Security News

Australia will hire 500 hackers as part of a AU$1.35bn boost to protect the nation's networks from a wave of cyber attacks. Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced this morning that the government would funnel the money from existing defence funding over the next decade to bolster the capabilities of the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Cybersecurity Centre.

A recently identified piece of cryptojacking malware includes functionality that enables its operators to launch distributed denial of service attacks, Palo Alto Networks reports. The malware enables itself with debug privilege and begins operation by launching several threads.

A man who developed distributed denial of service botnets based on the source code of Mirai was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison. Initially based on the publicly available Mirai source code, the botnets received additional capabilities over time, which increased their complexity and efficiency, the DoJ says.

The United States Department of Justice yesterday sentenced a 22-year-old Washington-based hacker to 13 months in federal prison for his role in creating botnet malware, infecting a large number of systems with it, and then abusing those systems to carry out large scale distributed denial-of-service attacks against various online service and targets. According to court documents, Kenneth Currin Schuchman, a resident of Vancouver, and his criminal associates-Aaron Sterritt and Logan Shwydiuk-created multiple DDoS botnet malware since at least August 2017 and used them to enslave hundreds of thousands of home routers and other Internet-connected devices worldwide.

Akamai on Thursday revealed that it mitigated a second record-setting distributed denial-of-service attack since the beginning of June, one that peaked at 809 MPPS. Earlier this month, the company shared details on the mitigation of a 1.44 TBPS DDoS assault that reached 385 MPPS at its peak, but the more recent incident, which happened on June 21, was more than double the size in terms of PPS. The attack, which lasted just over 10 minutes, reached 418 GBPS within seconds, and 809 MPPS in two minutes. Designed to overwhelm DDoS mitigation systems through a high PPS load, the attack involved the use of packets carrying 1 byte payloads, Akamai says.

Akamai reckons it blocked what may be the largest distributed denial-of-service attack ever, in terms of packets per second. The security team told The Register it is the largest such attack Akamai has ever encountered, let alone blocked, and the CDN believes that it is likely the largest DDoS attack to hit any network, in terms of packets per second.

There were seven major application DDoS attacks over the previous month - two of which lasted 5-6 days, Imperva reveals. Two of the attacks lasted five and six days consecutively - an unusual occurrence, as most DDoS attacks typically last less than 24 hours.

The distributed denial-of-service botnets named XORDDoS and Kaiji recently started targeting exposed Docker servers, Trend Micro warned on Monday. Trend Micro has recently spotted variants that also target Docker servers.

No financial firm is ever safe, especially as cybercriminals become more determined and sophisticated in their attack methods. Complexity and size of DDoS attacks have increasedThe complexity and size of DDoS attacks in 2019 has increased significantly compared to 2018.

There has been a shift in internet traffic patterns coinciding with an increase in DDoS and other types of network attacks in recent months as organizations across industries quickly transitioned to remote workforces and individuals under stay-at-home orders began relying on the internet more heavily, according to Neustar. The pandemic effect was clear in traffic to specific websites, such as the 250% increase in queries for a popular collaboration platform as lockdowns commenced and the sharp rise in traffic to the website of a N95 masks manufacturer.