Spam volume is back to mid-2010 heights, and Cisco Talos researchers say that the Necurs botnet is partly to blame. “Many of the host IPs sending Necurs’ spam have been infected for more than two years. To help keep the full scope of the botnet hidden, Necurs will only send spam from a subset of its minions. An infected host might be used for two to three days, and then sometimes not again for two … More ?
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Spam is once again on the rise
Cloud-based DDoS defences introduce delays Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can be painful and debilitating. How can you defend against them? Originally, out-of-band or scrubbing-centre DDoS protection was the only show in town, but another approach, inline mitigation, provides a viable and automatic alternative.…
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DDoS attacks: For the hell of it or targeted – how do you see them off?
If you were DDoSed once, you will be DDoSed again, that is for sure. A company is rarely attacked by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) just once. If it happens once, it will probably happen again, which is why constant preventive measures are required, if a company wants to keep their online services operational. These are the results of a new report by Kaspersky Lab. Entitled Corporate IT Security Risks 2016, it says that one in six companies were victims of DDoS attacks in the past 12 months. The majority of those attacks were aimed against construction, IT and telecommunications companies. Almost four out of five (79 per cent) reported more than one attack, and almost half reported being attacked four times, or more. The length of these attacks is also an issue. Just above a third (39 per cent) are considered ‘short-lived’, while more than a fifth (21 per cent) lasted ‘several days’ or even ‘weeks’. Companies are usually the last to know they’re being attacked, too, with 27 per cent being informed by their customers, and in 46 per cent of cases by their third-party audit organisation. Kaspersky Lab says this is not unusual, as cyber-attackers usually go for customer portals (40 per cent), communication services (40 per cent) and websites (39 per cent). “It’s dangerous to view DDoS attacks as some rare occurrence that a company may encounter once, by accident, and with minimal damage. As a rule, if an attack is successful, the criminals will use this tool against a company over and over again, blocking its resources for prolonged periods of time. Unfortunately, even a single attack can inflict large financial and reputational losses and, considering the likelihood of a repeat attack is almost 80 per cent, you can multiply these losses two, three or more times. For a modern company, an anti-DDoS solution is just as necessary as the basic protection against malware and phishing,” says Alexey Kiselev, Project Manager on the Kaspersky DDoS Protection team. Source: http://www.itproportal.com/news/ddos-always-knocks-twice/
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DDoS always knocks twice
When it comes to quantitative indicators, the last quarter can be marked by significant quantitative decline, according to DDoS-GUARD. The number of detected DDoS attacks is 57% lower than in the previous quarter and equals to 12583. But don’t get excited too soon, as the attacks quality, volume and complexity has increased markedly. The maximum volume of malicious traffic for a single UDP flood attack totaled 217.7 Gbps, which is 71% higher than in the … More ?
Akamai Technologies released its Second Quarter, 2016 State of the Internet / Security Report, which highlights the cloud security landscape, specifically trends with DDoS and web application attacks, as well as malicious traffic from bots. During May 2016, the number of attacks spiked, fueled by campaigns targeting the gaming industry “While attack sizes are decreasing, we continue to see an uptick in the number of attacks as launch tools grow increasingly pervasive and easy to … More ?
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DDoS and web application attacks keep escalating
In September 1996, New York City’s original ISP, Panix, was hit by a SYN flood denial of service attack that took them offline for several days. At a time when only 20 million Americans were online, this was one of the first high profile examples of the growing importance of network and service availability. It also demonstrated how fragile internet infrastructure was at the time. According to an advisory from Carnegie Melon’s CERT, “There is, … More ?
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Business still ill-prepared to handle modern DDoS attacks
One killer trojanised app or $100k of hardware is enough. A research trio has shown how thousands of malware-infected phones could launch automated distributed denial of service attacks to cripple the US emergency phone system “for days”.…
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Infected Android phones could flood America’s 911 with DDoS attacks
Nowhere near as bad as its ten-day Christmas cracker, but something seems to be afoot Cloud hosting outfit Linode has again come under significant denial of service (DoS) attack.…
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Linode fends off multiple DDOS attacks
Cybercriminals claiming to be the Armada Collective have sent out extortion emails threatening independent and small businesses with DDoS attacks. A group of cybercriminals which claim to be the infamous Armada Collective are threatening independent and small business websites worldwide with a huge Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, should they fail to pay the bitcoin ransoms requested by email. It is still unclear if these cybercriminals are the real deal or are just pretending to be to scare possible victims into paying a ransom to prevent a DDoS attack that could threaten their businesses. The actual Armada Collective gained infamy last year after extorting money from a number of Swiss firms, several Thai banks and even ProtonMail which provides encrypted webmail. The emails sent out to businesses around the globe inform users that their security is poor and that the group will launch a DDoS attack on their networks using the Cerber ransomware and anywhere from 10-300 Gigabytes per second (Gbps) of attack power. However, anyone who received and email from the group can prevent the attack by paying one bitcoin which is equivalent to $606. If the ransom is not paid before they attack though, the price will go up significantly to 20 bitcoins to put an end to the DDoS attacks. The group has also been kind enough to provide users who are unfamiliar with bitcoin all the information necessary on how to download a personal bitcoin wallet such as Multibit or Xapo. They are also informed on how to set up a bitcoin wallet of their choosing online. It is quite possible that the group’s email demands could be fake and any user who received the email should contact their local authorities, but under no circumstance should they pay the ransom. Source: http://www.itproportal.com/news/group-claiming-to-be-the-armada-collective-threatens-ddos-attacks/
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Group claiming to be the Armada Collective threatens DDoS attack
Arbor security claims Rio was a success in terms of mitigating powerful, prolonged DDoS attacks Public facing websites belonging to organisations affiliated with the 2016 Rio Olympics were targeted by sustained, sophisticated DDoS attacks reaching up to 540Gbps, according to Arbor Networks. Many of these attacks started months before the Olympic Games had begun, but the security company said that attackers increased their efforts significantly during the games, generating the longest-duration sustained 500Gbps+ DDoS attack Arbor has ever seen. “And nobody noticed,” boasted Arbor’s Security Engineering and Response Team (ASERT). Virtual battlegrounds Just like other public services like electricity and water, the ins and outs of keeping websites up and running should be hidden from the general public, allowing them to go about their business without knowing about the virtual warfare being engaged behind server lines. And in ASERT’s opinion, the Rio Olympic Games “set the bar for rapid, professional, effective DDoS attack mitigation under the most intense scrutiny of any major international event to date”. “Over the last several months, several organizations affiliated with the Olympics have come under large-scale volumetric DDoS attacks ranging from the tens of gigabits/sec up into the hundreds of gigabits/sec,” blogged ASERT. “A large proportion of the attack volume consisted of UDP reflection/amplification attack vectors such as DNS, chargen, ntp, and SSDP, along with direct UDP packet-flooding, SYN-flooding, and application-layer attacks targeting Web and DNS services. “The defenders of the Rio Olympics’ online presence knew they’d have their work cut out for them, and prepared accordingly. “A massive amount of work was performed prior to the start of the games; understanding all the various servers, services, applications, their network access policies, tuning anomaly-detection metrics in Arbor SP, selecting and configuring situationally-appropriate Arbor TMS DDoS countermeasures, coordinating with the Arbor Cloud team for overlay ‘cloud’ DDoS mitigation services, setting up virtual teams with the appropriate operational personnel from the relevant organisations, ensuring network infrastructure and DNS BCPs were properly implemented, defining communications channels and operational procedures. “And that’s why the 2016 DDoS Olympics were an unqualified success for the defenders! Most DDoS attacks succeed simply due to the unpreparedness of the defenders – and this most definitely wasn’t the case in Rio.” However, not all defence tactics worked surrounding the Olympic Games. The Brazilian arm of hacking collective Anonymous was successful in targeting websites that included the official website of the federal government for the 2016 games and the Brazilian Ministry of Sports. Anonymous was also able to leak personal and financial data belonging to Brazilian sports domains such as the Brazilian Confederation of Boxing and the Brazilian Triathlon Confederation. “Hello Rio de Janeiro. We know that many have realized how harmful it was (and still is) the Olympic Games in the city. The media sells the illusion that the whole city celebrates and commemorate the reception of tourists from all over the world, many of them attracted by the prostitution network and drugs at a bargain price. This false happiness hides the blood shed in the suburbs of the city, mainly in the favelas thanks to countless police raids and military under the pretext of a fake war,” stated Anonymous. “Therefore, we will continue with our operations to unmask the numerous arbitrary actions of those who are state and therefore its own population enemies.” Source: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/security/rio-olympics-ddos-attacks-196998
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Rio 2016 Olympics Suffered Sustained 540Gbps DDoS Attacks