Tag Archives: house

Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

And is if to confirm the link, a DDoS takes out Taiwan’s presidential website ahead of senior politico’s arrival Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has tied her controversial visit to Taiwan to an alleged barrage of China-directed cyber-attacks against the territory.…

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Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

No Telegram today, protestors: Chinese boxes DDoS chat app amid Hong Kong protest

That Guns N’ Roses album* might be out soon… or not Chat app Telegram has reportedly been DDoS’d, with its downtime coinciding with protests in Hong Kong against repressive new Chinese laws.…

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No Telegram today, protestors: Chinese boxes DDoS chat app amid Hong Kong protest

Activists plan DDoS attack on the White House website during Trump’s inauguration

A software engineer is calling for protesters to flood the site with traffic during the presidential inauguration It’s almost time. Ex-reality TV host and businessman Donald Trump will be officially sworn in as the US president on Friday January 20. His campaign was divisive, to say the least, and it seems his tenure as president is looking like having a bumpy start, with protests planned in all states of the US, including on the streets of Washington DC. However, rather than stand outside, some protestors are choosing to target the President-elect with other, indoor-based, means. Software engineer, Juan Soberanis, is calling on protestors to attempt to take down the White House’s website in a DDoS attack – simply by flooding the website with traffic. Soberanis is calling it “Occupy White House”. According to the International Business Times, Soberanis wrote on his online protest pledge: “”If you can’t make it to Washington DC on inauguration day to protest Trump’s presidency, you can still fight for the cause by helping to take down whitehouse.gov as a show of solidarity for the lives impacted by Trump’s policy agenda. “It’s simple. By overloading the site with visitors, we will be able to demonstrate the will of the American people,” he continued. Soberanis then goes on to tell fellow protestors to overwhelm the website by setting up auto-refresh on the WhiteHouse.gov homepage throughout the day. The San-Francisco engineer is the creator of Protester.io, a Kickstarter-type site that encourages individuals to get involved in online protests. However, only one protest is currently live on the site, a finished protest set up by Soberanis to incite people to join the ACLU as a protest against Trump. The alleged URL for his Occupy White House protest page on the site appears to be inaccessible at the moment. Hacking group Anonymous is additionally, and allegedly, planning cyber attacks against Trump’s new administration. It should be noted, though, that this type of attack is considered criminal activity in the US under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The act dictates that sending a command to a protected computer with the intent to cause damage can be judged a criminal offence, and people affiliated with Anonymous have been charged in the past by the US government for launching DDoS attacks on government entities and trade groups. Thousands of people are planning to protest Trump’s inauguration on January 20 As well as being a controversial choice for president, Trump’s inauguration is set to be a controversial affair, too. The likes of Cher, Chelsea Handler and Katy Perry have promised to take part in the Women’s March, either in the capital or in the states around, the day after the inauguration, to protest the Republican party’s threats to defund Planned Parenthood. According to Google, the statewide searches for “inauguration protest” are much higher than “attend inauguration” searches on the site. During the transition from Obama stepping down and Trump stepping up, “Russia” has been one of the top searched-for big issuesin the States on Google, alongside immigration and Obamacare. Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/donald-trump-inauguration-ddos-attack-planned

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Activists plan DDoS attack on the White House website during Trump’s inauguration

Thai police charge man in hacking attacks on gov’t sites

Police in Thailand on Monday charged a suspect with participating in recent hacking attacks on government computers that were billed as a protest against a restrictive law governing internet use. Natdanai Kongdee, 19, was one of nine people arrested in connection with the attacks that blocked access to some websites and accessed non-public files, Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan said. Police said he was a low-level hacker rather than a leader and had confessed to participating in the attacks. They said he belonged to several online groups specializing in hacking activities. Natdanai was present at Monday’s news conference but did not speak. He was charged with gaining unauthorized access to police data, along with illegal possession of firearms and marijuana, allegedly found when police searched his house. The legal status of the other people arrested was not explained. Groups promoting the attacks say they are in protest of passage of revisions to Thailand’s Computer Crime Act, which would restrict freedom of speech and facilitate targeting political dissidents. The new law would allow Thai authorities to intercept private communication and to censor websites without a court order. In addition to the leaking of documents, government sites have been subject to distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, where access is denied by overloading the online server with requests. A Facebook group encouraged a simple version of such attacks by suggesting people repeatedly reload them by pressing the F5 key. “He (Natdanai) was naive to believe the (Facebook) group and hack into the system,” Siripong Timula of the police’s technology department said. The Facebook group, with the name Citizens Against Single Gateway, earlier this month called for a “cyberwar.” Its name reflects activists’ concerns about plans for a single gateway through which all international internet traffic would pass. The government claims such a system is necessary for national security, but opposition from many sectors has made the government evasive about whether it plans to implement a single gateway. The group on Dec. 19 claimed responsibility for temporarily bringing down the Thai defense ministry’s website. Since then, it has claimed to have brought down websites for Thailand’s military, customs department, police, foreign affairs ministry and additional government websites. Other hackers, operating as part of the informal activist network Anonymous, have been posting data they say is from government computers. Police said Monday that their systems are still “well protected” and that the attacks constitute minor hacks. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said, “If we do not have any laws or write it down to make it clearer and if they continue to do this, what can we do?” Should hackers simply be allowed to poke into personal data, he asked reporters rhetorically. “We’ve talked about it many times. Everything is passed. Talk about something else,” said Prayuth, who is noted for his brusque manner of speaking. Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-4066212/Thai-police-charge-man-hacking-attacks-govt-sites.html

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Thai police charge man in hacking attacks on gov’t sites

CloudFlare warns of another massive botnet, er, flaring up

DDoS attacks on the horizon as White House cybersecurity report issues recommendations CloudFlare has warned of another massive botnet that appears to be ramping up and targeting the US West Coast.…

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CloudFlare warns of another massive botnet, er, flaring up

Media vulnerable to Election Night cyber attack

A hack on the AP and its results tally could have chaos-inducing consequences. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on security upgrades, U.S. media organizations have failed to properly protect their newsrooms from cyberattacks on their websites, communications systems and even editing platforms — opening themselves up to the possibility of a chaos-creating hack around Election Day. In just the past month, BuzzFeed has been vandalized, and both Newsweek and a leading cybersecurity blog were knocked offline after publishing articles that hackers apparently didn’t appreciate. Federal law enforcement is investigating multiple attacks on news organizations, and journalists moderating the presidential debates say they’ve even gotten briefings from the FBI on proper cyber hygiene, prompting them to go back to paper and pens for prep work. “We do a lot of printing out,” said Michele Remillard, an executive producer at C-SPAN, the network home to the backup moderator for all the debates. Journalists are seen as especially vulnerable soft targets for hackers. Their computers contain the kinds of notes, story ideas and high-powered contact lists coveted by foreign intelligence services. They also work in an environment that makes them ripe for attack, thanks to professional demands like the need for a constant online presence and inboxes that pop with emails from sources whom they don’t always know and which frequently contain the kinds of suspicious links and attachments that can expose their wider newsroom networks. Senior U.S. officials, current and former lawmakers and cybersecurity pros told POLITICO the threat against the media is real — and they fret the consequences. Specifically, the security community is worried The Associated Press’ army of reporters could get hacked and the wire service — the newsroom that produces the results data on which the entire media world relies — inadvertently starts releasing manipulated election tallies or that cybercriminals penetrate CNN’s internal networks and change Wolf Blitzer’s teleprompter. “It’s the art of possible is what really scares me,” said Tony Cole, chief technology officer of FireEye, a Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm that works with some of the country’s major television and newspaper companies. “Everything is hackable.” “No site is safe,” added Tucker Carlson, editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller. “If the federal government can be hacked, and the intelligence agencies have been hacked, as they’ve been then, can any news site say we have better cybersecurity than the FBI or Google?” The media have long been a spy’s best friend. Intelligence community sources say that foreign and U.S. agents use local newspapers to look for clues about their targets, and that strategy has only grown more sophisticated in an all-online era in which foreign intelligence is reportedly known to hover over a media company’s servers searching for any kind of heads-up on relevant stories inching closer to publication. Reporters on the campaign trail and back in their home bureaus said in interviews that they’ve become increasingly aware of their status as potential hacking victims. The spate of recent attacks — involving their sites and their competitors’ — are more than ample warning of what’s possible. Several journalists said they now use email and other communication with the expectation they’re being watched, and under the assumption that their messages can and will be hacked and shared publicly with the wider world. “We’re a bigger target than the 7-Eleven down the street,” said Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. “Presumably, we have really good, smart IT people who know what they’re doing, who are taking all kinds of precautions, who are acutely in tune with what the risks are and what the threats are.” There is perhaps no greater target in election journalism than the AP, the venerable wire service that will have more than 5,000 reporters, editors and researchers working across the country, tabulating results, calling races and feeding a much wider network of subscribers. Often other news outlets refer to the AP before making calls on races, and AP projections on the East Coast can have effects on West Coast voting, which closes hours later thanks to the time differences. Multiple sources in media, government and the security industry fretted about the effect if the AP were to get hit, and what that would do to their ability to get the news out. The AP will deploy reporters across the country to send up vote tallies, usually by phone, the  wire service  explained to The Washington Post in May. It also has multiple checks and balances in place to monitor for errors. But as with many other news organizations contacted by POLITICO, AP spokesman Paul Colford said the wire service’s policy is to refrain from making public comments about its security measures. “Given the extraordinary interest in the presidential election and thousands of other state and local contests, we would add that AP has been working diligently to ensure that vote counts will be gathered, vetted and delivered to our many customers on Nov. 8,” he said. Federal and state officials stress that even a successful hack on a major news outlet around Election Day would not affect the final results, which typically take weeks to certify. The vote tallies, after all, will be available on official sites and in many instances on special social media feeds. And if a news site did get defaced with incorrect information, the results would be more like a modern-day version of the famous ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline that President Harry Truman triumphantly held aloft the day after his 1948 reelection. Still, there is a widespread recognition — from the White House down to the local precinct level — that a hack on the media could be damaging given the role it plays in getting election news out to satisfy the country’s insatiable information appetite. Misinformation circulated in the early hours of Nov. 8 about the race’s trajectory, for example, could factor into a voter’s decision to even show up during the election’s final hours, especially in Western states. There’s also concern that false media reports spread via a hacked news account could be a potential spark for violence in an already exceptionally charged atmosphere. On the flip side, there’s a recognition that the media can help build public confidence in the final results, especially following a campaign that’s been engulfed in its closing weeks by Russian-sponsored hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman’s personal emails, and Donald Trump’s unfounded charges of vote rigging. “To the degree that foreign hackers could prevent the dissemination of good information around the election, that can be a problem,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The California congressman said he frets that media outlets, like many other industries, face “massive costs” in protecting themselves against cyberattacks with “no end in sight” to the potential risks. Schiff added that he is especially concerned about smaller news organizations without major IT budgets or the backing of larger parent companies. “They’re much more vulnerable,” he said. Cybersecurity experts say media spending to protect news organizations against cyberattack has grown substantially in the past three years, especially in the wake of North Korea’s attack on Sony Pictures in late 2014. The price tag for vulnerability audits and other techniques varies by the size of the newsroom and the surface area for potential attacks, but multiple sources said quarterly audits can easily cost $50,000 or more. Cyber experts and media officials from newsrooms across the country said they’re prepped to deal with a range of threats to their sites, including the kinds of malware that can infect a computer network and give hackers an entry point to manipulate a home site. They’re also building backup capacity in the event of a DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service, that tries to overwhelm a website or server with fake traffic. News sites, they note, are already prepping for monster traffic around the election, which can surge as much as 30 times compared with other big events this cycle, such as a debate or primary. At the staffing level, newsrooms have also been pushing for better cyber habits by hosting training seminars, requiring employees to take must-pass exams and requiring double-authentication before granting access to a newsroom’s internal filing system and social media accounts. But cyber experts warn that all the preparatory work in the world can matter little for a news organization if it’s facing an attack from a more sophisticated actor. “If all of a sudden your adversary becomes a nation-state, like Sony or the DNC with Russia, you see those kind of procedures aren’t worth a darn,” said Robert Anderson, a former senior FBI cyber official and a managing director at the Navigant consulting firm. The press has indeed been a familiar target for hackers. In 2013, hackers hit the AP’s Twitter account and posted a false report about a bombing at the White House, sending the stock market into a five-minute spiral. In more recent incidents, a USA Today columnist wrote an article in February admitting he was hacked midair while using his commercial flight’s WiFi, and the New York Times reported in August that its Moscow bureau was targeted by what were believed to be Russian hackers. Newsweek blamed hackers for a DDoS attack that took down its site last month soon after it published an article about Trump’s company allegedly violating the U.S. embargo against Cuba through secret business dealings in the 1990s. And BuzzFeed had several articles on its site altered earlier this month after it ran a story identifying a person allegedly involved in the hacking of tech CEOs and celebrities. “I’m sure that lots of newsrooms are having this conversation right now, particularly as we get closer to the election and people have a lot more to lose when things don’t go their way,” said Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity blogger and former Washington Post reporter whose site went down last month after a major DDoS attack that he says was spawned by his reporting about the arrest of two Israeli hackers. With the threat of hackings against the media reaching such a heightened pace, many election observers urged both reporters and the reading public to take a deep breath as the results start coming in. “If Twitter is reporting that Jill Stein wins South Carolina, that should probably give you pause,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/media-vulnerable-to-election-night-cyber-attack-229956

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Media vulnerable to Election Night cyber attack

Kelihos zombies erupt from mass graves after botnet massacre

Pumping spam, entering backdoors again almost right away Security researchers have warned that the resurrected Kelihos botnet blasted off the face of the web yesterday is still alive.…

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Kelihos zombies erupt from mass graves after botnet massacre