Security News

Man Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for DDoS Attacks
2020-06-15 12:55

Rakhshan was sentenced to five years in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $520,000 in restitution. He admitted to conspiring to launch a DDoS attack in January 2015, targeting Leagle.com, a legal aggregation site that had published information about Rakhshan's prior criminal conviction in Canada, and which was hosted by a provider located in Dallas, Texas.

Complexity and size of DDoS attacks have increased
2020-06-15 04:00

The complexity and size of DDoS attacks in 2019 has increased significantly compared to 2018. A report published by NaWas by NBIP concludes that despite the number of attacks has decreased slightly over 2019, their complexity and size has increased significantly.

CallStranger: UPnP Flaw Affecting Billions of Devices Allows Data Exfiltration, DDoS Attacks
2020-06-08 20:33

A newly disclosed UPnP vulnerability that affects billions of devices can be exploited for various types of malicious activities, including distributed denial-of-service attacks and data exfiltration. Designed to facilitate the automatic discovery and interaction with devices on a network, the UPnP protocol is meant for use within trusted local area networks, as it lacks any form of authentication or verification.

Owners of DDoS-for-Hire Service vDOS Get 6 Months Community Service
2020-06-07 16:02

The co-owners of vDOS, a now-defunct service that for four years helped paying customers launch more than two million distributed denial-of-service attacks that knocked countless Internet users and websites offline, each have been sentenced to six months of community service by an Israeli court. A judge in Israel handed down the sentences plus fines and probation against Yarden Bidani and Itay Huri, both Israeli citizens arrested in 2016 at age 18 in connection with an FBI investigation into vDOS. Until it was shuttered in 2016, vDOS was by far the most reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire or "Booter" service on the market, allowing even completely unskilled Internet users to launch crippling assaults capable of knocking most websites offline.

Crime agency turns to Google ads to deter teen DDoS hackers
2020-06-02 13:01

Britain's National Crime Agency has hit on what looks like a simple way to stop impressionable teens from being sucked into cybercrime - advertise the terrible legal consequences using Google Ads. It sounds too good to be true - can a simple ad deter teen would-be hackers that easily? In fact, the evidence of similar campaigns run by the NCA in the past is that it has some effect.

New DNS Vulnerability Lets Attackers Launch Large-Scale DDoS Attacks
2020-05-20 04:16

Israeli cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new flaw impacting DNS protocol that can be exploited to launch amplified, large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks to takedown targeted websites. Called NXNSAttack, the flaw hinges on the DNS delegation mechanism to force DNS resolvers to generate more DNS queries to authoritative servers of attacker's choice, potentially causing a botnet-scale disruption to online services.

New DNS Vulnerability Lets Attackers Launch Large-Scale DDoS Attacks
2020-05-20 04:16

Israeli cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new flaw impacting DNS protocol that can be exploited to launch amplified, large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks to takedown targeted websites. Called NXNSAttack, the flaw hinges on the DNS delegation mechanism to force DNS resolvers to generate more DNS queries to authoritative servers of attacker's choice, potentially causing a botnet-scale disruption to online services.

NXNSAttack: New DNS Vulnerability Allows Big DDoS Attacks
2020-05-19 16:39

Several major providers of DNS services and software have been working to address a serious DNS vulnerability that could allow malicious actors to launch significant distributed denial-of-service attacks. The flaw exists in the DNS protocol and it affects all recursive DNS resolvers.

Hoaxcalls Botnet Expands Targets List, DDoS Capabilities
2020-04-24 08:53

The Hoaxcalls Internet of Things botnet has expanded the list of targeted devices and has added new distributed denial of service capabilities to its arsenal, DDoS protection services provider Radware reports. The botnet was designed to launch DDoS attacks using UDP, DNS and HEX floods, based on commands received from its command and control server.

Fast-Moving DDoS Botnet Exploits Unpatched ZyXel RCE Bug
2020-04-22 21:39

That's according to researchers at Radware, who also said that it's notable how quickly Hoaxcalls operators have moved to weaponize the ZyXel bug, which as of this time of writing, has still not been addressed in a ZyXel advisory. According to the Palo Alto Unit 42 researchers who found it, the original sample featured three DDoS attack vectors: UDP, DNS and HEX floods; and, it was seen infecting devices through two vulnerabilities: A DrayTek Vigor2960 remote code-execution vulnerability and a GrandStream Unified Communications remote SQL injection bug.