A week in security (November 11 – 17)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we offered statistics and information on a sneaky new Trojan malware for Android, inspected a bevy of current Facebook scams, and explained the importance of securing food and agriculture infrastructure. We also released our latest report on cybercrime tactics and...

The Pirate Bay was recently down for over a week due to a DDoS attack

It seems like the prolonged downtime and technical difficulties faced by The Pirate Bay over the past several weeks were due to a series of distributed denial of service DDoS attacks against the widely-popular torrent website by malicious actors. For those unaware, The Pirate Bay was down for mor...

The Pirate Bay was recently down for over a week due to a DDoS attack

It seems like the prolonged downtime and technical difficulties faced by The Pirate Bay over the past several weeks were due to a series of distributed denial of service DDoS attacks against the widely-popular torrent website by malicious actors. For those unaware, The Pirate Bay was down for mor...

Too Interested?

I was asked to investigate an incident a while back where my client was being subjected to a sizeable DDoS attack. It was causing them significant pain and, owing to the nature of their business, implementing something like CloudFlare quickly wasn’t an option. It had the hallmarks of a...

Massive Gaming DDoS Exploits Widespread Technology

UPDATE Akamai Wednesday revealed that it’s witnessed the fourth-largest DDoS attack the company has ever encountered, leveraging a widespread and highly exploitable UDP amplification technique known as WS-Discovery WSD. WSD—a consumer device network discovery and connectivity technology—was seen...

Clever New DDoS Attack Gets a Lot of Bang for a Hacker's Buck

By exploiting the WS-Discovery protocol, a new breed of DDoS attack can get a huge rate of return...

Wikipedia suffers DDoS attack causing worldwide service disruption

By Waqas The DDoS attack on Wikipedia is first of its kind. The popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia has suffered a DDoS attack over the weekend that crippled its service preventing millions of users from accessing the platform. On Friday according to Down Detector's Outage Map, a service that...

News Wrap: Amazon Privacy and Telegram DDoS Attack

Beyond Patch Tuesday, this week was crammed with privacy and security related news. In this week’s Threatpost podcast, editors Tara Seals and Lindsey O’Donnell discussed the top news from the week. That includes: A federal lawsuit alleging that Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa...

Telegram CEO Fingers China State Actors for DDoS Attack

The chief executive of secure messaging app Telegram is pointing the finger squarely at China as the culprit responsible for the distributed denial of service DDoS attack that it suffered on Wednesday. The company announced the attack on Twitter, warning that users may be experiencing connection...

Telegram Suffers 'Powerful DDoS Attack' From China During Hong Kong Protests

Telegram, one of the most popular encrypted messaging app, briefly went offline yesterday for hundreds of thousands of users worldwide after a powerful distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack hit its servers. Telegram founder Pavel Durov later revealed that the attack was mainly coming from the...

Telegram messaging service hit by massive DDoS attack

By Waqas It is unclear why Telegram was targeted or who was behind the DDoS attack. The popular privacy-focused instant messaging application service Telegram has suffered a massive DDoS attack in which its service in the United States and several other countries has been disrupted, the company h...

A week in security (May 13 – 19)

Last week, Malwarebytes Labs reviewed active and unique exploit kits targeting consumers and businesses alike, reported about a flaw in WhatsApp used to target a human rights lawyer, and wrote about an important Microsoft patch that aimed to prevent a "WannaCry level" attack. We also profiled the...

4 lessons to be learned from the DOE’s DDoS attack

Analysts, researchers, industry professionals, and pundits alike have all posited the dangers of the next-generation “smart grid,” particularly when it comes to cybersecurity. They warn that without the right measures in place, unscrupulous parties could essentially wreak havoc on the bulk of...

How 5G could impact cybersecurity strategy

With the recent news that South Korea has rolled out the world’s first 5G network, it’s clear that we’re on the precipice of the wireless technology’s widespread launch. Offering speeds anywhere from 20 to 100 times faster than 4G long-term evolution LTE, the next generation of wireless networks...

Preparing the Internet for the Next Mega DDoS Attack

When you think of a distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack at this point in the age of the internet, you might be thinking they’re old news. But when a multi-million-dollar business can be easily taken offline by an unskilled adversary and a $5 rent-a-DDoS service, I would argue that the issue...

The Ping is the Thing: Popular HTML5 Feature Used to Trick Chinese Mobile Users into Joining Latest DDoS Attack

DDoS attacks have always been a major threat to network infrastructure and web applications. Attackers are always creating new ways to exploit legitimate services for malicious purposes, forcing us to constantly research DDoS attacks in our CDN to build advanced mitigations. We recently...

Design/Logic Flaw

In IoTivity through 1.3.1, the CoAP server interface can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks using source IP address spoofing and UDP-based traffic amplification. The reflected traffic is 6 times bigger than spoofed requests. This occurs because the construction of a "4.01...

CVE-2019-9750

In IoTivity through 1.3.1, the CoAP server interface can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks using source IP address spoofing and UDP-based traffic amplification. The reflected traffic is 6 times bigger than spoofed requests. This occurs because the construction of a "4.01...

CVE-2019-9750

In IoTivity through 1.3.1, the CoAP server interface can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks using source IP address spoofing and UDP-based traffic amplification. The reflected traffic is 6 times bigger than spoofed requests. This occurs because the construction of a "4.01...

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...