Quillette Magazine, a small but respected libertarian publication based in Australia, suffered a DDoS attack Tuesday after publishing an article supportive of James Damore, the fired Google memo writer. The attack, which crashed the site for a day, came after Quillette published the opinion of four scientists on the Google memo. The scientists found that the conservative Google employee’s views…
While fighting botnets like Mirai and BrickerBot with another botnet, Hajime, may help prevent denial-of-service attacks on the IoT, the best defense is a basic system security-hardening plan. An ongoing battle being waged is leveraging insecure Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices. BrickerBot (see “Beware BrickerBot, the IoT Killer”) is a recent malware strain attacking connected devices and causing them…
You might recall that when John Oliver did his latest piece on net neutrality, the FCC’s comment system ground to a halt under the load of viewers pissed to realize that the FCC is trying to kill popular consumer protections protecting them from buffoonery by the likes of Comcast. But the FCC then did something odd: it claimed that a…
A distributed denial of service siege spanning more than 11 days broke a DDoS record for the year, according to a report from Kaspersky Lab. DDoS attackers launched a 277-hour attack against a Chinese telecom company in the second quarter of 2017, registering a 131% hourly increase compared to the longest attack recorded earlier this year, according to a report…
Kaspersky report reveals the return of major DDoS threats, which are now also lasting longer than ever before. Long-lasting DDoS attacks are back, and they’re harder than ever, new research has claimed. According to a report from Kaspersky Lab, the second three months of 2017 saw a DDoS attack last more than 11 days – 277 hours straight. That’s a…
On Friday, US authorities arrested a man on charges of launching DDoS attacks and making death and bomb threats against several targets including Leagle.com, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Metro News Canada, the official website of the Canadian government, and others. The man’s name is Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, a man born in Iran, who later obtained US…
I do a lot of DDoS related research online, which results in a lot of DDoS protection related spam/offers. A trend I have seen gaining popularity lately is “ban the bots”. These emails contain a lot of emotionally charged language trying to persuade the reader that bots are destroying the internet, wasting your bandwidth and pillaging your website (and how…
IT security professionals are bracing for DDoS attacks of unprecedented frequency in the year ahead, and are already preparing for attacks that could disrupt the UK’s Brexit negotiations and cause outages worldwide. That’s according to a survey from Corero Network Security, which found that more than half (57%) of respondents believe that the Brexit negotiations will be affected by DDoS…
Some clever hackers found new ways to use the smart devices surrounding us, according to a report published last week by UK-based cyber-defense company Darktrace. The report, entitled the Darktrace Global Threat Report 2017, contains nine case studies from hacks investigated by Darktrace, among which two detail cyber-incidents caused by IoT devices. Smart drawing pads used for DDoS attacks In…
It used to be that news about DDoS attacks was largely limited to tech websites and other specialized information sources, where the focus was on attack vectors, attack sizes, how exactly the perpetrators pulled it off and how websites could protect themselves going forward. These still have their place, especially with the ever-increasing size, complexity and frequency of attacks, but…
