Three young men who developed and deployed the original Mirai IoT botnet malware were sentenced on Tuesday in an Alaskan federal court to five years probation – a lenient punishment earned through extensive cooperation with FBI on other cyber investigations. Paras Jha, 22, of Fanwood, N.J.; Josiah White, 21, of Washington, Penn.; and Dalton Norman, 22, of Metairie, La. were…
What’s causing the uptick? Motivation, opportunity, and new capabilities. According to IDC Research’s recent US DDoS Prevention Survey, more than 50% of IT security decision makers said that their organization had been the victim of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as many as 10 times in the past year. For those who experienced an attack, more than 40% lasted longer…
The campaign website of a Democratic congressional candidate in California was taken down by cyberattacks several times during the primary election season, according to cybersecurity experts. Rolling Stone reported on Thursday that cybersecurity experts who reviewed forensic server data and emails concluded that the website for Bryan Caforio, who finished third in the June primary, was hit with distributed denial of service…
New research from Kaspersky Lab reveals how cybercriminals are targeting IoT devices. During the first half of 2018, malware designed specifically for Internet of Things (IoT) devices grew three-fold with over 120,000 modifications of malware according to new research from Kaspersky Lab. The security firm’s IoT report revealed that the growth of malware families for smart devices is snowballing and…
This comes after more than 18 months of already helping the FBI stop cyberattacks Three young hackers went from believing they were “untouchable” to helping the FBI stop future cyberattacks. The trio of hackers behind the Mirai botnet — one of the most powerful tools used for cyberattacks — has been working with the FBI for more than a year,…
In October 2016, the Mirai botnet took down domain name system provider Dyn, waking much of the world up to the fact that Internet of Things devices could be weaponized in a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Although DDoS attacks have been around since the early days of the modern internet, IT communities around the globe came to…
Report fingers students and staff for academic cyber-attacks Who’s hacking into university systems? Here’s a clue from the UK higher education tech crew at Jisc: the attacks drop dramatically during summer break. A new study from Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) has suggested that rather than state-backed baddies or common criminals looking to siphon off academic research and…
DDoS attacks against university campuses are more likely in term time. Nation-states and criminal gangs often get the blame for cyber attacks against universities, but a new analysis of campaigns against the education sector suggests that students — or even staff — could be perpetrators of many of these attacks. Attributing cyber attacks is often a difficult task but Jisc,…
With the help of machine learning and AI, software-defined networks could soon aid businesses with network management. A network that can fix and optimize itself without human intervention could become a reality soon – but not without some training. With the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, software-defined networks can learn to help with network management by using operational…
According to the Q2 2018 Threat Report, Nexusguard’s quarterly report, the average distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack grew to more than 26Gbps, increasing in size by 500%. The research looked at the same period last year and found that the maximum attack size quadrupled to 359Gbps. Evaluating thousands of worldwide DDoS attacks, researchers reportedly gathered real-time attack data from botnet scanning, honeypots, ISPs and traffic moving…
