Recent reports all point to the same fact: despite the different motives of the attackers, DDoS attack have become more frequent and more intense. So what are businesses and organizations to do? …
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Who to call when hit by a DDoS attack
When DDoS attacks hit, organizations are thrown into crisis mode. From the IT department to call centers, to the boardroom and beyond, it’s all hands on deck until the danger passes. In February …
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35% of businesses experienced a DDoS attack in 2012
Charles Schwab Corp said it was the target of a cyber attack that prevented access to its website intermittently for about an hour on Wednesday, the second such attack in as many days, but that the problem had been resolved. Schwab, one of the largest U.S. brokerages, said on Tuesday afternoon it was that target of a distributed denial of service attack – an attack that floods websites with traffic in order to block access – that left clients unable to trade through the site for two hours. Phone service was available during both attacks, although responses were slower than usual due to the large number of people calling in, said Schwab spokesman Greg Gable. He said clients who believe they were affected by the outage can call 1-800-435-4000 to talk with a Schwab representative. The attacks did not impact client data or accounts, Gable added. Schwab said it is actively investigating the attacks but could not provide further information. The San Francisco-based company had 8.9 million active brokerage accounts and $2.1 trillion in total client assets at the end of the last quarter. For protection against your eCommerce site click here . Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0424/Schwab-website-recovers-after-second-day-of-cyber-attacks
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Charles Schwab website recovers after second day of cyber attacks
DigiD, the identity management platform that allows Dutch citizens to digitally sign bills, pay taxes, and more, has been unavailable since Tuesday evening due to a DDoS attack, Biz Community reports.
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Dutch DigiD e-signature system under DDoS attack
By now, almost everyone has at least heard or seen the term DDoS. Unless you’re fairly geeky, however, you might not know what a distributed denial-of-service attack is or how one works. Even if you are a dyed-in-the-wool geek, chances are you don’t know what a DDoS attack looks like . Thanks to the security staff at VideoLan, developers of the highly popular VLC media player, you can now catch a glimpse. This is what it’s like to be on the receiving end: According to VideoLan’s Ludovic Fauvet, the servers at get.videolan.org have been dealing with around 400 requests every second. A pattern was quickly identified in the attacks, however, which allowed Fauvet and his teammates to cut the bad guys off at the pass. By singling out a common user agent, they’ve been able to tweak Nginx to leave those connections lingering in limbo. Right now, the DDoS requests aren’t accomplishing anything more than generating HTTP 403 errors. Prior to fortifying their defenses, the VideoLan crew was seeing around 200 downloads of VLC every second — which totalled nearly 30Gbps. Here’s a quick comparative: the massive DDoS that took down Wikipedia was pushing about 10 gigabits every second. So who’s behind the attack on VideoLan and what’s the motivation? That’s not known just yet, but thankfully the team in France should be able to plug away in the interim. They won’t let something like a DDoS stand in the way of delivering that fancy, new Windows 8 app to their backers. For protection against your eCommerce site click here . Source: http://www.geek.com/news/vulnerability-in-ruby-on-rails-could-bring-200000-sites-down-1535400/
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This is what a DDoS attack looks like
Mt.Gox, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, has been downed earlier today by what appears to be a “strong DDoS attack”. “We are working hard to overcome it and will update when possible. It's c…
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World's largest bitcoin exchange under DDoS attack
The average DDoS attack bandwidth in Q1 2013 totaled 48.25 Gbps, which is a 718 percent increase over last quarter, and the average packet-per-second rate reached 32.4 million, says Prolexic. Ea…
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Average DDoS attack bandwidth up 718 percent
The WordPress blogging platform, which hosts more than 64 million websites, has been attacked by a huge botnet
Many websites built on the blogging and content management system WordPress are currently under attack by a group of hackers attempting to gain access to the sites to use them in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. The infected machines are then, in turn, attempting to gain access to other WordPress installations, to quickly grow the size of the botnet. Security experts say this is one of the most robust WordPress attacks to date, and the hackers have succeeded in building a very strong botnet of infected systems. There are currently nearly 100,000 IP addresses in use by the infected systems, and this could grow as the hackers turn additional WordPress installations into subservient systems. Two popular managed hosting services, HostGator and Resellers Panel are undergoing a very heavy attack by the botnet right now – both services specialize in WordPress hosting packages. Hackers are bute-force punching their way into the WordPress backend by trying 1,000 – 2,000 password combinations against the “admin” username on WordPress systems. WordPress users with easy-to-guess passwords are at the most risk for having their systems compromised. To avoid having your WordPress instances violated, John Dolan, a freelance security expert, suggests that users go into their WordPress settings “right now, as soon as possible, and update their passwords,” he said. “It should be changed to a complex password, not a dictionary word, and it should use a mixture of capital and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and another character, like a question mark, for example.” In addition to making sure your password is secure, Dolan also recommends that WordPress users look into a service like CloudFlare, an online security vendor that monitors your website’s incoming traffic and deflects attacks from known bots and spammers. What to do if your WordPress instance has been hijacked? “Talk to your hosting provider,” says Dolan. “They most likely have experience with this, and can help you wipe your WordPress install and restore your latest backup.” Source: http://www.szsu.com/2013/04/13/wordpress-websites-target-of-hacker-attack/
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WordPress Websites Target of Hacker Attack
Cyber attacks have become an alarming problem in recent months. Threats from China have been the main concern in America, but now a new type of hacker has surfaced. A group of Islamic internet hackers launched a distributed denial of service attack on the American Express website, temporarily shutting down the site for a few hours. As expected, this did not go over well with American Express cardholders. In a DDOS attack, site visitors are infected with a Trojan virus that redirects them to a site of the creator’s choice. Once a certain number of people visit that target site, the original site shuts down. The hackers were able to make this work successfully, but American Express’s security team quickly corrected the problem. Nevertheless, it shows how vulnerable American business is right now to Internet hackers. The hackers claimed that much of their motivation came from the YouTube video, Innocence of Muslims. Since its publication, that video has enraged the Islamic community and fueled their hatred of Americans. The cyber hackers vowed to continue their efforts until it was removed from the internet. The original video was in English, but there are now versions in Arabic, French, Spanish and other languages. It has been blocked in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Muslim states. The video was actually removed once before because of a slew of hate mail going towards the original uploader. It was re-posted shortly thereafter and has since received close to two million views. American Express is now taking extra precautions to ensure that similar events do not happen in the future. Source: http://www.lowcards.com/amex-website-hacked-islamic-attackers-11690
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Amex Website Victim of DDoS Attack