The New Zealand stock exchange (NZX) website has gone down again in what appears to be the latest disruption caused by cyber attackers. The NZX website has been targeted by repeated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks over the last week, beginning last Tuesday. Such attacks disrupt service by saturating the network with significant volumes of internet traffic, and have caused…
A team of Chinese academics has found a new way to abuse HTTP packets to amplify web traffic and bring down websites and content delivery networks (CDNs). Named RangeAmp, this new Denial-of-Service (DoS) technique exploits incorrect implementations of the HTTP “Range Requests” attribute. HTTP Range Requests are part of the HTTP standard and allow clients (usually browsers) to request only…
New vulnerability in DNS server software can be leveraged for DDoS attacks with an 1620x amplification factor. A team of academics from Israel has disclosed today details about NXNSAttack, a vulnerability in DNS servers that can be abused to launch DDoS attacks of massive proportions. According to the research team, NXNSAttack impacts recursive DNS servers and the process of DNS…
A previously unknown SQL injection vulnerability in the Sophos XG Firewall gave hackers access to customers’ local usernames and hashed passwords for several days. The Abingdon, U.K.-based platform security vendor said it learned late Wednesday of an attack against its physical and virtual XG Firewall units when a suspicious field value was discovered inside the device’s management interface. The attack…
There is no escaping it. COVID-19 is dominating headlines and has impacted virtually every corner of the world. Like most people at this point, I’m 30 days into isolation and trying everything in my power to ignore the elephant in the room and the politics that go along with it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, cyber security is an essential business. As…
Dutch law enforcement has shut down 15 DDoS-for-hire services that were used to run cyberattacks aimed at knocking websites and networks offline. Although they did not reveal the names of the DDoS-for-hire booters that they stopped, Police in The Netherlands were able to arrest a 19-year-old man from The Netherlands, who is suspected of orchestrating a DDoS attack against two websites that provide…
Australian banking and financial institutions received extortion emails threatening them of possible distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against them. To avert this situation the extortioners demanded a ransom that needs to be paid in the form of Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency. The Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) is aware of this extortion campaign and issued threat advice…
OKEx and Bitfinex were hit by similar attacks in 24 hours Someone is disrupting cryptocurrency exchanges with Distributed Denial of Service attacks, with both Bitfinex and OKEx hit in the past 24 hours. “I was not aware of the attack against OKEx yesterday. I’m interested to understand similarities,” tweeted Bitfinex CTO Paulo Ardoino. “We’ve seen a level of sophistication that means a…
The head of Iran Civil Defense has accused Washington of the latest large-scale cyber-attack that targeted Iranian infrastructure. The coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack affected two mobile operators and partially shut down Iran’s internet for hours. Iranian officials said they stopped the DDoS attack after activating Iran’s digital fortress DZHAFA shield. He added that the frequent cyber-attacks had…
Peer-to-peer botnets, TCP reflection attacks, and increased activity on Sundays are three DDoS attack trends from last quarter. The number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks nearly doubled between the fourth quarter of 2018 and fourth quarter of 2019, researchers found in a new study of DDoS trends. Last quarter brought an increase in the number of attacks relative to the…
