not exempt [from our attacks], and all police must take responsibility for this incident. We cannot permit the use of violence or pepper spray on peacefully demonstrating people. When you hurt the Taiwanese people, revenge will be sought. We cannot forget, support us and the corrupt officials will be afraid of us. Taiwan’s government, expect us.” On Sunday, the group launched a second wave of DDoS attacks against the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of National Defense, the National Academy of Educational Research and CtiTV, a television station generally sympathetic toward the KMT, the report said. In a Facebook post on Sunday, New Party Chairperson Yok Mu-ming (???) said the DDoS attacks were serious national security concerns. “Do we not see China as our enemy and try to prevent Beijing hacking our Web sites? What I’m seeing now is like the opening salvoes of a Taiwanese civil war,” Yok said. Yok called on the public to put pressure on the Presidential Office and National Security Bureau to look into the attacks and find out who was behind them. “We must know if the motives are against curriculum changes or if there are other ulterior motives,” he said. Shortly after Yok’s Facebook post the New Party Web site was hacked. Anonymous Asia said on Facebook: “Yok Mu-ming, are you looking for us? Here we come.” Anonymous Asia is a loose coalition of hackers and Internet activists. The group describes itself as “an internet gathering” with “a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives” and has been known for high-profile public DDoS attacks on government, religious, and corporate Web sites. Source: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/08/04/2003624588

More here:
Curriculum Protests: DDoS attacks launched on official, pan-blue Web sites

Planned Parenthood websites downed in DDoS attack

Planned Parenthood websites have gone down and are, according to the main page, undergoing maintenance. In a statement emailed to SCMagazine.com on Thursday, Dawn Laguens, executive VP of Planned Parenthood, said that the Planned Parenthood websites were the target of a DDoS attack. “Today, the Planned Parenthood websites experienced a wide scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a hacker tactic to overwhelm websites with massive amounts of traffic to block any legitimate traffic from getting in,” Laguens said. The websites were back online shortly after the attack, but are scheduled to remain down throughout Thursday for security purposes, Laguens said, adding that during this time visitors are being redirected to the organization’s Facebook pages. Following reports that politically motivated attackers released website databases, Planned Parenthood announced on Monday that it is investigating possible unauthorized access to its systems. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/planned-parenthood-websites-downed-in-ddos-attack/article/429563/

Taken from:
Planned Parenthood websites downed in DDoS attack

Critical BIND bug scores PATCH YESTERDAY grading

Easy to hack universal remote BIND DoS hole leaves DNS open to attack Gird your loins internet: Attackers now have the ability to disrupt large swathes of the web through a remote denial of service vulnerability found in the most widely used software for DNS servers.…

Original post:
Critical BIND bug scores PATCH YESTERDAY grading

NJ Casino’s DDoS Attack Still Under Investigation

On July 2, a cyber attack was coordinated against several New Jersey-based gambling websites and continued throughout the July 4th holiday weekend. At least four online casinos were affected and experience downtime, and we placed on alert as the State Division of Gaming Enforcement commenced their investigation. Although this is the first time the country had seen an attack on online gaming websites, it isn’t the first time that hackers have targeted casinos. Back in 2014, Sands Casino in Las Vegas had experienced an IT catastrophe that led to the shutdown of PCS and servers, wiping many of their hard drives clean. Bloomberg Business writers Ben Elgin and Michael Riley explained that this wasn’t an Ocean’s Eleven heist; someone had a personal vendetta against the company, specifically CEO and majority owner Sheldon Adelson. Frank Cilluffo, director of George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, later disclosed that they believe this digital conflict was perpetrated by Iran. Many feared that this was the beginning of a cyber war, as the nation’s enemies discovered a way to injure American companies to the point that it would incite a government response. Surprisingly, Sands had managed to keep most of the details of the incident under wraps for almost a year. At the time, it was the biggest strike on US corporate infrastructure, prior to the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack from last November. Fast forward to this year’s July 4th weekend, David Rebuck of the State Division of Gaming Enforcement Director confirms that there was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack, where the 30-minute downtime occurred due to the hackers flooding the sites with data, rendering the them inoperative. Atlantic City’s Bill Hughes Jr., head of Cybersecurity of law firm Cooper Levenson, compares the attack to a traffic gridlock, where “the parkway becomes a parking lot.” The hackers threatened to launch a more powerful attack within 24 hours and revealed they would sustain this breach unless the casino operators paid a ransom to be paid in bitcoins, an internet currency that has proven popular with online criminals even though it does have its legitimate uses. Luckily, no further attacks were reported to the State Division of Gaming Enforcement. While gambling was legalized in Atlantic City in 1976 according to information portal Mayfair Casinos, online casinos had only been legal since 2013 which makes this strike rather sudden. Sudden, maybe, but not random. Rebuck tells NJ.com that they have an idea of who was behind this hacking incident, saying that this individual is a known actor and has a history of this types of attacks. Rebuck did not divulge any more details of the perpetrator, along with the websites impacted and amount paid in ransom. Despite the occurrences in the past year, University of Nevada’s Center for Gaming Research Director David Schwartz says that American online casinos are still not a major target for hackers, unlike gaming sites hosted on servers outside of the country which usually have a demand for ransom. Source: http://www.casinoscamreport.com/2015/07/22/nj-casinos-cyber-attack-still-under-investigation/

Read the original:
NJ Casino’s DDoS Attack Still Under Investigation

Anonymous in Cyberwar With Canadian Gov’t After Mountie Killed Activist

On Monday, hacktivists said they had stepped up their operation to gain access to Canadian government secrets after a mounted police officer shot and killed an activist at an environmental protest in BC. The million-strong army of Anonymous group hacktivists is waging a cyberwar on Canadian authorities and law enforcers after a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer fatally shot an activist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask at an environmental protest in British Columbia last week.The shooting in Dawson Creek, which Anonymous says was unprovoked, triggered a vehement response from the group, who launched a massive cyberoperation codenamed AnonDown to force Canadian police to reveal the identity of the shooter. The declaration of war on Saturday was followed by a series of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on RCMP web pages the next day, including on its national website, the Dawson Creek affiliate site and the RCMP Heritage Center page. On Monday, hacktivists said they had stepped up the operation to gain access to government secrets. “AnonDown has accessed docs marked ‘secret’ inside Canadian government. It’s not just a DDoS op anymore kiddos,” the activists said in a taunting tweet. Fatal Shooting The killing of the protester took place last Thursday when Canadian mounted police responded to a disturbance at a public hearing where a controversial dam project was being discussed. Upon arrival, police singled out a masked man who allegedly refused to surrender and was shot down, police said, adding that a pocket knife was later recovered at the scene. Anonymous, however, told the local Globe and Mail newspaper that lawmen gunned down the wrong man. The man who allegedly caused the disturbance during the dam debates had left by the time police moved in. They said the victim, who succumbed to the gunshot wound later at a hospital, was fired at while trying to put the knife on the ground. The policeman behind the killing has not been identified publicly. In a video statement, Anonymous vowed to “identify the RCMP officer involved and release the docs on the Internet because the world has the right to know every detail about killer cops.” Operation Begins In a Saturday video statement, Anonymous said they would seek justice for the slain activist and avenge him if their demands are not met. They also pledged to rally the entire collective of hacktivists to “remove the RCMP cyber infrastructure from the Internet.” The first “cyber-shots” were fired on Sunday when the main RCMP website and Dawson Creek detachment site could not be accessed for several hours. The group later claimed responsibility for the outages. The Globe and Mail cited a Twitter posting, associated with the hacker group, which suggested “turning it off and back on again.” The main RCMP website was online on Monday. But Anonymous warned that there was more such actions to follow. “Our vengeance will be swift and powerful but it will not include violence,” they tweeted. Not So Harmless Denial-of-access attacks that involve flooding the target website with communication requests are often used to crash a site for a short period of time. Nevertheless, hacktivists’ threats to disrupt the work of police websites should not be taken lightly, the Globe and Mail cited a cybersecurity expert from the Defence Intelligence firm as saying on Sunday. Defence Intelligence Chief Executive Keith Murphy told the outlet that the group had a global reach of about one and a half million, and had proven in the past to go through with their threats. Source: http://sputniknews.com/world/20150720/1024824329.html#ixzz3gSiu0DZW

See more here:
Anonymous in Cyberwar With Canadian Gov’t After Mountie Killed Activist

A comparative view of cloud-based DDoS protection services

Six months ago we experienced a 30Gb/sec and 60M PPS attack that was targeting over 1000 IPs on our network. Although we eventually stopped the attack with the aid of our upstream providers, a number …

Continued here:
A comparative view of cloud-based DDoS protection services

Cisco Videoscape bug could bring endless repeats to your tellie

Cloudy PVR has denial of service problem, but the fix is in Cisco is asking Web broadcasters using its Videoscape TV-over-IP streaming product to get patching, after a denial-of-service vulnerability was found in the software.…

See more here:
Cisco Videoscape bug could bring endless repeats to your tellie

Three Israelis among dozens arrested in global sting on hacking forum

Israeli suspects include an Israeli Arab who is believed to have used his hacking prowess to assist a terror group hostile to Israel. Three Israelis – including an Arab Israeli accused of aiding a terror group – were arrested this week as part of a global sting led by the FBI against a hacking forum believed responsible for an unknown number of cybercrimes over the past several years, it was cleared for publication on Wednesday. The site www.Darkode.com” was taken down on Tuesday by a joint law enforcement effort led by the FBI in collaboration with Europol and law enforcement agencies in 18 countries, including the Israel Police cybercrimes unit. Over 70 suspects have been arrests since the raids began, including alleged hackers from the United Kingdom, India, South America, the United States, Eastern Europe, the Former Yugoslavia, Israel, and elsewhere. The homepage of Darkode.com currently shows a message from the FBI saying that the domain has been seized by the law enforcement agency and several others acting through Europol. Around the message are the seals of police departments from more than a dozen countries. The Israeli suspects include an Israeli Arab who is believed to have used his hacking prowess to assist a terror group hostile to Israel, either by passing on money or stolen data; though an official from the Israel Police cybercrimes unit said he could not disclose which group. The other two suspects are brothers from central Israel. The identities of all three suspects are not cleared for publication for the time being. All three were brought for a remand extension at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday and were ordered kept in custody until Sunday. Since the site went online in 2007 its been used as a black market for hundreds of hackers to meet and collaborate, and buy and sell stolen data, including, but not limited to, credit card information, email addresses and passwords, and personal details to aid in identity theft. An officer from the Israel Police cybercrimes unit on Wednesday called the forum “a factory for the production of cyber weapons.” It was also a popular meeting place for hackers looking to contract other cyber criminals to carry out attacks for them. For instance, hackers looking to carry out a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) could take to the forum and contract such attacks from other attackers, in exchange for payments made in bitcoins, the online currency. Payments were also made by way of money transfer to bank accounts, which Israel Police said indicates the level of freedom the forum members said they had operating on the website. The site was invitation only, and members could only gain access after two separate members recommended them and later showing examples of cyberattacks they had carried out in the past, a sort of “hacking portfolio” as one official from the Israel Police cybercrimes unit said Wednesday. The FBI on Tuesday sent agents from their Israel liaison office to the Lod headquarters of the LAHAV 433 unit, popularly referred to as “the Israeli FBI”, to watch the arrests take place in real time. In a situation room, the FBI agents and officers from the cybercrimes unit watched a screen that showed the countries worldwide where the raids were being carried out, as well as the names of the suspects being arrested and removed from the screen in real time, police said Wednesday. Source: http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Tech/Three-Israelis-among-dozens-arrested-in-global-sting-on-hacking-forum-409092

Continue Reading:
Three Israelis among dozens arrested in global sting on hacking forum