Residents of the island, a Special Administrative Region of China, are up in arms after plans for a popular vote in the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant were sidelined by a distributed denial-of-service attack that knocked the voting system offline. The attack on Sunday evening swamped systems used for the vote with millions of bogus votes – far more than…
San Francisco, CA - infoZine - Denial of service attacks – flooding websites with traffic in order to make them unavailable to the public – have become an increasingly popular way to take down or block Internet content. A new online guide from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) outlines how website operators can fend off these attacks and keep their…
The hacktivist group Anonymous staged a number of DDoS attacks on UK government websites yesterday in an apparent show of support for the controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who remains stuck inside his Ecuadorean embassy bolt-hole as he attempts to avoid extradition to Sweden. Anonymous, who have been associated with numerous distributed denial of service attacks in the past, yesterday…
Earlier this year, India had an encounter with “Anonymous”, a diffuse alliance of what are commonly (and incorrectly) called hackers. In its much-publicized “Operation India”, Anonymous blocked public access to, hacked and defaced various websites in protest against the rising censorship of the Internet. This is a legitimate political cause. However, a movement cannot be judged purely by the legitimacy…
The website of the Kremlin-funded news network Russia Today has been hit with a denial-of-service attack that some have linked with the station’s support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and others with the impending Pussy Riot verdict. The English-language Russia Today (RT) tweeted on Friday morning that its hosting provider had confirmed RT.com was “under DDoS attack”. An anti-Wikileaks group…
The WikiLeaks website came back online last Tuesday after being down for almost a week due to Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). The secret-leaking organization says it has been targeted by DDoS making its website inaccessible or sluggish for several days. The attack was said to have began at the beginning of August and has intensified to affect other…
Bambuser came under a distributed denial-of-service attack on Thursday morning, possibly in connection with a user’s coverage of the Ecuadorian embassy where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is holed up. The connection is not certain, but Bambuser’s Swedish proprietors say they had received threatening tweets just prior to the attack. Bambuser chief Jonas Vig told ZDNet that the DDoS took the…
Never heard of a DDoS attack? Small companies that do business online ought to learn about this growing online threat — and figure out how they’ll respond should one ever hit them. Consider what happened to Los Angeles-based business-planning publishing and advisory company Growthink. Last September, a surprise flood of bogus traffic knocked its website off the internet for several…
Cybercrooks are now offering to launch cyberattacks against telecom services, with prices starting at just $20 a day. Distributed denial of attacks against websites or web services have been going on for many years. Attacks that swamped telecoms services are a much more recent innovation, first starting around 2010. While DDoS attacks on websites are typically launched from botnets (networks…
A college student arrested last year for alleged involvement in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks waged by Anonymous appeared publicly here Saturday on a panel discussing the hacktivist collective and online civil liberties. Mercedes Haefer, an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who was indicted in July 2011 with 13 others for alleged conspiracy to commit DDoS attacks…
