Security News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There has been an increasing number of high-volume attacks in Q1 2020, with 51 attacks over 50 Gbps. The average bandwidth of attacks also rose, reaching 5,0 Gbps versus 4,3 Gbps in the same quarter in 2019. Key findings Maximum bandwidth nearly doubles: In Q1 2020, the maximum bandwidth nearly doubled in comparison to the previous year; the biggest attack stopped was 406 Gbps. In Q1 2019 the maximum bandwidth peaked at 224 Gbps. Complex multi-vector attacks rising: The share of multi-vector attacks rose to 64% in Q1 2020 up from 47% in Q1 2019.
New research from Atlas VPN has shown that the United States experienced more than 175,000 DDoS attacks in the month of March, more than double the number faced by the next highest country and four times as many as China. According to data gathered and analyzed by Atlas VPN researchers, South Korea and Brazil both suffered from more than 50,000 DDoS attacks while China came in just ahead of the United Kingdom with about 45,000 attacks.