Booter Boss Interviewed in 2014 Pleads Guilty

A 20-year-old Illinois man has pleaded guilty to running multiple DDoS-for-hire services that launched millions of attacks over several years. The plea deal comes almost exactly five years after KrebsOnSecurity interviewed both the admitted felon and his father and urged the latter to take a more...

Former Russian Cybersecurity Chief Sentenced to 22 Years in Prison

A Russian court has handed down lengthy prison terms for two men convicted on treason charges for allegedly sharing information about Russian cybercriminals with U.S. law enforcement officials. The men -- a former Russian cyber intelligence official and an executive at Russian security firm...

Rootstock Labs: Traffic amplification attack via discovery protocol

A vulnerability was discovered in the RSKJ node's UDP discovery protocol that allowed for traffic amplification DDoS attacks. The ping-pong mechanism intended to protect against this was not properly implemented, allowing an attacker to successfully finish it even with a spoofed IP. By sending a...

Cisco Talos Honeypot Analysis Reveals Rise in Attacks on Elasticsearch Clusters

Christopher Evans of Cisco Talos conducted the research for this post. Executive Summary Cisco Talos warns users that they need to keep a close eye on unsecured Elasticsearch clusters. We have recently observed a spike in attacks from multiple threat actors targeting these clusters. These attacke...

New Video Series: How a Security Operations Command Center Took On the Largest Attacks the Internet Has Ever Seen

For over two decades I've made it my mission to stop "bad guys" on the Internet. Working day in and day out alongside an amazing team of security professionals inside our global Security Operations Command Center SOCC has given me the opportunity to do just that. I'm excited to share with you our...

BoNeSi - The DDoS Botnet Simulator

BoNeSi , the DDoS Botnet Simulator is a Tool to simulate Botnet Traffic in a testbed environment on the wire. It is designed to study the effect of DDoS attacks. What traffic can be generated? BoNeSi generates ICMP, UDP and TCP HTTP flooding attacks from a defined botnet size different IP...

Tips on How to Fight Back Against DNS Spoofing Attacks

The Domain Name System DNS, known as the phone book for the internet, was recently retuned to improve performance as well as include new security provisions to protect against Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks. DNS Flag Day drew a line in the sand for noncompliant authoritative DNS serve...

Bomb Threat Hoaxer Exposed by Hacked Gaming Site

Federal authorities this week arrested a North Carolina man who allegedly ran with a group of online hooligans that attacked Web sites including this one, took requests on Twitter to call in bomb threats to thousands of schools, and tried to frame various online gaming sites as the culprits. In a...

Hackers Destroyed VFEmail Service – Deleted Its Entire Data and Backups

What could be more frightening than a service informing you that all your data is gone—every file and every backup servers are entirely wiped out? The worst nightmare of its kind. Right? But that's precisely what just happened this week with VFEmail.net, a US-based secure email provider that lost...

Compromising vital infrastructure: communication

Have you ever been witness to a Wi-Fi failure in a household with school-aged children? If so, I don’t have to convince you that communication qualifies as vital infrastructure. For the doubters: when you see people risking their lives in traffic just to check their phone, you'll understand why...

ThreatList: Latest DDoS Trends by the Numbers

Fresh statistics reveal a mix bag of good news and bad when it comes to distributed denial-of-service attacks in Q4 2018. According to the latest numbers available, the sheer number of attacks are down, but the length of time those attacks last have reached record lengths. The numbers come from...

DDoS Attacks in Q4 2018

News overview In Q4 2018, security researchers detected a number of new botnets, which included not only Mirai clones for a change. The fall saw increased activity on the part of the Chalubo bot, whose first attacks were registered in late August. Although the new malware employs snippets of Mira...

The Challenges of DIY Botnet Detection – and How to Overcome Them

Botnets have been around for over two decades, and with the rise of the Internet of Things IoT they have spread further to devices no one imagined they would - printers, webcams, and even toasters and fridges. Some botnets enlist infected devices to mine cryptocurrency or steal passwords from oth...

UBNT Discovery Protocol Amplification Attack (UDP) - Active Check

A publicly accessible Ubiquity device exposing the UBNT Discovery Protocol can be exploited to participate in a Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attack. SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2019 Greenbone AG Some text descriptions might be excerpted from a referenced sources, and are Copyright C by the...

FreeBSD : p5-Email-Address-List -- DDoS related vulnerability (22b90fe6-258e-11e9-9c8d-6805ca0b3d42)

Best PRactical Solutions reports : 0.06 2019-01-02 - Changes to address CVE-2018-18898 which could allow DDoS-type attacks. Thanks to Lukas Kramer for reporting the issue and Alex Vandiver for contributing fixes. - Fix pathological backtracking for unkown regex - Fix pathological backtracking in...

State of the Internet, Volume 5, Issue 1

Is it too late to still say "Happy New Year?" We don't think so. We're kicking off 2019 with our first issue of the State of the Internet / Security. Goal setting is something that security teams around the world are doing right now. What are your team's goals? How do your goals align with the...

Europol Now Going After People Who Bought DDoS-for-Hire Services

If you were a buyer of any online DDoS-for-hire service, you might be in trouble. After taking down and arresting the operators of the world's biggest DDoS-for-hire service last year, the authorities are now in hunt for customers who bought the service that helped cyber criminals launch millions ...

A Look Back At The DDoS Trends of 2018

As mentioned in the 2018 Year in Review State of the Internet / Security report, trends in DDoS are remarkably stable. The size of the largest attacks have grown by approximately 6% on an annual basis, with occasional outliers like the Mirai botnet. The median size of attacks has been much more...

Bit-and-Piece DDoS Method Emerges to Torment ISPs

A pioneering distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack pattern has emerged, targeting internet service providers ISPs with something researchers have dubbed the bit-and-piece “Mongol” attack. The approach involves spreading out junk traffic across large numbers of IP addresses in order to evade...

Linux: Log Martians packets

Martian packets are packets with an obviously wring source address. These packets can not be routed over the network. An attacker can use those packets, e.g. for a DoS/DDoS attack. Logging those packets can help for further inspections. This script tests whether the Linux host is configured to lo...