Category Archives: DDoS News

Sony issues formal response to DDoS attacks in PSN update

For the first time in days, Sony has issued a formal response to the ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) affecting various networks in the gaming industry, including PlayStation Network. While the update doesn’t offer much in terms of when PlayStation owners can expect full service to resume, Sony has at least assured us that they are working to restore full network access. Note: An update on Sony’s official support page notes that service is restored on PS3 and Vita; however, PSN is still down on PS4. A special section of the website is dedicated to PSN post-restoration that says if you are continuing to experience problems after PSN services are fully restored to refer to Contact Support. Here’s the full message from Catherine Jensen, VP of SCEA Consumer Experience. The video game industry has been experiencing high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay. Multiple networks, including PSN, have been affected over the last 48 hours. PSN engineers are working hard to restore full network access and online gameplay as quickly as possible. From time to time there may be disruptions in service due to surges in traffic, but our engineers will be working to restore service as quickly as possible. If you received a PlayStation console over the holidays and have been unable to log onto the network, know that this problem is temporary and is not caused by your game console. We’ll continue to keep you posted on Twitter at @AskPlayStation and we’ll update this post once the problems subside. Thanks again for your patience. The DDoS attacks on PSN (and Xbox LIVE) began around Christmas Day. Though neither Sony nor Microsoft admitted to being DDoS’d, the notorious hacker group Lizard Squad was eager to claim credit. For those unfamiliar, this is the same group that launched multiple attacks earlier this year, including bomb threats to SOE president John Smedley. On Friday, one of the numerous Twitter accounts claiming to be Lizard Squad said the DDoS attacks were stopped and that any ongoing disruptions were “just the aftermath” of hours worth of traffic bombardment. However, another account claiming to be one of the prominent members of Lizard Squad, continued to tweet out messages suggesting the DDoS attacks were continuing. Even now, two days after Christmas, PSN is still struggling to return to full service; although, some believe it to be Sony simply restructuring its system architecture. At this point it’s still not 100 percent certain if the outages are ongoing DDoS attacks, but it appears for now at least that Sony has a grasp on the problem and is working to restore service. Hopefully they are addressing the issues and even working to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. Considering this isn’t the first time PSN has been brought down for a lenghty period, I’m hoping Sony will finally take some serious action in preventing this sort of outage again. But, I’m also skeptical; if they haven’t learned by now, when will they? Source: http://www.gamezone.com/news/sony-issues-formal-response-to-ddos-attacks-in-psn-update-9048-jrni

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Sony issues formal response to DDoS attacks in PSN update

Update: Columbia’s website back online after cyber attack; KOMU down from DDoS attack

UPDATE: This story has been updated to include details of another denial of service attack on KOMU and additional comments on FBI involvement in investigating the attack on Columbia’s website. COLUMBIA — The city’s official website is back online after being down since Wednesday night, when a cyber attack flooded the server with information requests. But the hacker responsible might have found a new target in KOMU. The city’s site, gocolumbiamo.com, was back up as of 12:35 p.m. The site provides information and updates to the public about city services and events. Deputy city manager Tony St. Romaine said city officials have been in touch with the FBI about the incident. Joel Sealer, a spokesman for the FBI in Kansas City, said only that city officials had been in contact with the agency, but he would not comment on or confirm the existence of an investigation. St. Romaine said the activist hacker group Anonymous was the source of the attack on the city’s site, but a YouTube video posted by Bitcoin Baron denies that affiliation and claims sole responsibility for the attack. In the video’s introduction, Bitcoin Baron states that the attack is in retaliation for a February 2010 incident where Columbia police killed one dog and wounded another during a drug raid. The YouTube video then shows footage from the raid. The city’s website was hit by a distributed denial of services attack, which sent requests from multiple sources to the site’s server to overload its bandwidth capacity. City staff became aware of the problem at around 11 p.m. Wednesday and shut down access to the site to sort out the problem. KOMU.com’s outage began around 3 p.m. Friday, and KOMU posted on its Facebook page at 4 p.m. Saturday to address the distributed denial of service attack. In the post, KOMU calls the attack a “direct result” of its reporting on the city’s website being taken down. Its story noted that city officials believed Anonymous was responsible, but a third party contacted the news station to claim responsibility and threaten to take down KOMU.com as well. Attacks of this nature generally don’t result in the theft of information or other security loss, St. Romaine said. “Your system is not getting hacked into, and data is not getting compromised,” he said. Source: http://www.columbiamissourian.com/a/183192/update-columbias-website-back-online-after-cyber-attack-komu-down/

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Update: Columbia’s website back online after cyber attack; KOMU down from DDoS attack

Xbox Live and PSN Face DDoS Attacks Throughout Christmas Eve and Day

During a day when people are booting up their new Xbox Ones and PlayStation 4s for the first time, a group of Grinches have decided to try and ruin things for everyone online. During what is supposed to be one of the most joyful days of the year for families across the world, the hacker group Lizard Squad claims responsibility for hitting Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network with DDoS attacks, Tech Worm reports. The Lizard Squad’s main Twitter account has been banned, but other representatives of the group (warning: NSFW language) are saying they are the reason why both Xbox Live and the PSN have been experiencing outages throughout the past 24 hours. In response, a pro gaming hacker crew called The Finest Squad has been exposing various members of the Lizard Squad to the proper authorities. Unfortunately, the deviant hacker group appears to always be a step ahead of The Finest Squad. Xbox’s servers are currently up, but they have been experiencing outages every few hours on the official server status page (which currently lists accessibility as “Limited”). The same could be said of Sony, as the official PlayStation Help Twitter made a comment about the PSN’s recent issues: Here’s to hoping these hackers get caught and the attacks stop. Go hack the Westboro or KKK websites instead of doing this sort of thing, Lizard Squad. Just leave the gaming community alone so we can play our new games in peace without bothering anyone. Source: http://arcadesushi.com/xbox-live-and-psn-face-ddos-attacks-throughout-christmas-eve-and-day/

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Xbox Live and PSN Face DDoS Attacks Throughout Christmas Eve and Day

Rackspace restored after DDOS takes out DNS

25-hour incident blocked traffic from reaching rackspace.com and some subdomains Rackspace says it has recovered from a nasty distributed denial of service attack that it says may have seen “a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure … inadvertently blocked.”…

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Rackspace restored after DDOS takes out DNS

50% of companies unprepared for DDoS attacks

Research carried out by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International has revealed that only 50% of companies regard countermeasures against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as an important component of IT security. It means that the other 50% of companies may prove to be unprepared for a sudden attack, which could damage both their finances and their reputation as a result of the unavailability of internet services. Different industries have different views on how important it is to protect against DDoS attacks. For example, 60% of financial institutions, energy companies and utility services are conscious of the need of protection against DDoS attacks. This is the highest percentage of any industry. But it seems quite low considering that IT continuity is critical for these structures as they affect the well-being of many people. There is also a noticeable difference of opinion among different sized organizations: only 38% of small businesses consider protection against DDoS attacks an important component of IT security,but for big companies this figure reaches 60%. In recent years, DDoS attacks have become a common tool for cybercriminals and their clients. There are many different reasons for organizing these attacks — hooliganism, dishonest competition, blackmail. Currently the price to order a large-scale attack starts from just $50. Each year brings increasing numbers of DDoS attack schemes, so IT professionals at any company need to consider ways of protecting against them. According to the research, 23% of companies include maintaining the continuity of business processes in the top 3 most important tasks of their IT services. Interestingly the survey found no clear correlation between the level of threat faced in reality and the recognition of the need for DDoS protection. For instance, the sectors with public facing online services most affected by these incidents included IT companies (49%), e-commerce (44%), telecom (44%) and the media (42%). At the same time, countermeasures against DDoS were named as important by 53% of telecoms companies, 50% of IT businesses and only 41% of e-commerce and 38% of media companies. Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/50-of-companies-unprepared-for-DDoS-attacks-Report/articleshow/45575197.cms

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50% of companies unprepared for DDoS attacks

US Officials Believe North Korea Was Involved In Sony Hacks

U.S. officials say they believe that North Korea’s government was involved in the large-scale hack of Sony servers, which led to the leak of troves of Sony data from emails to unreleased projects, according to the NYT. Federal cyber-security sources say that there is evidence indicating that the hack was routed through computers in Singapore, Thailand, Italy, Bolivia and Cyprus, ABC reports. While the hack resulted in a dump of Sony data, including email, confidential materials, and unreleased projects, it also specifically targeted The Interview , a movie featuring Seth Rogen and James Franco. The theory that North Korea was behind the attack was initially dismissed when North Korea publicly denied involvement, but official sources believe that the North Korean government was “centrally involved” in the attacks. The New York Times reports that officials aren’t going on the record, and are unsure whether or not the White House will publicly accuse Kim Jong Un and North Korea of the attack. The hackers’ methodology is highly reminiscent of tactics used by Anonymous — timed dumps of sensitive data, DDOS attacks, etc. — which have thus far clouded the investigation. The Interview , which depicts the assassination attempt of Kim Jong Un, was slotted to be released on Christmas Day until Sony was forced to pull the movie. Amid 9/11-referencing threats from the hacker organization, which called itself the Guardians of Peace, five of the major theater chains said they would not show the film, leading Sony to pull back entirely. Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/17/us-officials-believe-north-korea-was-involved-in-sony-hacks/

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US Officials Believe North Korea Was Involved In Sony Hacks

DDoS Attacks Hit Equity Poker Network Full Flush Poker

  A rash of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that have been plaguing the online poker industry as of late have also included the Equity Poker Network (EPN). Following the cancellation of the “Winning Millions” tournament at the Winning Poker Network (WPN) on Sunday due to DDoS attacks, as well as similar actions by hackers that caused both WPN and the Merge Gaming Network to be shutdown on Tuesday, EPN and flagship skin Full Flush Poker issued press releases confirming that the network has also been under fire from computer miscreants. The DDOS attacks at EPN have occurred intermittently across the past six weeks, causing some short-term disruptions to Network connectivity, and frustrating poker room outages,” stated the EPN press release. Players at EPN have been subjected to disconnections that typically last no longer than 60 seconds. While that amount of time is relatively short, it certainly is long enough to seriously affect tournament play, as well as action on the cash tables. Network in Motion to Fight Hackers Full Flush informed that the DDoS incidents were small in number and that customer support was able to satisfy player concerns over the issues “quickly and efficiently.” EPN pointed out that account information of players “remains uncompromised,” and that efforts have been made to combat the actions by the hackers. We are working behind the scenes to strengthen the Network mechanisms and structures necessary to deal with such assaults on our operations, and we hope to reach a solution shortly that will fix the outages our Network’s Operators and their players have had to endure during recent times,” an EPN spokesperson said. The DDoS attacks have been quite troubling and come at a time when many sites throughout the online poker industry have undertaken steps to attract more recreational players to the tables. The negative press that comes from such attacks may cause some of those players to turn their backs on Internet poker, as trust and security are of utmost importance. We apologize to you, our players, for these recent disconnections caused by nefarious outside sources,” said an FFP representative. “We understand how frustrating this has been for our players, but we ask that if you experience a disconnect to be patient, wait 30-60 seconds for our mitigation devices to kick in, and the service will be restored as normal.” Source: http://www.pokerupdate.com/news/networks-and-rooms/12171-ddos-attacks-hit-equity-poker-network/  

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DDoS Attacks Hit Equity Poker Network Full Flush Poker

London teen pleads guilty to SpamHaus DDoS attack

The London teen behind the massive denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on SpamHaus and Cloudflare has pleaded guilty. Technology blogger Brian Krebs reported over the weekend that 17-year-old Sean Nolan McDonough, also known by his hacker alias “Narko,” pleaded guilty on Dec. 10 to computer misuse and money laundering in connection with the attack. McDonough was arrested in September 2013 after he played a role in the March 19, 2013 DDoS attacks aimed at Spamhaus, a Dutch anti-spam group and international nonprofit. SpamHaus later moved its servers behind CloudFlare, which then pushed the attackers to devote their efforts toward the company’s network. The attack sent 85Gbps of traffic. The U.K. National Crime Agency told Krebs that, “court reporting restrictions are in place in respect to a juvenile offender, [and] as a consequence the NCA will not be releasing further detail.” Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/sean-nolan-mcdonough-narko-pleads-guilty/article/388387/

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London teen pleads guilty to SpamHaus DDoS attack

Channel mis-selling firewalls leads to DDoS attacks

The channel mis-selling firewalls to their customers as protection against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks is partly to blame for the escalating number of attacks on enterprises. Dave Larson, CTO of Corero claims that tTraditional security solutions such as firewalls and IPS technology can’t handle the complexity of the modern DDoS attack – and even the more recent next generation firewalls can only provide a marginal benefit in fighting the attacks. Nevertheless, a survey conducted by Corero in 2013 had 40 percent of organisations stating they were relying on firewalls to protect them against DDoS attacks. “We see confusion in the market every day. DDoS protection vendors are fighting for mindshare with the end user community because there is still a vast misunderstanding about what DDoS is all about, and what it takes to eliminate the problem,” says Larson. “The problem is that firewall solutions are not well positioned to show the extent of the problem. Most organisations are shocked at the level and frequency of DDoS activity in their environment once they deploy a targeted in-line DDoS solution that is capable of exposing the threat.” He continues: “Proper DDoS protection is more than a ‘checkbox’ on a traditional security tool . Clicking the’DDoS on’ button on a firewall is not going to protect the business from the sophisticated and adaptive DDoS attacks that are taking down organisations, and distracting security teams from breach activity,” he explains. Larson concedes the channel is not deliberately advising customers to purchase the wrong protection, but “it is a matter of better education around why purpose built in-line appliance-based protection will allow their customers to properly defend against the modern DDoS attack landscape.” “There is no question that firewall technology is a tried and true security solution—a requirement for the majority of businesses. They key here is that that the channel can and should introduce dedicated DDoS protection as an additional layer to their overall security architecture. Implementing first line of defence technology to defeat DDoS at the very edge of the network allows all downstream technology infrastructure , like firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), to perform as intended. “There is a real opportunity for the channel to gain mind share , and ultimately revenue growth by understanding, and tapping into the DDoS market, this opportunity would complement the selling of traditional security solutions rather than replace them.” Source: http://www.channelpro.co.uk/news/8865/channel-mis-selling-firewalls-leads-to-ddos-attacks

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Channel mis-selling firewalls leads to DDoS attacks