Tag Archives: ddos news

Xbox Live Suffers DDoS Disruption, Playstation Network May Be Next

A DDoS attack initiated by grey-hat hacker group Phantom Squad may have taken Microsoft’s Xbox Live online network offline for at least 3 hours today. If the hacker group’s threats are to believed, Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) may be next. Gamers, look away. This is going to make for painful reading. For the second time in two years, a hacker group may be disrupting two of the most popular gaming networks in the console gaming world, Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Hacked reported on the DDoS threats made by Phantom Squad a few days ago, after a series of tweets posted by the hacker group that also took credit for knocking Reddit offline recently. In a case of history repeating itself, the group is doing what infamous hacking group Lizard Squad did last year in December, disrupting gamers’ plans of going online with their consoles by taking down Xbox Live and PSN for several days last year. While the new group Phantom Squad threatened to take down the gaming networks during Christmas, Xbox Live suffered an outage in certain parts around the world for a few years today. To nobody’s surprise, Phantom Squad took credit for the outage. An update posted today on Xbox’s status website read: Hey Xbox members, are you having trouble purchasing or managing your subscriptions for Xbox Live? Are you also having an issue with signing into Xbox Live? We are aware of these issues and are working to get it fixed ASAP! Thank you for being patient while we work. We’ll post another update when more information becomes available. The message made no reference to any disruptions or DDoS attacks targeting the network although Microsoft nor Sony seldom acknowledge such attacks, even if they were bearing the brunt of such attacks. For now, Xbox Live Status shows all services are up and running and it is likely that Microsoft has found an IP range or two to block the DDoS requests flooding the servers, a common defense strategy against such attacks. Meanwhile, Phantom Squad has claimed that it will DDoS both gaming networks this Christmas Day. So we are going to DDoS Xbox&PSN on Christmas Day We Dont Joke We Are Always Watching Christmas Day PSN&Xbox This Is Not A Bluff #Phantom — PhantomSquad (@PhantomLair) December 18, 2015 The hacking group claims that the disruptions are to bring attention to the lack of cybersecurity in the gaming networks but gamers will argue the group is doing it simply to annoy a large population of console gamers looking to wind down and play games during the holidays. Hacked has previously reported on several disruptive malicious hackers, including those from Lizard Squad who have been arrested not long after their antics from Christmas last year. One of the suspects was arrested in the UK in January this year while another was apprehended as a part of a wider operation in March 2015. Hacked will keep you updated on this story as it unfolds in the week leading to Christmas. Source: https://hacked.com/xbox-live-suffers-ddos-disruption-playstation-network-may-next/

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Xbox Live Suffers DDoS Disruption, Playstation Network May Be Next

Hacker squad plans DDoS attacks on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live this Christmas

Hacker group Phantom Squad plans to shut down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network on Christmas. Forget the Grinch, there’s someone else who wants to steal Christmas. Phantom Squad, an online hacker group, has threatened to shut down Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network this Christmas by unleashing a series of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks — coordinated barrages of falsified incoming server traffic that causes the system to crash. DATA BREACHES AND CYBERATTACKS IN 2015 “We are going to shut down Xbox Live and PSN this year on Christmas,” the hackers tweeted. “And we are going to keep them down for one week straight. #DramaAlert.” We are going to shut down Xbox live and PSN this year on christmas. And we are going to keep them down for one week straight #DramaAlert — Phantom Squad (@PhantomSqaud) December 9, 2015 This could cause a big problem, because a lot of people are expecting to receive new gaming consoles on Dec. 25. If Phantom Squad is successful, this would be the second year in a row that these gaming networks go offline. Last year, the infamous hacker group Lizard Squad took credit for shutting down Xbox Live and PSN for two days. The group demanded more retweets and Twitter followers in exchange for restoring the servers. Phantom Squad, which said it has no relation to Lizard Squad, claims they’ve previously performed smaller outages on the gaming community servers, as well as other website such as Reddit. The group also explained in a tweet why it is that they perform these attacks. “I get asked a lot on why we do this? Why do we take down PSN and Xbox Live?” the tweet reads. “Because cyber security does not exist.” Sony and Microsoft have both received a series of attacks over the past year, but it’s still unknown what tactics they’ve developed to try and avoid these issues. Kim Dotcom, the infamous Internet entrepreneur behind Megeupload, has warned Sony and Microsoft that the attack could be avoided if they update their servers. “Warning @Sony & @Microsoft. You had 1 year to upgrade your networks. If Lizard Squad takes down PSN & XBOX this Xmas, we’ll be pissed! RT!,” Dotcom tweeted. Dotcom, who is also a gamer, helped stop last year’s attack by promising the hackers 3,000 accounts on his encrypted upload service Mega. While Sony and Microsoft work on strengthening their servers, people who bought a console as a gift this Christmas can unbox it, plug it in, and download all the updates as soon as they buy it. This process will let them at least play games offline on Christmas. Otherwise, if the hackers release a DDoS attack, the console will be useless without being powered on and updated. Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/hackers-plan-ddos-attack-psn-xbox-live-christmas-article-1.2467876

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Hacker squad plans DDoS attacks on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live this Christmas

Boston internet service disrupted briefly by DDoS attack

Internet service in Boston was disrupted on Tuesday in what is being called a “minor act of cybervandalism,” according to the Boston Herald . The outage, affecting city agencies and the police and fire departments, was “short, but widespread,” said Mayor Martin J. Walsh. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that caused computers worldwide to redirect network traffic to City Hall computers is cited as the method by which web connections were shuttered. While Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city’s CIO, dismissed the attack as “a minor act of cybervandalism,” the incident is another example of an attack method becoming increasingly common and illustrates the vulnerabilities enterprises face on a daily basis. Experts explained that as the attack harvests no data, it might have been retribution or an attacker’s attempt to gain notoriety. Franklin-Hodge said his team was able to restore service within 20 minutes. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/boston-officials-call-ddos-attack-on-internet-service-a-minor-act/article/460203/

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Boston internet service disrupted briefly by DDoS attack

Web host Moonfruit defies Armada DDoS crew … by (temporarily) defeating itself

Move follows 45-minute attack last Thursday Web host Moonfruit last night began putting its systems back online after taking down customers’ sites in order to upgrade defences in the face of a threatened DDoS attack, with the firm blaming a recent assault (which prompted the self-takedown) on the Armada Collective crew.…

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Web host Moonfruit defies Armada DDoS crew … by (temporarily) defeating itself

Are your competitors organizing DDoS attacks against you?

According to recent research from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, nearly half (48 per cent) of the companies surveyed believe they know the identity and motivation of those behind recent DDoS att…

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Are your competitors organizing DDoS attacks against you?

Cyber criminals not to blame for all DDoS attacks, study shows

There is a real concern that many companies are being affected by the DDoS attacks commissioned by competitors, according to Kaspersky Lab Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are associated with criminal activity, but not all those behind DDoS attacks are cyber criminals, research has revealed. Nearly half of more than 5,500 companies polled in 26 countries claimed to know the identity and motivation behind recent DDoS attacks, and 12% named competitors as the most likely culprits. This suspicion increases in the business services industry, with 38% of respondents in this sector believing their competitors were behind a DDoS attack, according to a survey by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International. However, 18% attributed recent DDoS attacks to criminals seeking to disrupt or distract while another attack took place; 17% to criminals seeking to disrupt their services for a ransom; 11% to political activists; and 5% to state-sponsored activities. The most popular motivation for the attacks is believed to be a ransom, cited by 27% of respondents in the manufacturing and telecoms sectors. “DDoS attacks are no longer just about cyber criminals seeking to halt a company’s operations,” said Evgeny Vigovsky, head of DDoS protection at Kaspersky Lab. “Businesses are becoming suspicious of each other, and there is a real concern that many companies – including small and medium ones – are being affected by the underhanded tactics of their competitors, which are commissioning DDoS attacks directly against them, damaging their operations and reputation,” he said. In the light of this trend, Vigovsky said all businesses should remain vigilant and fully understand the repercussions of a DDoS attack in terms of the potential financial and reputational damage. “It is wise not to pay a ransom, or to fall victim to cyber criminals or competitors. Ensure that you have the appropriate security measures in place to help manage the increased risk posed to your business from DDoS attacks,” he said. Looking ahead to 2016, security firms expect to see an increase in the tactic of using DDoS attacks to distract companies from other, more damaging malicious activity on their networks, such as data theft. The use of DDoS, or the threat of DDoS attacks, as a way of extorting money is also expected to continue and increase in the coming year. According to the study, 20% of companies with 50 employees or more reported that they have been the victim of at least one DDoS attack, with companies in the telecoms, financial services and IT sectors the most likely to be targeted. The study also revealed that 50% of DDoS attacks led to a noticeable disruption of services; 26% led to the loss of sensitive data; 24% led to services being completely unavailable; and 74% led to a noticeable disruption of service, which coincided with a different type of security incident, such as a malware attack, network intrusion or other type of attack. According to Kaspersky Lab, the average cost for recovering from a DDoS attack for companies of more than 1,500 employees is $417,000, and $53,000 for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Yet 56% of those polled thought that spending money to prevent or mitigate DDoS attacks in future would be worth the investment, 53% said their organisation knew how to mitigate or prevent DDoS attacks, and only 52% felt well-informed about DDoS attacks. Despite the cost and complexity of dealing with DDoS attacks, the Kaspersky Lab research said the average financial damage of a DDoS attack is significant, especially for SMBs, and is definitely higher than the cost of a service designed to reduce the effect of such attacks. “DDoS prevention is almost always a third-party service, and outsourcing this trouble to experts not only reduces the damage but also frees up IT personnel to deal with a probable complementary attack on a company infrastructure, which will have much worse consequences,” the report said. Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500260544/Cyber-criminals-not-to-blame-for-all-DDoS-attacks-study-shows

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Cyber criminals not to blame for all DDoS attacks, study shows

OpTrump: Anonymous declares war on Donald Trump with DDOS attack following Muslim ban speech

Hacktivist group Anonymous has continued to add to its list of targets, with controversial US presidential candidate Donald Trump the latest in the crosshairs. Following Trump’s radical speech stating he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the US, Twitter accounts linked to the group declared war. The OpTrump campaign launched last night (9 December) with the first piece of business taking down Trump’s website www.trumptowerny.com for several hours by hitting it with a DDOS (distributed-denial-of-service) attack, which crashed the site. One Twitter user posted a picture of the hack, claiming the site was “almost down”. Anonymous posted a video online in response to Trump’s comments and warned of the repercussions of his words. “Donald Trump, it has come to our attention that you want to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. This policy is going to have a huge impact. This is what Isis wants. The more Muslims feel sad the more Isis feels they can recruit them. The more the United States appears to be targeting Muslims, not just radical Muslims you can be sure Isis will be putting that on their social media campaign,” said a masked member of the hacktivist group. While Anonymous has yet to officially claim responsibility for the DDOS attack, Twitter users showed full support of the group and its campaign. In the grand scheme of things this was a fairly tame attack, as the website is still running as normal at the time of writing, but it did serve as a digital slap to show this could be the first of many targeted operations against Trump. Anonymous is also busy taking on Islamic State by organising an official Isis Trolling Day called “Day of Rage” on 11 December, where it is encouraging an uprising of social media users to post content mocking the terror group. They issued a list of actions in a statement that includes reporting accounts of Isis sympathisers, posting mocking photos and use mocking hashtags. There will also be organised demonstrations held around the world. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/optrump-anonymous-declares-war-donald-trump-ddos-attack-following-muslim-ban-speech-1532739

Abe’s official website latest to come under possible cyber attack by Anonymous

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may have had his official website attacked by the ‘hacktivist’ Anonymous group, local media reported Thursday. According to Japan’s public NHK broadcaster, Abe’s official website has been inaccessible since early on Thursday, with the international group of clandestine hackers knows as Anonymous allegedly posting a message on Twitter claiming responsibility for the cyber attack on the site. Abe’s top spokesperson, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, said the government had been informed about the possible breach to the prime minister’s site by Anonymous, but in a press conference earlier Thursday declined to comment specifically as to whether the attack had been carried out by Anonymous. The possible attack by Anonymous is the latest in a series of cyber attacks on Japanese websites, including most recently last month on the website of Japan’s Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, which went down for three days after the group, according to its Twitter post, disabled the site by flooding it with enough data to crash its servers. As with the latest case, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police have been on high alert, although the government is either unaware or is remaining tight-lipped about the motive for the recent attacks, according to sources close to the matter Thursday. The group also took aim at Japan on Oct. 10 this year, when both Narita and Chubu airports in the east of the country, came under DDoS attacks with Anonymous saying on Twitter the attacks were a part of their campaign against Japan’s controversial dolphin hunting practice. The town of Taiji in southeastern Japan where the drive hunts take place saw its official website also taken down earlier in the year with police concluding that the hactivist group was responsible. The Japan National Tourism Organization and Japan’s Fishermen’s Union’s websites have also suffered DDoS attacks, for Japan’s continued dolphin hunts, it has been reported. Prior to these, in 2012, the government was also subjected to a series of cyber attacks by Anonymous following the implementation of new ant-piracy laws by the government, which outline stiff fines and jail terms for those downloading copyrighted content. The group highlight the fact that content suppliers were pressuring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to implement surveillance technology in an unprecedented move that some felt impinged on privacy laws. As a result, the Finance Ministry, Supreme Court, the then ruling Democratic Party of Japan and Liberal Democratic Party of Japan all saw their sites attacked at the time, some with specific pages defaced. Source: http://www.ecns.cn/2015/12-10/192047.shtml

DNS Root Servers Hit by DDoS Attack

Unknown parties carried out a large-scale DDoS attack on the Internet’s DNS root servers, causing slight timeouts for four nodes, more exactly on the B, C, G, and H servers, RootOps reports. There were two different attacks, one launched on November 30 that lasted 160 minutes (from 06:50 to 09:30 UTC), and a second, shorter one on December 1 that lasted only one hour (from 05:10 to 06:10 UTC). RootOps, the DNS root server operators, are reporting that the attacks were valid DNS queries addressed towards one domain in the first attack, and to a different domain on the second day. Each attack blasted up to five million queries per second per DNS root name server. RootOps has no hopes to catch the culprit, since IP source addresses can be easily spoofed, and the source IP addresses used in the DDoS attack were very well spread and randomized across the entire IPv4 address space. The DDoS didn’t cause any serious damage, but a mere delay for some users making DNS queries via their browser, FTP, SSH, or other clients. DNS protocol’s design saves the day “The DNS root name server system functioned as designed, demonstrating overall robustness in the face of large-scale traffic floods observed at numerous DNS root name servers,” said the DNS root server operators, referring to the fallback system employed by DNS servers. Because of the way DNS is constructed, on a mesh-like structure like the Internet itself, if one server does not respond, other servers intervene and provide a DNS query result. The DNS root server operators did not speculate on the reasons this massive attack was carried out against their infrastructure but did say this was not the result of a reflected DDoS attack. RootOps recommended that ISPs that don’t want to allow DDoS attacks that use IP address spoofing to be carried from their network should implement Source Address Validation and the BCP-38 specification. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/dns-root-servers-hit-by-ddos-attack-497363.shtml

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DNS Root Servers Hit by DDoS Attack

DDoS attacks increase 180% compared to a year ago

Akamai Technologies announced its Q3 2015 report, which provides analysis and insight into the global cloud security threat landscape. “Akamai has been seeing greater numbers of denial of service a…