Top Tips For Home Cybersecurity And Privacy In A Coronavirus-Impacted World (Part 2)

The past few months have seen radical changes to our work and home life under the Coronavirus threat, upending norms and confining millions of American families within just four walls. In this context, it’s not surprising that more of us are spending an increasing portion of our lives online. But...

Large, Complex DDoS Attacks on the Rise in 2020

While we've highlighted both record PPS and BPS attacks mitigated on the Akamai Prolexic Platform over the past few weeks, these attacks are part of a broader trend of increasingly large and complex DDoS activity. We have seen clear indications across the industry of high-water mark DDoS attacks...

Large, Complex DDoS Attacks on the Rise in 2020

While we've highlighted both record PPS and BPS attacks mitigated on the Akamai Prolexic Platform over the past few weeks, these attacks are part of a broader trend of increasingly large and complex DDoS activity. We have seen clear indications across the industry of high-water mark DDoS attacks...

BSF - Botnet Simulation Framework

BSF provides a discrete simulation environment to implement and extend peer-to-peer botnets, tweak their settings and allow defenders to evaluate monitoring and countermeasures. Synopsis In the arms race between botmasters and defenders, the botmasters have the upper hand, as defenders have to...

Satori Botnet Creator Sentenced to 13 Months in Prison

A 22-year-old man has been sentenced to more than a year in prison for developing Mirai botnet variants that compromised hundreds of thousands of devices worldwide. The man, Kenneth Currin Schuchman, of Vancouver, Wash., was sentenced to 13 months in prison after pleading guilty to creating and...

'Satori' IoT DDoS Botnet Operator Sentenced to 13 Months in Prison

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...

New Charges, Sentencing in Satori IoT Botnet Conspiracy

The U.S. Justice Department today charged a Canadian and a Northern Ireland man for allegedly conspiring to build botnets that enslaved hundreds of thousands of routers and other Internet of Things IoT devices for use in large-scale distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks. In addition, a...

Mitigating Credential Stuffing Attacks in the Financial Sector

If You Think Multi-Factor Authentication Prevents Credential Stuffing, Think Again! Financial services firms around the world are experiencing credential stuffing attacks at an alarming rate. Cybercriminals are using readily available automation tools, botnets, and compromised account credentials...

Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime is Mostly Boring

When law enforcement agencies tout their latest cybercriminal arrest, the defendant is often cast as a bravado outlaw engaged in sophisticated, lucrative, even exciting activity. But new research suggests that as cybercrime has become dominated by pay-for-service offerings, the vast majority of...

Alleged Hacker Behind Massive ‘Collection 1’ Data Dump Arrested

A hacker accused of selling hundreds of millions of stolen credentials from last year’s “Collection 1” data dump on the dark web has been arrested in the Ukraine. The Security Service of Ukraine SSU took into custody a threat actor known as “Sanix,” who they claim posted 773 million e-mail...

Ukrainian Police Arrest Hacker Who Tried Selling Billions of Stolen Records

The Ukrainian police have arrested a hacker who made headlines in January last year by posting a massive database containing some 773 million stolen email addresses and 21 million unique plaintext passwords for sale on various underground hacking forums. In an official statement released on...

Verizon Data Breach Report: DoS Skyrockets, Espionage Dips

Denial-of-service DoS attacks have spiked over the past year, while cyber-espionage campaigns have spiraled downwards. That’s according to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report DBIR released Tuesday, which analyzed 32,002 security incidents and 3,950 data breaches across 16 industry...

Hackers Actively Exploited 0-Day in CCTV Camera Hardware

Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities were actively being exploited in CCTV security cameras manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN, researchers found. The company, an IP video solution provider, was being targeted by hackers hijacking the company’s DVR hardware. Once commandeered, hackers then planted...

Hackers Actively Exploit 0-Day in CCTV Camera Hardware

Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities were actively being exploited in CCTV security cameras manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN, researchers found. The company, an IP video solution provider, was being targeted by hackers hijacking the company’s DVR hardware. Once commandeered, hackers then planted...

Multiple DDoS Botnets Exploited 0-Day Flaws in LILIN DVR Surveillance Systems

Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in digital video recorders DVRs for surveillance systems manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN have been exploited by botnet operators to infect and co-opt vulnerable devices into a family of denial-of-service bots. The findings come from Chinese security firm Qihoo...

DDoS attacks in Q4 2019

News overview In the past quarter, DDoS organizers continued to harness non-standard protocols for amplification attacks. In the wake of WS-Discovery, which we covered in the previous report, cybercriminals turned to Apple Remote Management Service ARMS, part of the Apple Remote Desktop ARD...

How Organizations Can Defend Against Advanced Persistent Threats

Advanced persistent threats APTs have emerged to be legitimate concerns for all organizations. APTs are threat actors that breach networks and infrastructures and stealthily lurk within them over extended spans of time. They typically perform complex hacks that allow them to steal or destroy data...

Biggest Malware Threats of 2019

One out of five computer users were subject to at least one malware-class web attack in 2019. This past year cities such as New Orleans were under ransomware siege by the likes of malware Ryuk. Zero-day vulnerabilities were also in no short supply with targets such as Google Chrome and Operation...

This Week in Security News: APT33 Botnets Used for Extreme Narrow Targeting and Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday Arrives with A Patch for An IE Zero-Day

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about the APT33 threat group that is using live C&C servers for extremely narrow targeting. Also, read about Trend Micro’s complete...

DDoS attacks in Q3 2019

News overview This past quarter we observed a new DDoS attack that confirmed our earlier hypothesis regarding attacks through the Memcached protocol. As we surmised, the attackers attempted to use another, rather exotic protocol to amplify DDoS attacks. Experts at Akamai Technologies recently...