OMG, it reconfigures your firewall… SAVE yourselves, Linux lords A router-to-router bot first detected two years ago has evolved – and now has the capability to reconfigure the firewalls of its victims.…
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Use home networking kit? DDoS bot is BACK… and it has EVOLVED
After analyzing trends in the Chinese underground, Trend Micro found that activity in the marketplace doubled between 2012 and 2013. Upon an even closer look, researchers at the firm also found that the most coveted tools and services in the underground were compromised hosts, remote access trojans (RATs) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack services. Trend Micro’s new research paper, “The Chinese Underground in 2013,”(PDF) detailed criminal activity facilitated in the space, and in a Thursday interview with SCMagazine.com, Christopher Budd, global threat communication manager at the company, said that, among the products, compromised hosts were most sought after. In the report, Trend Micro defined “compromised hosts” as client workstations or servers that cybercriminals “have gained command and control of” without the owners’ consent. “That makes sense, because the compromised host is a multi-tasker,” Budd said. “It’s kind of a like a Swiss army knife – you can do multiple things with it.” The report also highlighted the going rate last year for popular black market services. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) offerings, for instance, were offered for anywhere from $16 per day to nearly $500 for a “lifetime” DDoS toolkit rental, the report revealed. Researchers also monitored underground activity centered around mobile attacks. Trend Micro found that the most in demand offerings were SMS spamming services, SMS servers and premium service numbers. Overall, the report noted that the increased activity in the China’s underground took into account, both the number of participants and the number of product and services offerings in 2013. In his interview, Rudd also noted that attacks, facilitated through shady transactions in China’s underground market, were most often aimed at other users in the country – an ongoing trend that will likely continue. “The participants in the Chinese underground looking inward, and the Russian underground looking outward [in attacks], has been a consistent trend,” Budd said. “And partly, that’s linguistic, because the people in the Chinese underground market [products and services] in Chinese as opposed to English – [but] it’s a combination of cultural and linguistic factors,” he said. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/report-chinas-underground-activity-doubled-last-year/article/369849/
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Report on China’s underground services for DDoS Attacks
Akamai Technologies is alerting enterprises to a high-risk threat of IptabLes and IptabLex infections on Linux systems. Malicious actors may use infected Linux systems to launch DDoS attacks against t…
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Linux systems infiltrated and controlled in a DDoS botnet
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a method attackers favor for disrupting an organization’s operations by flooding the network with traffic, overwhelming available bandwidth, and making network resources unavailable. According to research from the Ponemon Institute, DDoS attacks accounted for 18 percent of data center outages in 2013, up from 2 percent in 2010. They found that such attacks are the most costly data-center attacks to mitigate, costing an average of $822,000 per outage, leading to problems such as business disruption, loss of revenues, and reduced productivity. However, the costs can be even higher for organizations that rely on their websites as their main sales vehicle, since the unavailability of those websites can lead to those organizations losing multiple millions of dollars in sales. According to Forrester Research, the average organization loses $27 million for a 24-hour outage, with business services and financial services institutions faring the worst. Despite the damage that DDoS attacks can do in and of themselves, they are often used as a smoke screen to divert resources into clearing up the disruption, leaving organizations unaware of other attacks happening simultaneously. Often, the real motivations are financial manipulation or a competitive takeout. In other cases, the motivations are ideological, looking to hurt or embarrass organizations. For example, in late 2012 to early 2013, 46 financial institutions in the United States were hit with over 200 coordinated and timed DDoS attacks. It is believed that the motivation for this campaign of attacks was to cause consumers to lose their trust in the retail banking system. However, organizations in any walk of life can be impacted, both in the private and public sector, and such attacks should be considered a top concern by any organization, especially as DDoS attacks are increasingly becoming a weapon of choice. Not only are DDoS attacks growing in number and affecting a wider range of organizations, but more tools are becoming available that make them easier to pull off. Whereas previously an attacker would have had to possess a fair degree of skill and recruit an army of computers into a botnet in order to create enough computing power to launch an attack, new attack methods require considerably fewer resources and less skill. DDoS attack kits are now readily available on the Internet for low prices, making the job of a relatively unskilled hacktivist much easier, and DDoS-as-a-service attacks are an increasingly common phenomenon, whereby attackers hire themselves and their botnets out to those wishing to launch attacks. Another recent development is the use of network time protocol amplification attacks, which use publicly available network time protocol servers, the real purpose of which is to provide clock-synchronization services over public networks. Using this method means that attackers no longer need to go through the effort of putting together a botnet to launch their attacks. Recently, there has also been a dramatic rise in mobile applications used in DDoS attacks, driven by the ease with which mobile apps can be downloaded. These apps allow any mobile user to join a DDoS attack if he or she wishes—for example, for an ideological cause with which he or she sympathizes. It is predicted that such attacks will increase dramatically. The tremendous growth in DDoS attacks in 2013 that continued, if not accelerated, in 2014 means that all organizations should beware of the consequences. Where they do not have the resources in-house to defend themselves, organizations should investigate the use of services that can divert traffic away from their networks while remediation measures are taken. While, on the one hand, there is a trend toward increasing complexity and sophistication of attacks, on the other hand, attacks are becoming easier to pull off by an ever-wider range of criminal actors. The DDoS attack landscape is set to become much more complicated, and many more organizations will become victims. All organizations should beware. Source: https://blogs.rsa.com/ddos-attacks-increasingly-weapon-choice/
THE Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing a computer-hacking attack on JPMorgan Chase and as many as four other banks, in what people familiar with the probe described as a significant breach of corporate computer security. The timing and extent of the hacking attacks wasn’t immediately clear, though cybersecurity experts began probing the possible JPMorgan breach earlier this month, according to people familiar with the investigation. Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/fbi-probe-into-hack-attacks-on-banks/story-fnay3ubk-1227040501221?nk=a9c75ab55e6d5171cc79455c78c5564d#
Police officers in Ferguson, Missouri have been forced to communicate via text message after Anonymous launched a DDOS attack against the city’s servers shutting them down, following the murder of Michael Brown. On top of that, private servers of the Ferguson police department were hacked to get personal information. Both peaceful and violent protests have taken place in response to the atrocity in Ferguson. Last Thursday, anonymous performed a DDoS attack on Ferguson servers. The attack was in reaction to the murder of 18 year old, Michael Brown, an African American teenager who was killed unjustly by white policemen. Law enforcement officials said recently that the FBI has taken an immense interest in the investigation of hacking attempts directed at the personal computers and online accounts of police officers who are part of the department responsible for the murder. CNN and other mainstream media outlets, in affiliation with three policeman, who’s names are undisclosed, have reported the police as victims of a ‘cyber attack’, suggesting that anonymous is to blame for the violent demonstrations that took place in Ferguson, avoiding the clear fact that the PD of Ferguson are responsible, and a reaction like this is to be expected in result to the killing of an innocent person. This is of no surprise that corporately funded news outlets would be hesitant to speak negatively of the police. In reality, despite the propaganda that the 1% will spew forth, it is organizations like Anonymous that are fighting for freedom, unrestricted by the fascist regulations of a fear-mongering governing body, we can fight for peace using whatever means possible. Source: http://anonopsofficial.blogspot.ca/2014/08/anonymous-hacked-ferguson-police.html
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Anonymous Hacked Ferguson Police Servers and Launched a DDOS Attack
Planning on haxing Netflix? Don’t plan it on Facebook NetFlix’s security team has given the open source treatment to three tools it uses to monitor the internet and gather evidence of planned attacks against its infrastructure.…
Just hours after Amazon announced a $970m deal to acquire Twitch, the live video platform for gamers was taken offline temporarily by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Twitch is the latest in a string of online gaming platforms to be hit by DDoS attacks that have been linked to several groups, including Lizzard Squad, jihadist group Islamic State, and Anonymous. At the weekend, Sony’s PlayStation Network was knocked offline and several others experienced disruptions, including Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Blizzard’s Battle.net. DDoS attacks are commonly used by competitors or activists to take services offline using a variety of techniques that make services impossible to reach. The reason for the DDoS attack on Twitch is unknown, but industry pundits have speculated that it may be linked to concerns about the acquisition by Amazon. Commenting on the weekend disruptions, Dave Larson, CTO at Corero Network Security, said the drivers for launching DDoS attacks are far ranging and difficult to pinpoint in many cases. “Anyone can become a victim at any time and, as the attacks continue to become stronger, longer and more sophisticated, businesses that rely on their online web applications as a revenue source cannot become complacent,” he said. Larson said the latest DDoS attacks underscore the importance of including a DDoS first line of defence as a component of network security architecture. Lancope chief technology officer TK Keanini said that while DDoS was once a resource held by a few of the elite groups on the net, this method of attack is now available to anyone as it is offered as a service. “If you know where to look, and you have some crypto currency in hand, just point and shoot,” he said. According to Keanini, any business connected to the internet is likely to be targeted by a DDoS attack at some point. “But game networks have to work harder than most to remain secure as they are incredibly attractive targets. “Not only are they high profile, with any disruption making the news, but given all the in-game commerce, credit card and personal information is kept up to date and can be monetised by these cyber criminals,” he said. Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240227573/DDoS-attack-downs-Twitch-on-news-of-Amazon-acquisition
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DDoS attack downs Twitch on news of Amazon acquisition
Sony's PlayStation Network has been hit with and downed by a large DDoS attack this weekend, but is now back online a functioning as it should. “Like other major networks around the world, the Play…
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Sony PSN back online after DDoS attack
A CHINESE TROJAN , one of the few to be written for the Linux operating system, has seemingly made the jump to Windows. First reported in May by Russian anti-malware software house Dr Web, the original malware known as “Linux.Dnsamp” is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Trojan, which, according to the company blog, transfers between Linux machines, altering the startup scripts, collecting and sending machine configuration data to the hackers’ server and then running silently waiting for orders. Now it appears that the same hackers have ported the Trojan to run in Windows as “Trojan.Dnsamp.1? The Windows version gains entry to the system under the guise of a Windows Service Test called “My Test 1?. It is then saved in the system folder of the infected machine under the name “vmware-vmx.exe”. When triggered, just like its Linux counterpart, the Trojan sends system information back to the hackers’ central server and then awaits the signal to start a DDoS attack or start downloading other malicious programs. Fortunately, the vast majority of the attacks using this method were aimed at other Chinese websites, which were attacked 28,093 times, but Dr Web warns that US websites came second with nine percent of attacks. Although the threat of malware is an everyday hazard to most computer users, to find an attack on Linux is much rarer, and to find any kind of malware that has been ported from one operating system to another is almost unheard of. In June, RSS reader service Feedly, note app Evernote and streaming music service Deezer all suffered DDoS attacks. Google is working on Project Shield, an initative designed to help smaller web servers fight off DDoS attacks. Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2361245/chinese-linux-trojan-makes-the-jump-to-windows
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Chinese Linux Trojan makes the jump to Windows – DDoS attacks largely aimed within China