Category Archives: DDoS Vendors

Hacker squad plans DDoS attacks on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live this Christmas

Hacker group Phantom Squad plans to shut down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network on Christmas. Forget the Grinch, there’s someone else who wants to steal Christmas. Phantom Squad, an online hacker group, has threatened to shut down Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network this Christmas by unleashing a series of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks — coordinated barrages of falsified incoming server traffic that causes the system to crash. DATA BREACHES AND CYBERATTACKS IN 2015 “We are going to shut down Xbox Live and PSN this year on Christmas,” the hackers tweeted. “And we are going to keep them down for one week straight. #DramaAlert.” We are going to shut down Xbox live and PSN this year on christmas. And we are going to keep them down for one week straight #DramaAlert — Phantom Squad (@PhantomSqaud) December 9, 2015 This could cause a big problem, because a lot of people are expecting to receive new gaming consoles on Dec. 25. If Phantom Squad is successful, this would be the second year in a row that these gaming networks go offline. Last year, the infamous hacker group Lizard Squad took credit for shutting down Xbox Live and PSN for two days. The group demanded more retweets and Twitter followers in exchange for restoring the servers. Phantom Squad, which said it has no relation to Lizard Squad, claims they’ve previously performed smaller outages on the gaming community servers, as well as other website such as Reddit. The group also explained in a tweet why it is that they perform these attacks. “I get asked a lot on why we do this? Why do we take down PSN and Xbox Live?” the tweet reads. “Because cyber security does not exist.” Sony and Microsoft have both received a series of attacks over the past year, but it’s still unknown what tactics they’ve developed to try and avoid these issues. Kim Dotcom, the infamous Internet entrepreneur behind Megeupload, has warned Sony and Microsoft that the attack could be avoided if they update their servers. “Warning @Sony & @Microsoft. You had 1 year to upgrade your networks. If Lizard Squad takes down PSN & XBOX this Xmas, we’ll be pissed! RT!,” Dotcom tweeted. Dotcom, who is also a gamer, helped stop last year’s attack by promising the hackers 3,000 accounts on his encrypted upload service Mega. While Sony and Microsoft work on strengthening their servers, people who bought a console as a gift this Christmas can unbox it, plug it in, and download all the updates as soon as they buy it. This process will let them at least play games offline on Christmas. Otherwise, if the hackers release a DDoS attack, the console will be useless without being powered on and updated. Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/hackers-plan-ddos-attack-psn-xbox-live-christmas-article-1.2467876

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Hacker squad plans DDoS attacks on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live this Christmas

‘Phantom’ menace threatens to down Xbox Live, PSN at Xmas

Hackers reveal plans to make children cry Last Christmas LizardSquad played Grinch with the holiday fun of gamers by knocking out XBox Live and smacking the PlayStation Network offline with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.…

Boston internet service disrupted briefly by DDoS attack

Internet service in Boston was disrupted on Tuesday in what is being called a “minor act of cybervandalism,” according to the Boston Herald . The outage, affecting city agencies and the police and fire departments, was “short, but widespread,” said Mayor Martin J. Walsh. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that caused computers worldwide to redirect network traffic to City Hall computers is cited as the method by which web connections were shuttered. While Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city’s CIO, dismissed the attack as “a minor act of cybervandalism,” the incident is another example of an attack method becoming increasingly common and illustrates the vulnerabilities enterprises face on a daily basis. Experts explained that as the attack harvests no data, it might have been retribution or an attacker’s attempt to gain notoriety. Franklin-Hodge said his team was able to restore service within 20 minutes. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/boston-officials-call-ddos-attack-on-internet-service-a-minor-act/article/460203/

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Boston internet service disrupted briefly by DDoS attack

Web host Moonfruit defies Armada DDoS crew … by (temporarily) defeating itself

Move follows 45-minute attack last Thursday Web host Moonfruit last night began putting its systems back online after taking down customers’ sites in order to upgrade defences in the face of a threatened DDoS attack, with the firm blaming a recent assault (which prompted the self-takedown) on the Armada Collective crew.…

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Web host Moonfruit defies Armada DDoS crew … by (temporarily) defeating itself

Mysterious hackers attempting to bring down entire internet by DDoS-ing critical servers

Mysterious hackers are yet again trying to bring down the entire internet by bombarding crucial servers that support it with a gigantic, sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which has caused webpages to load slowly in some locations. There are 13 internet root name servers in the world that run the internet, and these servers are responsible for helping your web browser to locate top-level domains such as .com, .org, .net or any country-specific top level domains like .uk, .fr, .sg, .de, .ae and .cn. The servers function as a sort of internet address book and they make up what is known as the domain name system (DNS) system. The 13 root name servers are run by independent organisations in the world, including ICANN, the US Army, the US Department of Defense, Nasa, Europe’s internet registry RIPE NCC, the University of Southern California, Japan’s Wide Project and Sweden’s Netnod. Network infrastructure solutions firm Verisign also operates two of them, namely the “A” and “J” root servers (the 13 servers are named in sequence after the alphabet from A-M). DDoS attack sent 5 million queries per second The 13 root name servers are run by independent organisations in the world, including ICANN, the US Army, the US Department of Defense, Nasa, Europe’s internet registry RIPE NCC, the University of Southern California, Japan’s Wide Project and Sweden’s Netnod. Network infrastructure solutions firm Verisign also operates two of them, namely the “A” and “J” root servers (the 13 servers are named in sequence after the alphabet from A-M). “The incident traffic saturated network connections near some DNS root name server instances. This resulted in timeouts for valid, normal queries to some DNS root name servers from some locations.” You might think that the servers would be knocked offline by that much traffic, but no, they were saved by the root server operators having enough additional servers on standby that were able to balance the load of traffic. Although the sustained cyberattack resulted in some real queries from users surfing the web timing out in some locations, there were no complaints that end-users were having severe internet problems, so the root server operators believe that the attack would have been “barely perceptible” and all anyone would have seen was a slight delay in loading webpages in some web browsers. The root name server operators also stated that since IP source addresses can be easily spoofed and the traffic flooded multiple anycast websites, it is impossible to trace the traffic back to its source, so we have no idea who was behind this. Only a government could have this much clout However, if you use logic, it would take a really powerful entity like a country’s government to have the resources to sustain a coordinated cyberattack that lasted 48 hours and was able to keep flooding the root name servers consistently with a high level of traffic at five million queries a second. This is not the first time this has happened either – on 21 October 2002 a DDoS attack campaign attacked the 13 root name servers for one hour, and on 6 February 2007 a DDoS attack was sustained for 24 hours. In the first incident, the attackers didn’t have enough traffic to fully flood the servers and take them offline, while the second incident saw two root servers suffer badly, while another two servers experienced heavy traffic. So who could it be? Is it a foreign government, a terrorist group or cybercriminals? Who knows, but they seem to be getting better at it. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mysterious-hackers-are-trying-bring-down-entire-internet-by-ddos-ing-critical-servers-1532762

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Mysterious hackers attempting to bring down entire internet by DDoS-ing critical servers

Abe’s official website latest to come under possible cyber attack by Anonymous

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may have had his official website attacked by the ‘hacktivist’ Anonymous group, local media reported Thursday. According to Japan’s public NHK broadcaster, Abe’s official website has been inaccessible since early on Thursday, with the international group of clandestine hackers knows as Anonymous allegedly posting a message on Twitter claiming responsibility for the cyber attack on the site. Abe’s top spokesperson, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, said the government had been informed about the possible breach to the prime minister’s site by Anonymous, but in a press conference earlier Thursday declined to comment specifically as to whether the attack had been carried out by Anonymous. The possible attack by Anonymous is the latest in a series of cyber attacks on Japanese websites, including most recently last month on the website of Japan’s Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, which went down for three days after the group, according to its Twitter post, disabled the site by flooding it with enough data to crash its servers. As with the latest case, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police have been on high alert, although the government is either unaware or is remaining tight-lipped about the motive for the recent attacks, according to sources close to the matter Thursday. The group also took aim at Japan on Oct. 10 this year, when both Narita and Chubu airports in the east of the country, came under DDoS attacks with Anonymous saying on Twitter the attacks were a part of their campaign against Japan’s controversial dolphin hunting practice. The town of Taiji in southeastern Japan where the drive hunts take place saw its official website also taken down earlier in the year with police concluding that the hactivist group was responsible. The Japan National Tourism Organization and Japan’s Fishermen’s Union’s websites have also suffered DDoS attacks, for Japan’s continued dolphin hunts, it has been reported. Prior to these, in 2012, the government was also subjected to a series of cyber attacks by Anonymous following the implementation of new ant-piracy laws by the government, which outline stiff fines and jail terms for those downloading copyrighted content. The group highlight the fact that content suppliers were pressuring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to implement surveillance technology in an unprecedented move that some felt impinged on privacy laws. As a result, the Finance Ministry, Supreme Court, the then ruling Democratic Party of Japan and Liberal Democratic Party of Japan all saw their sites attacked at the time, some with specific pages defaced. Source: http://www.ecns.cn/2015/12-10/192047.shtml

DDoS attacks increase 180% compared to a year ago

Akamai Technologies announced its Q3 2015 report, which provides analysis and insight into the global cloud security threat landscape. “Akamai has been seeing greater numbers of denial of service a…

Unknown Copycat Using Armada Collective Name for DDoS-for-Bitcoin Extortions

Cyber-crime syndicates are moving in, pushing script kiddies out of the picture, expect more large-scale attacks After the success of DDoSing outfits like DD4BC and Armada Collective, an unknown copycat that’s using the Armada Collective name but asking for astronomical payments has appeared. A report from Recorded Future, a real-time threat intelligence protection company, shows that DDoS-for-Bitcoin extortion schemes are here to stay, with more and more attacks being launched solely for this reason. DD4BC have launched a new type of extortion scheme This trend can be tracked down to an Akamai report released over the summer that documented the actions of a hacking group known as DD4BC (DDoS 4 Bitcoin). This group launched DDoS attacks on companies around the world, requesting small payments in Bitcoin for each target. The group’s scheme was a simple one. They would send threatening emails to business owners, saying they would launch powerful DDoS attacks if a ransom was not paid in due time to a specific Bitcoin wallet. To prove their point, a small 15-minute DDoS was launched to showcase their capabilities. DD4BC’s scheme proved to be extremely lucrative and allowed them to rack up Bitcoin over the past year in over 140 DDoS attacks. The group was active since late 2014 and suddenly stopped its activity after the Akamai report was released, probably to avoid getting caught by law enforcement authorities alerted to their scheme. Enter Armada Collective Soon after, the first DD4BC copycat arose, in the form of the Armada Collective hackers, carrying out DDoS attacks on small businesses in Switzerland. They then expanded to email providers, and their name became known around the world in the famous ProtonMail incident. The incident is very well documented in one of our previous stories , but we’ll give you a small summary. Basically, Armada Collective followed the DD4BC regular tactics, sending an email and launching a small 10-15 Gbps DDoS attack on ProtonMail. Armada Collective returning ransom to ProtonMail As soon as the attack ended, ProtonMail revealed what happened, and more serious attacks took place, with ProtonMail paying the ransom in the end. Armada Collective denied any involvement and even went as far as to return the ProtonMail ransom, putting the blame on a state-sponsored actor with capabilities that far exceeded its own. Enter the unknown copycat But something else happened recently that made the Recorded Future team stop and ponder about the bigger picture, and that’s the DDoS-for-Bitcoin attacks on three major Greek banks . With DD4BC and Armada Collective always launching small-scale attacks and requesting modest ransoms (the equivalent of a few thousand dollars), this new group attacking Greek banks does not fit the bill. While the attacks of DD4BC and Armada Collective seem to be the work of script kiddies, the ones that brought down ProtonMail and the three major Greek banks were massive in scale. Coupled with the fact that this new group also requests ransoms in the order of millions of dollars, there are clear signs that they are a copycat that’s trying to remain hidden by passing as Armada Collective (as stated in the email sent to the Greek banks). With the number of DDoS-for-Bitcoin attacks on the rise, this type of cyber-threat is about to evolve from the work of script kiddies to the normal MO of larger cyber-criminal syndicates.

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Unknown Copycat Using Armada Collective Name for DDoS-for-Bitcoin Extortions

UK research network Janet still being slapped by DDoS attack

DNS services appear to be targeted, switching may work Members of UK’s academic community from freshers to senior academics are facing more connection issues today as a persistent and continuous DDoS attack against the academic computer network Janet continues to stretch resources. Janet first came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack yesterday, and the same attack has continued through to today forcing much of the academic community offline. Initially, Jisc’s engineers and security teams identified the cause as a DDoS attack and worked to identify the source of the assault and implement blocks. However, after some suggestions of network stabilisation, further problems were seen. Janet reported that it would cease providing updates on its Twitter page following the attack, as the information seemed to be providing the attackers with hints about how to adjust their attacks. For those who find Janet’s DNS services sluggish to respond, it may be possible to work around the issue by switching to Google Europe’s DNS. Boffins from various field have somehow managed to take to Twitter to share their woes about the outage. Vision and Office 365 are also being reported as offline. The Register understands no ransom notice has been delivered to Jisc as of writing. DDoS-for-ransom attacks are almost always preceded by the ransom request, as an early payment saves the attackers money. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/08/uk_research_network_janet_ddos/

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UK research network Janet still being slapped by DDoS attack

Day 2: UK research network Janet still being slapped by DDoS attack

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Day 2: UK research network Janet still being slapped by DDoS attack