Tag Archives: ddos

Xbox Live and PSN Face DDoS Attacks Throughout Christmas Eve and Day

During a day when people are booting up their new Xbox Ones and PlayStation 4s for the first time, a group of Grinches have decided to try and ruin things for everyone online. During what is supposed to be one of the most joyful days of the year for families across the world, the hacker group Lizard Squad claims responsibility for hitting Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network with DDoS attacks, Tech Worm reports. The Lizard Squad’s main Twitter account has been banned, but other representatives of the group (warning: NSFW language) are saying they are the reason why both Xbox Live and the PSN have been experiencing outages throughout the past 24 hours. In response, a pro gaming hacker crew called The Finest Squad has been exposing various members of the Lizard Squad to the proper authorities. Unfortunately, the deviant hacker group appears to always be a step ahead of The Finest Squad. Xbox’s servers are currently up, but they have been experiencing outages every few hours on the official server status page (which currently lists accessibility as “Limited”). The same could be said of Sony, as the official PlayStation Help Twitter made a comment about the PSN’s recent issues: Here’s to hoping these hackers get caught and the attacks stop. Go hack the Westboro or KKK websites instead of doing this sort of thing, Lizard Squad. Just leave the gaming community alone so we can play our new games in peace without bothering anyone. Source: http://arcadesushi.com/xbox-live-and-psn-face-ddos-attacks-throughout-christmas-eve-and-day/

DDoS attacks carry six-figure price tag for businesses

The average distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack costs large businesses an average of $444,000 in lost revenue and subsequent IT spending, according to a recent survey by B2B International. The same poll found that DDoS attacks hit the bottom line of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) at an average clip of $52,000 per incident. Kaspersky Lab sponsored the annual survey, conducted by B2B International, which polled 3,900 respondents from 27 countries about IT infrastructure challenges they faced from April 2013 through May 2014. All businesses at risk Businesses of all sizes were polled, with approximately 17 % coming from large enterprises (5,000 to 50,000 employees), 12% from the large/medium category (1,500 to 5,000), 25% from the medium/small (250 to 1,500) enterprise segment, and the remaining from small businesses. Overall, nearly 1 in 5 businesses (18%) experienced a DDoS attack during the year-long study period. The polling then drilled down into business verticals that provide online financial services or operate public-facing websites. Among this subset that relies on 24/7 web access for clients, the survey found that 38% experienced at least one DDoS attack during the study period. When this subset was broken down into specific business verticals, the poll found that 49% of IT/technology firms suffered at least one DDoS incident during the study period, followed by e-commerce sites (44%), telecommunications (44%), media (42%), construction/engineering (40%) and finance (39%). Downtime = Money The most frequent effects of DDoS attacks include slow-loading web pages, inability to complete online transactions, or complete service disruption – all of which weigh heavily on a business that relies on the web for revenue. Survey respondents listed potential losses in revenue (33%) and damage to company brand (38%) as the two most negative outcomes from a DDoS attack. This is in lockstep with their management’s concerns, who list loss of revenue (26%) and customer trust (23%) as the most feared outcomes of such an attack. A disconnect between the potential threat of DDoS and investments to detect or mitigate these attacks is apparent when dissecting the survey. For example, media companies were fourth on the list of most targeted, by only 38% of respondents from these firms listed DDoS countermeasures as a security priority. Among e-commerce respondents, whose businesses may be most heavily affected by the effects of a DDoS attack, only 41% noted DDoS security investment as a priority. “Even if a company does not have a public-facing website, its finances and reputation can be seriously affected by DDoS attacks”, said Eugene Vigovsky, head of DDoS protection at Kaspersky Lab, in a statement. “It is known that DDoS can be organized not only to incapacitate online services or for ransom, but also to mask other cybercriminal activities, such as targeted attacks…to gain access to confidential data.” Watching your availability When it comes to online security, most organizations tend to focus on the confidentiality or integrity of data and services, often at the expense of availability, noted Lenin Aboagye, Director of IT, cloud and product security for data center provider IO. He told DatacenterDynamics that companies experiencing DDoS-related downtime stand to lose money every minute their web services are affected. “If you operate a downed e-commerce site, and people cannot make a purchase especially during this holiday season, then losses can be substantial”, he added. “Most organizations do not look into this area of security because it’s not considered a data breach event that requires customer notification.” Source: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/focus/archive/2014/12/ddos-attacks-carry-six-figure-price-tag-businesses

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DDoS attacks carry six-figure price tag for businesses

Alibaba : Cloud Suffered DDoS Attack for 14 Hours

A well-known game company on Alibaba Cloud Computing suffered a DDoS attack for 14 hours from December 20 to 21. However, Alibaba has not disclosed the name of the game company and why the company was attacked. Alibaba condemned the hacking attack and called on all Internet innovation companies to jointly resist hacking. Alibaba Cloud said in the microblogging “faced with hacker attacks, we cloud never compromise.” Source: http://www.4-traders.com/ALIBABA-GROUP-HOLDING-LTD-17916677/news/Alibaba–Cloud-Suffered-DDoS-Attack-for-14-Hours-19594653/

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Alibaba : Cloud Suffered DDoS Attack for 14 Hours

Rackspace restored after DDOS takes out DNS

25-hour incident blocked traffic from reaching rackspace.com and some subdomains Rackspace says it has recovered from a nasty distributed denial of service attack that it says may have seen “a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure … inadvertently blocked.”…

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Rackspace restored after DDOS takes out DNS

DDoS Attacks ‘major concern for Saudi firms’

Leading IT decision-makers in the Kingdom have indicated that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are fast becoming a main security risk in for Saudi businesses. This was stated in a new survey released at a seminar in Riyadh on the cyber risks and business security in the Kingdom. The survey, commissioned by global Application Delivery Networking leader F5 Networks, and conducted by Redshift Research, said: “84 percent agreed that DDoS attacks can have a strong adverse impact on business.” The survey included 109 of these Saudi decision-makers, employed in companies with at least 500 employees said that 56 percent of respondents singled out data and revenue loss resulting of these attacks as the main concerns whereas 55 percent cited a related decline in productivity. Commenting on the survey, Saudi expert Mamdoh Allam, Saudi Arabia country manager of F5 Networks, said: “DDoS attacks are a major problem in Saudi Arabia and they are only going to intensify as cyber criminals compete with each other to devise new ways of causing disruption,” “DDoS attacks can affect businesses in many ways and attacks can cause damage running into many millions of dollars, permanently ruining a company’s reputation with everything from downtime to putting customer data at risk.” Allam explained that while attackers have traditionally used personal computer networks to launch DDoS attacks, it has become increasingly common to hijack oblivious global networks of malware infected machines to coordinate large-scale attacks. The survey also stated that 40 percent of the Saudi IT decision makers had endured a DDoS attack. 34 percent claimed normalcy after a few days, 36 percent after a week and 20 percent after a few weeks. Ten percent of those surveyed said it took up to a month to get back to business as usual. Around 45 percent did put the estimated cost of recovery at between $3 to 5 million, 30 percent between $5 to 10 million, and 16 percent between $10 to $20 million, and 2 percent said the damage was as high as $20 to $30 million. The survey also highlighted the need for greater industry-wide awareness. Allam stressed that the responsibility is now on businesses to place cyber security at the heart of their business strategies and do everything they can to gain a more comprehensive understanding of both cyber-attacker identity and their motivations. In particular, Allam pointed to the potential of full-proxy firewalls that can handle hundreds of thousand connections per second, policy management solutions that curb unauthorized access without impacting on the end-user, and uptime-boosting application security and traffic manager solutions that combine to block malicious intrusions and re-route legitimate requests. Source: http://www.arabnews.com/news/677396

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DDoS Attacks ‘major concern for Saudi firms’

50% of companies unprepared for DDoS attacks

Research carried out by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International has revealed that only 50% of companies regard countermeasures against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as an important component of IT security. It means that the other 50% of companies may prove to be unprepared for a sudden attack, which could damage both their finances and their reputation as a result of the unavailability of internet services. Different industries have different views on how important it is to protect against DDoS attacks. For example, 60% of financial institutions, energy companies and utility services are conscious of the need of protection against DDoS attacks. This is the highest percentage of any industry. But it seems quite low considering that IT continuity is critical for these structures as they affect the well-being of many people. There is also a noticeable difference of opinion among different sized organizations: only 38% of small businesses consider protection against DDoS attacks an important component of IT security,but for big companies this figure reaches 60%. In recent years, DDoS attacks have become a common tool for cybercriminals and their clients. There are many different reasons for organizing these attacks — hooliganism, dishonest competition, blackmail. Currently the price to order a large-scale attack starts from just $50. Each year brings increasing numbers of DDoS attack schemes, so IT professionals at any company need to consider ways of protecting against them. According to the research, 23% of companies include maintaining the continuity of business processes in the top 3 most important tasks of their IT services. Interestingly the survey found no clear correlation between the level of threat faced in reality and the recognition of the need for DDoS protection. For instance, the sectors with public facing online services most affected by these incidents included IT companies (49%), e-commerce (44%), telecom (44%) and the media (42%). At the same time, countermeasures against DDoS were named as important by 53% of telecoms companies, 50% of IT businesses and only 41% of e-commerce and 38% of media companies. Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/50-of-companies-unprepared-for-DDoS-attacks-Report/articleshow/45575197.cms

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50% of companies unprepared for DDoS attacks

Finest Squad to bring DDoS services down

The Finest Squad is set out to bring cyber criminals to justice around the world; their main plan at the moment is to bring DDoS services down. When you visit the @FinestSquad Twitter account they are going all out with their tweets, you can clearly see they want the world to see they brought the Lizard Squad crew to their knees with its pinned tweet. Lizard Squad has been removed from twitter thanks to the Finest Squad, and then they say in their tweet, “Your welcome fellow gamers. We will make sure their IRC stays offline.” The next few steps for the Finest Squad include taking down / offline as many DDoS services, these include hosting, offshore, hosting, web booters and more. They have also announced on its Twitter account they are setting up a new YouTube channel, a news bulletin and a community forum – these are being developed right now so stay tuned. They also want to stack up its team; they basically want more of the finest. They do stress no illegal activities allowed, are you interested. This new role comes after they hired a professional full-time web designer/developer and web site security specialist. Looks like the Finest Squad is here to help all the gamers out there, PlayStation and Xbox gamers will be thrilled to bits Lizard Squad has had the Finest treatment. They do not like these kids harassing people and that is why they are there to bring justice. So far the Finest Squad website lists the LizardSquad member Obnoxious being arrested, @LizardPatrol, @LizardSquad and many more being removed from Twitter. All these wrong doings are being hunted, such as the EZTV proxy site being shutdown – read more here. Are you happy with what the Finest Squad have done so far? Source: http://www.onlinesocialmedia.net/20141217/finest-squad-to-bring-ddos-services-down/

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Finest Squad to bring DDoS services down

London teen pleads guilty to Spamhaus DDoS

Sentence will be passed in January next year A 17 year-old Londoner has pleaded guilty to a series of denial-of-service attacks against internet exchanges and the Spamhaus anti-spam service last year.…

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London teen pleads guilty to Spamhaus DDoS

Winning Poker Network $1M Guaranteed Tournament Cancelled After Apparent DDoS Attack

The Winning Poker Network (WPN) was forced to cancel its $1 million guaranteed prize pool tournament on Sunday, after an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack caused disruptions and connectivity issues for players participating in the event. While the tournament had been running for several hours, late registration was still open, so all players were refunded their buy-ins and entry fees in accordance with network policy. The tournament was an ambitious effort by WPN, a network that includes America’s Cardroom, to bring a major online poker tournament to US players. It was billed as the first $1 million event in American online poker in nearly four years, as the events of Black Friday had more or less put an end to such prize pools in the country. Cancelled Despite Strong Turnout With a $500 + $40 buy-in and entry fee, the tournament needed 2,000 players to meet the prize guarantee (without dipping into the entry fees), and it appeared likely to do so. When the tournament was finally cancelled, 1,937 players had registered, and there were still about 45 minutes left in the late registration period. According to reports, the event was cancelled after less than five hours of play, though some players have said closer to 5.5 hours had elapsed by the time it was officially cancelled. Given how long the tournament had been running, a substantial number of players had already been eliminated; on the TwoPlusTwo.com forums, some players said they had hoped for some sort of chip split or ICM chop among the remaining players, given the large stacks they had accumulated in the first few hours of play. CEO Addresses Issues, Defends Decisions After the tournament, WPN CEO Phil Payton streamed a broadcast live on Twitch.tv to address the cancellation. “Call it a conspiracy, call it what you want, a lot of online poker sites have had Internet connectivity issues,” a clearly disappointed and frustrated Payton said. Payton referenced the fact that tournament issues were caused by DDoS attacks last weekend, but had seemed to clear up in the days before the big event. Whoever was causing the Internet disconnections was waiting for the million,” Payton said. “The second that it started, it started.” According to Payton, he and his staff initially tried to fight through it, but eventually came to the conclusion that it simply wasn’t fair to players who might be disconnected during key hands. “There’s a lot of sites that [would say] let them push through it, and we make $80,000, and gg,” Payton said. “Well, you know what, I’ve got to sleep with myself at night, and I’m not going to do that. “If it happened again tomorrow, I’d do the same thing,” he added. As Payton referenced, there have been an increasing number of DDoS attacks across online poker and the Internet at large. Just days earlier, players were suspicious about the possibility of DDoS attacks being used to disconnect opponents for the benefit of a specific player. Swedish operator Svenska Spel also had to cancel some poker tournaments last month following similar attacks and a massive Internet collapse in Sweden just last week is also blamed on DDoS hackers. In the end, given that the issues gave some players an advantage, Payton said that he was happy to stand by his decision, even if it was unpopular. “It doesn’t matter if you like it or not,” Payton said in response to questions about the decision at the end of his broadcast on Twitch. “It was fair.” Source: http://www.cardschat.com/news/wpn-1m-tournament-cxld-ddos-attack-8827

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Winning Poker Network $1M Guaranteed Tournament Cancelled After Apparent DDoS Attack

London teen pleads guilty to SpamHaus DDoS attack

The London teen behind the massive denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on SpamHaus and Cloudflare has pleaded guilty. Technology blogger Brian Krebs reported over the weekend that 17-year-old Sean Nolan McDonough, also known by his hacker alias “Narko,” pleaded guilty on Dec. 10 to computer misuse and money laundering in connection with the attack. McDonough was arrested in September 2013 after he played a role in the March 19, 2013 DDoS attacks aimed at Spamhaus, a Dutch anti-spam group and international nonprofit. SpamHaus later moved its servers behind CloudFlare, which then pushed the attackers to devote their efforts toward the company’s network. The attack sent 85Gbps of traffic. The U.K. National Crime Agency told Krebs that, “court reporting restrictions are in place in respect to a juvenile offender, [and] as a consequence the NCA will not be releasing further detail.” Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/sean-nolan-mcdonough-narko-pleads-guilty/article/388387/

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London teen pleads guilty to SpamHaus DDoS attack