Following an investigation that lasted 10 months, Russian police authorities have managed to arrest the 22-year-old operator of one of the largest botnets known to date. According to a press rele…
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Massive botnet shut down after botmaster's arrest
The social networking service Twitter suffered sporadic outages Thursday, leading some to speculate about a hacker attack. Access came and went, with reports that users were being affected around the world. In a brief update, the company acknowledged some people were having issues using the service. “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter,” they said in a statement. “Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.” A micro-blogging service that allows users to send short messages, Twitter has been likened to an international party line. There are myriad running conversations, to which anyone can contribute. As of March there were 140 million active users who generated over 340 million tweets daily, Twitter says. Not long after its initial message, Twitter said that the issue had been “resolved” and that all services were operational. Users often are quick to turn to Twitter to pose questions about emerging events. But in an ironic twist, Thursday’s outage was initially so pervasive that users couldn’t take to the twitterverse to discuss what was happening. But on message boards, comment fora and other social networking services people voiced their concern. Some wondered if the site had been attacked by a distributed denial of service attack by the hacker group Anonymous. Others bemoaned the lack of access. “I’m losing my mind!” Matt Gio wrote at mashable.com. “I have so much to talk about today and I have an important blog post scheduled.” But some took the outage humourously in stride. Olivia Bovery posted at Facebook that she was “going through withdrawal” and going to step outside. “There is this bright yellow ball in the sky that must be investigated. Seems to be giving off a lot of heat. Wonder what it is.” Moments later she followed up. “Finally, its back up! Back to twitter. Yellow ball will have to wait. Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/omg-twitter-down-sporadic-outage-leads-to-speculation-of-hacker-attack/article4360263/?cmpid=rss1
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Twitter down: Sporadic outage leads to speculation of DDoS attack
Announcing the findings of “The Impact of Cybercrime on Businesses” survey, carried out by Ponemon Institute, Check Point Software Technologies revealed that 65% of the organizations which experienced targeted attacks reported that an attacker’s primary objective was to make a financial gain. Disrupting business operations and stealing customer data were attributed as the next likely motivation for attackers, as stated by 45 % of the surveyed organizations. The report also stated that only around 5% of security attacks were driven by political or ideological agendas. The report, which surveyed 2,618 C-level executives and IT security administrators in the US, United Kingdom, Germany, Hong Kong and Brazil across organizations of various types and sizes, showed that companies reported an average of 66 new security attack attempts per week. Respondents in all countries stated that the most serious consequences of such attacks were disruption of business and loss of sensitive information, including intellectual property and trade secrets. Diminished reputation and impact on brand name were the least of their worries, with the exception of respondents in the UK. Successful attacks could end up costing businesses anywhere between $100,000 and $300,000: the participants estimated the average cost of such an attack at $214,000 USD. Tomer Teller, security evangelist and researcher at Check Point Software Technologies, was quoted in the press release as saying, “Cybercriminals are no longer isolated amateurs. They belong to well-structured organizations, often employing highly-skilled hackers to execute targeted attacks, many of whom receive significant amounts of money depending on the region and nature of the attack.” “For the most part, the goal of attackers is to obtain valuable information. These days, credit card data shares space on the shelves of virtual hacking stores with items such as employee records and Facebook or email log-ins, as well as zero-day exploits that can be stolen and sold on the black market ranging anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000,” he added. While Denial of Service (DoS) attacks were seen as the type of cyber crime that posed the greatest risk to organizations, SQL injections were cited, by 43% of the respondents, as the most serious types of attack organizations had experienced in the last two years, the report stated. Other threats cited in the survey included APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats), botnet Infections and DoS attacks cited by 35%, 33%, and 32% of the respondents respectively. On the threats posed by activities of their employees, organizations, across all the surveyed countries, unanimously cited the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs as the biggest concern, followed by the use of social networks and removable media devices such as USB sticks. Hong Kong and Brazil reported on an average the highest percentage of mobile devices infected through an act of cyber crime, at 25 percent and 23 percent, respectively. The U.S. and Germany had the lowest average of infected mobile devices and machines connected to the network at 11 percent and nine percent respectively. The report found that for protecting themselves from these threats, a majority of organizations have instituted Firewall and Intrusion Prevention solutions. However, at the same time, less than half of the surveyed organizations have implemented the necessary protections to fight botnets and APTs. “Cybercrime has become a business. With bot toolkits for hackers selling today for the mere price of $500, it gives people insight into how big the problem has become, and the importance of implementing preemptive protections to safeguard critical assets,” Teller stated. It was pointed out that only 64% of companies said that they have current training and awareness programs in place to prevent targeted attacks. “While the types of threats and level of concern companies have may vary across regions, the good news is that security awareness is rising,” Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute, was quoted as saying in the press release. “Across the board, C-level executives reported high levels of concern about targeted attacks and planned to implement security precautions, technology and training to mitigate the risk of targeted attacks.” For fast DDoS protection click here . Source: http://www.computerworld.in/news/check-point-survey-financial-gain-main-motivation-cyber-criminals-12922012
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Financial Gain is Main Motivation for Cyber Criminals
Check Point introduced a new line of security appliances designed to fight DDoS attacks. The DDoS Protector appliances deliver multi-layered protection and up to 12 Gbps of throughput to help business…
COMMUNICASIA, SINGAPORE–With the rise of cloud services adoption, businesses also have escalating security concerns over distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and that presents an opportunity for carrier service providers to offer cloud-based DDoS protection, which one industry executive adds is set to gain traction in Asia. Among enterprises, the constant discussion around cloud to make it “sexy and pervasive” to customers cannot ignore the question of what happens when the cloud service becomes unavailable due to an attack, said Lau Kok Khiang, director for Asia-Pacific IP division at Alcatel-Lucent. There is hence “strong pent-up demand” for cloud-based DDoS protection, for which carrier cloud services are in a good position to provide, he said. Lau was presenting at the Telco Rising Cloud conference in CommunicAsia here Tuesday. Large attacks have become commonplace, and enterprises are basically losing the arms race in the Internet security space, Lau described. Among the various DDoS attacks in 2011 alone that saw businesses worldwide suffer a “great amount of damage” involved Sony PlayStation Network, the Hong Kong stock exchange, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and WordPress, he pointed out. The executive emphasized that cloud-based DDoS security was a “win-win” scenario for both the service provider and enterprise customers. For the service provider, it is a new revenue opportunity, which also complements existing enterprise services such as virtual private network (VPN) and business broadband. Additionally, this could help drive customer stickiness, Lau said. That is because from the customers’ point of view, having cloud-based DDoS protection ensures 24-by-7 availability of the cloud services they use, which mean better safeguards for their enterprise assets such as confidential client data, he added. On the event sidelines, Lau told ZDNet Asia that cloud DDoS security is set to gain traction in Asia, due to increasing awareness of the risks and prevalence of DDoS. This will prompt companies to consider cloud DDoS protection as added security measures, in order to ensure their service availabilities meet customer demands as well as industry-specific regulations. Also, apart from commercial entities, governments in the region are also pushing the message that organizations need to protect themselves from becoming the next victim of an attack, he added, referring to the massive DDoS attacks that disrupted Internet services in Myanmar in November 2010. Another speaker at the conference, Anisha Travis, partner at law firm Webb Henderson, said while the cloud has benefits and opportunities for businesess, they should go into space with “their eyes open”. In other words, they need to understand and prepare for mitigate the major risks associated with cloud, one of which is service levels, she pointed out during her presentation. It is essential that service level agreements (SLAs) are well-drafted for specific service levels and must also include “practical remedies” when there is downtime or outage, Travis advised. Customers cannot rely solely on the service provider, and should do their due diligence in clarifying ownership, consequences, and failures, she added. Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/communicasia/asia-to-see-rise-in-cloud-ddos-security-biz-62305165.htm
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Asia to see rise in cloud DDoS security biz
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) have matured with hackers blending different attack techniques and becoming more damaging, observers note. They add that defenses need to evolve to complement infrastructure security that has already been commoditized.” DDoS attacks, where multiple compromised systems usually infected with a Trojan virus, are used to target a single system have been getting more “sophisticated” over the years, Vic Mankotia, security vice president of CA Technologies Asia-Pacific and Japan, noted. Today, there are DDoS attacks coming from automated systems, payloads delivered from USB sticks and protocols such as Bluetooth and magnetic strips of cards, he observed. In the past, DDoS attacks primarily targeted networks using low-level protocol or volumetric attacks, Eric Chan, regional technical director of Fortinet Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, remarked. However, hackers today use a combination of volumetric and application-layer attacking techniques, he noted. An application-layer DDoS targets the application service by using legitimate requests to overload the server, and rather than flood a network with traffic or session, they target specific applications and slowly exhaust resources at the application layer, Chan explained. They can be very “effective” at low traffic rates, which makes them harder to detect, he added. The Sony Playstation breach for example, had been a result of application-layer DDoS attacks, able to camouflage a data breach of over 77 million customer records, he cited. Evolved with IT trends, hackers intent On a basic level, denial-of-service (DoS) has evolved from “taking a pair of wire cutters outside the organization and snipping those wires” 20 years ago, to becoming distributed DoS where “hundreds and thousands of” traffic making computers into botnets to shut down systems, Andrew Valentine, managing principal of investigative response at Verizon observed. Strong connectivity, data centers and cloud, have given mobility center-stage, paved way for the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend making the security parameters “disappear”, Mankotia explained. While mobile devices may not store the target information, but they do allow the DDoS attackers access to the information they seek, he noted. Laptops and devices also have a lot more computing power compared to those in the past, Claudio Scarabello, global security product manager of Verizon added. As such, hardware have a lot more power to flood systems, and can be much more “damaging”, he warned. Another way it has evolved is through the intent, Valentine added. In the past, DDoS had stemmed from “bragging rights”–showing off one’s ability to hack into the server, as well as financial intents, he explained. Today, it is used for political intents, commonly known as hacktivism, and DDoS and data breaches have become “synonymous”, he added, citing the Verizon 2012 data breach investigation report which found a rise in hacktivism against large organizations. “As such, DDoS today is associated with political intent, and making a statement, and not about script kiddies showing off anymore,” he said. Security system with visibility, multi-layered defense needed What is needed is a different type of security to complement the infrastructure security that has already been commoditized–a security system which enables the knowledge of where and who is sharing the data, Mankotia pointed out. DDoS attacks are heavily customized with a signature to get specific information, and security has to evolve as all information is not equal, and all identities, access and system must be in one ecosystem, where content-aware identity and access management are applied and advanced authentication is at its core, he explained. As botnets can send huge amounts of legitimate connections and requests from each compromised machine, and determining whether such connections are valid or not will be crucial, enterprises will need security solutions with “sufficient visibility and context”, Chan added. “These systems should have sufficient visibility and context to detect a wide range of attack types without slowing the flow, and processing of legitimate traffic, and is then able to conduct mitigation in the most effective manner,” he said. Above of, a multi-layer defense strategy is also essential, and the defense strategy must cover both network-layer and application-layer attacks, Chan surmised. In need of protection click here DDoS protection . Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/ddos-becoming-more-sophisticated-damaging-62305134.htm
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Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ becoming more ‘sophisticated’, damaging
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted a 20-year-old British citizen on charges related to attacks by the LulzSec hacking group on the Fox and PBS television networks and Sony’s film and TV studio, authorities said on Wednesday. Ryan Cleary, who is already jailed in the United Kingdom where he faces prosecution over similar charges, is accused of joining other members of LulzSec in harnessing compromised computers, known as a “botnet,” to steal confidential information, deface websites or attack servers. He was indicted on Tuesday. “Cleary is a skilled hacker. He controlled his own botnet, employed sophisticated methods and his broad geographic scope affected a large number of businesses and individuals,” FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said. LulzSec, an offshoot of the international hacking group Anonymous, has taken credit for hacking attacks on government and private sector websites. Anonymous and its offshoots, including LulzSec and AntiSec, initially focused on fighting attempts at Internet regulation and the blocking of free illegal downloads, but have since taken on such targets as Scientology and the global banking system. The charges come just over two months after accused LulzSec hacker Cody Kretsinger pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to taking part in an extensive computer breach of Sony Corp’s Sony Pictures Entertainment. In March, court documents revealed that Anonymous leader “Sabu,” whose real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, had pleaded guilty to hacking-related charges and provided the FBI with information on fellow hackers. According to the indictment released by the FBI, Cleary and his unnamed co-conspirators hacked into the computer systems of News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group and Sony Pictures Entertainment and stole confidential user information. The indictment also charges Cleary and his co-conspirators of defacing the PBS website and launching “denial of service” attacks against an online gaming website and Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency. Cleary is charged with one count of conspiracy and two counts of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. He faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison if convicted. Eimiller said federal authorities would “allow the prosecution to take its course” against Cleary overseas before deciding whether to seek his extradition to the United States. He is next scheduled to be in court in the U.K. on June 25. Anonymous, and LulzSec in particular, became notorious in late 2010 when they launched what they called the “first cyber war” in retaliation for attempts to shut down the WikiLeaks website. They attacked websites including those of MasterCard Inc, which had tried to block payments to WikiLeaks after apparent pressure from the U.S. government following the release of thousands of diplomatic cables. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/net-us-usa-lulzsec-hacking-idUSBRE85D00620120614
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Accused British hacker launch DDoS attack and charged in U.S. over LulzSec attacks
DDos (Distributed Denial of Service) attack took place in order to thwart the works of “Armenpress” Armenian news agency website, which was prevented by IT specialists of the agency. Earlier Armenpress web site has been attacked. The agency learnt about the hacker attack on June 13 night and informed the enforcement bodies. Armenpress staff continues its work: the agency’s customers receive the news with its full volume. Thanks to the efforts of Armenpress IT specialists the security of agency has been intensified: currently works are carried out to determine the reasons of hacker attack. “Armenpress” expresses gratitude to its colleagues for the support and condemns any kind of hacker attack, qualifying it as a crime in all respects. Source: http://armenpress.am/eng/news/684393/%E2%80%9Carmenpress%E2%80%9D-prevented-ddos-hacker-attack.html
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“Armenpress” prevented Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ hacker attack
Last night Azerbaijani hackers attacked BlogNews.am, Armenpress.am websites, and Turkish hackers attacked Beeline.am website. Information security specialist Samvel Martirosyan informed about this. Armenpress.am and Beeline.am websites aren’t functioning at present. According to the information circulated by BlogNews.am, a significant part of the information on the website was deleted because of the hackers’ actions. At this moment, the website’s administration is trying to recover the deleted information. Source: http://www.yerkirmedia.am/?act=news&lan=en&id=7791
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Azerbaijani and Turkish hackers hit Armenian websites with Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attacks
According to an independent report published in Korea’s JoongAng Daily, Seoul’s Metropolitan Police Agency has intercepted a cyber attack plot orchestrated by North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, which successfully shipped malware-infected games to South Korean users which were later on used to launch a DDoS attack against the web site of Incheon Airport. More details: According to the police, the South Korean man, identified by the surname Jo, traveled to Shenyang, northeastern China, starting in September 2009 and met agents of an alleged North Korean trading company. He allegedly asked them to develop game software to be used in the South. Jo purchased dozens of computer game software for tens of millions of won, which was a third the cost of the same kind of software in the South. The games were infected with malignant viruses, of which Jo knew, an official at the police agency said. Jo sold the games to South Korean operators of online games. When people played the games, the viruses used their computers as zombies, through which the cyberattack was launched. This is the second attempt by North Korea in recent months to engage in electronic warfare with South Korea, following the use of GPS jammers causing difficulties in air and marine traffic controls. What’s particularly interesting about North Korea’s infection vector in this campaign, is that it’s not a novel approach to spread malware. Instead, it relies on a chain of trust, from the unknown origin of the produced games, to the sellers claims that they are malware-free, and ultimately targets bargain hunters. In the past, software piracy has proven to be a key driving force behind the growth of malware campaigns internationally. Distribution of malware-infected games greatly reminds me of a case which happened in Eastern Europe in the 90s where a malware coder participating in a popular IT magazine’s coding contest, on purposely backdoored his game, which ended being shipped to thousands of subscribers on a magazine-branded CD. Although a good example of a flawed QA (Quality Assurance) on behalf of the magazine, South Korean authorities claim that the person who purchased the games actually knew that they were infected with malware, hence the lower price for purchasing them. Just how big of a cyber threat is North Korea? It’s an emerging market player, having actively invested in the concept over the years, that’s for sure. In my recent conversation with cyber warfare expert Jeffrey Carr, he pointed out that he doubts Russia or China will knowingly supply the irrational North Korea with cyber warfare ‘know how’. However, Russia or China’s chain of command doesn’t need to know that this outsourcing will ever take place, as North Korea could easily outsource to sophisticated cybercriminals doing it for the money, not for the fame. Summary: Seoul’s Metropolitan Police Agency has intercepted a cyber attack plot orchestrated by North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, which successfully shipped malware-infected games to South Korean users. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/north-korea-ships-malware-infected-games-to-south-korean-users-uses-them-to-launch-ddos-attacks/12383
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North Korea ships malware-infected games to South Korean users, uses them to launch DDoS attacks