Security News
There has been a 33% increase in the number of DDoS attacks in H1 2021, according to a report published by Link11. The report also found that between Q1 2021 and Q2 2021 there was a 19% increase in DDoS campaigns, some of which were over 100 Gbps in attack volume; further evidence that hackers are continuing to exploit the vulnerabilities of businesses during the pandemic.
A British script kiddie who DDoS'd a Labour Party parliamentary candidate's website in the runup to the last general election has been banned from using the Tor browser. Bradley Niblock, formerly the operator of the UGLegion Twitter account, pleaded guilty to two Computer Misuse Act crimes after being tracked down by Cumbria Police.
CDN, cybersecurity and cloud services provider Akamai has blamed an outage that occurred on Thursday on an issue with its Prolexic DDoS attack protection service. Akamai's Prolexic Routed is a fully managed service designed to protect an organization's online assets against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Major financial institutions, airlines and the Hong Kong stock exchange were knocked offline by a backfiring distributed denial-of-service mitigation service Thursday. The hour-long outage, which was triggered at approximately 1 a.m. EST Thursday, is tied to Akamai Technology's anti-DDoS Prolexic service.
During the pandemic, cyber attackers targeted industries providing connectivity, services and entertainment to populations forced to shelter-in-place, resulting in a 341% year-over-year increase in distributed denial-of-service attacks, according to Nexusguard. The massive shift in online behavior and reliance on connectivity strained communications service providers and internet service providers that provided the backbone for this remote work, including spikes in ransom DDoS attacks to extort organizations for payment in exchange for staying online.
The new name is a tongue-in-cheek combination of the Russia-linked Fancy Bear advanced persistent threat and North Korea's Lazarus Group. According to Proofpoint, this time around the gang has been sending threatening, targeted emails to various organizations, including those operating in the energy, financial, insurance, manufacturing, public utilities and retail sectors - asking for a two-Bitcoin starting ransom if companies want to avoid a crippling DDoS attack.
Kinetic Business introduced DDoS Mitigation Service, a fully managed service that monitors, detects, validates and mitigates attacks-even on third-party networks -before an outage or related damage occurs. Kinetic's DDoS Mitigation Service uses a network of highly scalable scrubbing centers that ingest and inspect attack traffic upstream from the customer's network.
Application and network performance management company NETSCOUT warned organizations this week that STUN servers have been increasingly abused for distributed denial-of-service attacks, and there are tens of thousands of servers that could be abused for such attacks by malicious actors. While the amplification rate is only 2.32 to 1, UDP reflection/amplification attacks abusing STUN services can be more difficult to mitigate without overblocking legitimate traffic.
DDoS attacks increase the pressure on the victim to pay the ransom by adding another threat to combat, says NETSCOUT. Ransomware attackers are always looking for new ways to persuade their targets to pay the ransom. One tactic increasingly being added to a traditional ransomware campaign is a DDoS attack.
Access to Mexico's Lotería Nacional and Pronósticos lottery websites are now blocked to IP addresses outside of Mexico after a ransomware gang threatened to perform denial of service attacks. Lotería Nacional is the government-run national lottery system of Mexico, operating under Mexico's Ministry of Finance.