Since March 3 — and perhaps as far back as Feb. 26 — Verizon customers in Westboro and Northboro had been experiencing regular and constant interruptions to their Internet and phone service. Dozens of Westboro residents have discussed the service outages on Facebook (and offer sharp-tongued critiques of Verizon’s response), and six have filed complaints with the state Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation. The disruptions, according to Verizon spokesman Philip G. Santoro, were caused by repeated cyberattacks on one residential customer in Westboro. The cyberattack is called a dynamic denial of service, a DDOS or DOS. In an email, Mr. Santoro described the attack thusly: “Someone deliberately flooded that customer with an overwhelming amount of traffic that rendered their Internet service inoperable.” “When that happened, it caused Internet service to periodically slow down for other customers in Westborough,” he wrote. “We are working to restore service to normal as soon as possible. DOS attacks are all too common today among customers of all Internet providers. It’s important to remind Internet users to keep their firewalls operating and to keep their security software current.” Interestingly, though, when I first asked Mr. Santoro about this, he said there were no widespread outages reported. I think that is because there was nothing physically wrong with the FiOS lines — no technical problems, no trees on the line, etc. At Verizon, the lines were all reported to be working as normal. But customers were calling in complaints and opening repair tickets left and right. The state logs the complaints and passes them on to the service provider, in this case Verizon, said Jayda Leder-Luis, communications coordinator for the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation. “DOS is a cybersecurity issue, one that can affect voice services that rely on access to the Internet (like VOIP),” she wrote in an email, referring to Voice Over Internet Protocol, in which phone service is provided through an Internet connection. “Those were the kinds of complaints we were receiving.” For dozens of residential and business customers in Westboro and Northboro, the interruptions were frustrating. “It happened around 3 o’clock, every day,” said Allen Falcon, chief executive officer for Cumulus Global, a cloud computing company in Westboro. “Sometimes it was a few minutes, sometimes 45 minutes to an hour.” A few times, the interruptions occurred in the morning, just after 9 a.m., he said. Since the company’s phone service and Internet connection runs through a FiOS line provided by Verizon, when the FiOS line goes out, customers lose both phone and Internet. “For us, it’s incredibly embarrassing as a technology company, to lose our service like this,” he said. “We’re talking to someone and the phone lines goes down, the Internet goes down.” The company has workarounds, in which the office can switch its Internet and phone service to a 4G service provided by their cellphones. “But it’s slower performing and more expensive,” he said. “Some days, around 3 p.m., we have to consider, ‘Should we switch, just in case?’ “ Several customers reported that Verizon had a lot of trouble pinpointing the cause of the interruptions, and several of them had Verizon technicians visit their homes and replace their routers. Since the cause was later determined to be this DOS cyberattack, replacing their routers looks like, in hindsight, a waste of time and money. Steve Winer, a Westboro resident, said Verizon installed a new router at his home, but it made no difference. The outages continued. “I am just wondering how much time and money was wasted on this,” he wrote in an email. “I know I spent at least a couple of hours on the phone, and others shared similar stories. But, if you add up all the shipped routers and unnecessary service calls, along with the time both of us customers and (Verizon) personnel, I am sure it really adds up, and could have been avoided if someone had simply put two and two together and posted a chronic outage which began in February.” On Tuesday, Verizon apparently pinpointed the exact Internet Protocol address of the Verizon customer being attacked, and shut down the customer’s FiOS service. The slowdowns and service interruptions have stopped. Let’s hope they never return. Source: http://www.telegram.com/article/20140323/COLUMN73/303239976/1002/business
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Westboro, Northboro Verizon service hit by DDoS attack
“Cyber-criminals continue to innovate and find vulnerabilities to exploit for their criminal activity” says Lancope CTO Tim Keanini. 162,000 reasons to tighten up WordPress security WordPress may be one of the most popular website systems used to publish on the Internet, but its open source nature – and consequent security challenges – have been highlighted this week after around 160,000 WordPress sites have apparently been used as DDoS zombies. Security research firm Securi reports that the WordPress pingback option – which allows WordPress sites to cross-reference blog posts – has been misused in recent times by unknown hackers to launch large-scale, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The attack vector used is not unknown as, back in the summer of last year, Incapsula reported that one of its clients was targeted in a pingback DDoS attack involving 1,000 page hits a second. Securi says it has been monitoring a swarm attack involving more than 162,000 WordPress sites and collectively generating many hundreds of IP requests to a single WordPress site. Whilst Daniel Cid, Securi’s CTO, has declined to identify the site, this suggests the attack may have been a proof-of-concept trial. On a technical level, the attack vector exploits an issue with the XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) code within WordPress and which is used for pingbacks, trackbacks and remote access from mobile Web browsers. SCMagazineUK.com notes that WordPress has known about the issue for several years, but the problem is that it a key structural issue with WordPress’s kernel architecture. Despite this, WordPress development teams have changed the default setting of sites to operate with a Web cache, meaning there is less load placed on the hosting server concerned. The hackers, however, have generated fake website addresses within their IP calls, so bypassing the web cache. Securi’s CTO says he been talking to WordPress developer teams about the issue, who are reportedly investigating a workaround. Tim Keanini, CTO of Lancope, said that the structural natures of the issue mean that it is not something that will ever go away. “Think of it as a supply chain and these criminals need compromised connected computers for their botnets – if you are connected for whatever reason to the Internet, you are a part of this supply chain,” he said, adding that cyber-criminals continue to innovate and find vulnerabilities to exploit for their criminal activity. To add to this, he explained, we – as Internet users – continue to put insecure devices on the Internet and with the Internet of Things ramping up, he warns there is just no end to the supply of targets. “What we need to do is to focus on the precision, timeliness, and leadership through these crisis – not the fact that they will just go away. They are here to stay and a part of doing business in the Internet age. When these events happen, what does leadership look like that provides business continuity and restores customer confidence? That is the question we need to be asking because hanging your head in shame does no one any good,” he said. Sean Power, security operations manager with DDoS security vendor DOSarrest, said that the vulnerabilities in old versions of WordPress mean that hackers can exploit them to be used for DDoS attacks. “This is nothing new – in fact, it was first recognised back in 2007. Attackers exploited a vulnerability in the core WordPress application and therefore it could be used for malicious purposes in DDoS attacks,” he said. “The fix for this feature was actually released in the 3.5.1 version of WordPress in January 2013 and would be picked up by most good vulnerability scanners,” he added. Power went on to say that this a prime example of how users aren’t regularly performing updates to their websites – “because if they were, we wouldn’t still be seeing DDoS attacks being carried out by websites taking advantage of this old flaw.” Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/162000-reasons-to-tighten-up-wordpress-security/article/337956/ 
The Meetup site is down after a hacker attempted to extort $300 from the site’s CEO Scott Heiferman. The social networking site was the victim of a DDoS attack that was allegedly paid for by one of Meetup’s competitors. The attack began on Thursday when CEO Scott Heiferman received an email that reads: Date: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 10:26 AM Subject: DDoS attack, warning A competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website. I can stop the attack for $300 USD. Let me know if you are interested in my offer. As soon as Heiferman received the email, the attack began and overwhelmed Meetup’s servers. The site went down and stayed that way for nearly 24 hours. The success of the site being back up was short-lived as Meetup was hit again and again with numerous DDoS attacks over the course of the weekend. Why is Meetup Site Down? Hacker Attempts to Extort $300 From CEO Scott Heiferman – photo from Twitter Stating his reasons for not paying the hacker behind the attack, Heiferman wrote on Meetup’s blog: We chose not to pay because: 1. We made a decision not to negotiate with criminals. 2. The extortion dollar amount suggests this to be the work of amateurs, but the attack is sophisticated. We believe this lowball amount is a trick to see if we are the kind of target who would pay. We believe if we pay, the criminals would simply demand much more. 3. Payment could make us (and all well-meaning organizations like us) a target for further extortion demands as word spreads in the criminal world. 4. We are confident we can protect Meetup from this aggressive attack, even if it will take time. As of right now, the site is still down as the Meetup team continues to secure its servers. When users attempt to log onto the site, they are met with the following error message: Over the past several days, Meetup has suffered a prolonged denial of service (DDoS) attack, resulting in intermittent service outages for our website and apps. We’re working urgently to bring Meetup back and restore full functionality. We appreciate your patience. Heiferman encourages all Meetup users to stay informed by receiving updates via Twitter, Facebook or the company’s blog. Why is Meetup Site Down? Hacker Attempts to Extort $300 From CEO Scott Heiferman. Source: http://americanlivewire.com/2014-03-03-meetup-site-down/