Security News
A newly discovered evasive malware leverages the Secure Shell cryptographic protocol to gain entry into targeted systems with the goal of mining cryptocurrency and carrying out distributed denial-of-service attacks. Dubbed KmsdBot by the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team, the Golang-based malware has been found targeting a variety of companies ranging from gaming to luxury car brands to security firms.
While the FBI alert doesn't name said hacktivists in its latest cyber squad notification [PDF] for private industry, the Feds may be talking about Killnet, a "Relatively unsophisticated" gang whose "Nuisance-level DDoS attacks" don't live up to its rhetoric, according to security researchers. These attacks are generally opportunistic in nature and, with DDoS mitigation steps, have minimal operational impact on victims; however, hacktivists will often publicize and exaggerate the severity of the attacks on social media.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Friday that distributed denial-of-service attacks coordinated by hacktivist groups have a minor impact on the services they target. "Coinciding with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the FBI is aware of Pro-Russian hacktivist groups employing DDoS attacks to target critical infrastructure companies with limited success," the agency said.
The US Treasury Department has thwarted a distributed denial of service attack that officials attributed to Russian hacktivist group Killnet. According to Reuters, which first reported on the US Treasury incident, the Killnet DDoS flood didn't have any operational impact on the agency and it happened a couple days before the Russians turned their attention to JPMorgan Chase.
The threat actor behind the Fodcha distributed denial-of-service botnet has resurfaced with new capabilities, researchers reveal. Fodcha first came to light earlier this April, with the malware propagating through known vulnerabilities in Android and IoT devices as well as weak Telnet or SSH passwords.
A new version of the Fodcha DDoS botnet has emerged, featuring ransom demands injected into packets and new features to evade detection of its infrastructure. The most notable improvement in this botnet version is the delivery of ransom demands directly within DDoS packets used against victims' networks.
In the first half of 2022, the amount of DDoS attacks increased by 75.6% compared to the second half of 2021, according to new Nexusguard research revealed in the company's DDoS Statistical Report for 1HY 2022. In this Help Net Security video, Juniman Kasman, CTO at Nexusguard, talks about how, while the total number of attacks did grow, the average and maximum attack sizes each decreased by 56% and 66.8%, respectively, during the same period.
Microsoft announced today the availability of Azure DDoS IP Protection in public preview, a new and fully managed DDoS Protection pay-per-protected IP model tailored to small and midsize businesses.Unlike the enterprise offering, DDoS IP Protection does not have support for DDoS rapid response support, cost protection, and discounts on WAF. "With the DDoS IP Protection SKU, customers now have the flexibility to enable DDoS protection on individual public IP addresses," Microsoft Senior Product Manager for Azure Networking Amir Dahan said.
Web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare disclosed this week that it halted a 2.5 Tbps distributed denial-of-service attack launched by a Mirai botnet. Characterizing it as a "Multi-vector attack consisting of UDP and TCP floods," researcher Omer Yoachimik said the DDoS attack targeted the Minecraft server Wynncraft in Q3 2022.
A pro-Russian group created a crowdsourced project called 'DDOSIA' that pays volunteers launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against western entities. In hacktivist DDoS attacks, volunteers don't get a monetary reward.