The firm leveraged its Arbor Atlas initiative, which receives anonymised internet traffic and DDoS event data from 330 internet service providers (ISPs) worldwide, to view events in France in the days after the protest, which was in response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings that left 20 people dead. The magazine was targeted by ISIS sympathisers and others unhappy with the satirical magazine’s ridiculing of Islam, including its depiction of the Prophet Muhammed. The publication also satirised other religions. Comparing the DDoS attacks between January 3-10 and 11-18, the US security firm found that there were 1,342 unique attacks – an average of 708 attacks a day – during the two week period. However, the firm noted in a recent blog post that the number of DDoS attacks after the march rose by 26 percent with the average size of DDoS attack growing 35 percent. In the eight days prior to the attack, the average size was 1.21Gbps but this later increased to 1.64Gbps. The vast majority of these DDoS attacks were low-level although the number of attacks larger than 5Gbps did double in the days after the protest. Arbor reports that one attack measured as high as 63.2 Gbps on January 11. “This is yet another striking example of significant online attacks paralleling real-world geopolitical events, wrote Arbor’s threat intelligence and response manager Kirk Soluk. Speaking to SC after it first emerged that ‘thousands’ of French websites were facing cyber-attacks, Corero Network Security CEO Ashley Stephenson said that DDoS attacks were increasingly being used as an attack tool during international conflicts. “Whatever the motivation – cyber-terrorism, retaliation, religious incitement, radicalisation… It is clear that modern conflicts will be fought in the cyber-world as well as the real world,” he said via email. “The internet should be better protected against all of these associated cyber-threats. Increasingly we are seeing DDoS used as a tool in and around these conflicts and we should be prepared to institute increased cyber-security to protect this vital resource.” Last week, Admiral Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyber-defence at the French military, said that about 19,000 French websites had faced cyber-attacks in the days after the shootings, although one source closely connected with the clean-up operation for some of these sites later told SC that hacking groups from Tunisia, Syria, Morocco, the Middle East and Africa had largely ignored DDoS as an attack vector because such attacks “didn’t work”. Instead, Gérôme Billois, senior manager of Solucom, said that these groups – also believed to often be ISIS sympathisers – had looked to scan thousands of websites to identify and exploit common WordPress, Joomla and other content management system (CMS) vulnerabilities. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/french-ddos-attacks-spike-after-terror-protest/article/393796/
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French DDoS attacks spike after terror protest
The worlds number 4 torrent website is down following a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by unknown hackers. The website seems to have been down for 23 hours and seems to come online for little bit before throwing up a 503 service error. The Extratorrent admin took to Twitter to tell its fans about the DDoS attack ExtraTorrent was one of the more popular torrent websites in 2014. It has grown in size due to more traffic and has moved up again in the top 10, now placed as the 4th most-visited torrent site by torrent ranking websites. This success didn’t go unnoticed by rightsholders groups such as the MPAA who recently called out ExtraTorrent as one of the top pirate sites. The site was forced to trade in its .com domain for .cc this year, after it was suspended by its domain registrar. The Isitdownrightnow says that Extratorrent has been down for past 23 hours (now it says 4 minutes because the website sprang to live for few seconds before going down again While the admin says that its a DDoS attack by unknown hackers, the actual reason may be a takedown by authorities or a revenge DDoS by the music and movie companies. Earlier Sony had allegedly undertaken a similar kind of DoS attacks to stop the torrents sites from sharing the files from the massive hack attack. Reader may note that only two days back around 13 mega Hollywood movie screener versions were leaked and being shared on torrent websites. These movies are considered to be prime Oscar award contenders and it is though that one of the guild members or his/her associates may have leaked these screener versions. Source: http://www.techworm.net/2015/01/extratorrent-down-hackers-launch-ddos-attack.html