During the weekend the gaming industry has been suffering from a barrage of DDoS attacks. Blizzard’s Battle.net, League of Legends, and Sony’s PlayStation Network are just some of the games and services that have experienced unexpected downtime. However, it appears one hacker group is claiming...Read more...
The Internet is as wide and wonderful as it is dark and dangerous. So many individuals and groups use it as a powerful platform for advocacy, raising awareness, disseminating “dangerous” (to tyrants) ideas, and more, but all too often those entities face threats from actors looking to censor them, knocking...Read more...
As unfortunate as it is, DDoSing is as easy to pull off as it is frustrating. With enough computers at their disposal, anyone could force enough traffic to a website in order to take it down, and even massive services are not immune. A perfect example of this is ongoing, with popular social networking site Meetup...Read more...
There was a moment there when the Snapchat guys were feeling pretty hot. Their mobile app was exploding in popularity, and Facebook practically begged to buy the service for a cool, but the company rejected the $1 billion offer--and then the $3 billion offer Facebook made thereafter. You could call it chutzpah or...Read more...
This weekend, Dropbox experienced an outage that lasted far too long. A wing of hacker collective Anonymous claimed credit for the outage, saying it performed a database hack, which turned out to be a hoax. However, the group maintained that it did hit Dropbox with a DDoS attack, which was timed to coincide with the...Read more...
For a moment there, it appeared as though popular cloud storage service Dropbox had been hacked, with the user database accessed and user emails being exposed. Two loosely affiliated wings of hacker collective Anonymous, AnonOpsKorea and The 1775 Sec, claimed credit, but the whole thing was just a hoax timed to coincide with scheduled Dropbox...Read more...
Google is not interested in suffering a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack--although it’s hard to imagine such an attack being successful considering Google’s vast capabilities--and the company is bringing the same DDoS-thwarting technology it uses to protect itself to the masses with Project...Read more...
Orbit Downloader is a nifty tool. It’s a web browser file downloading add-on, and it lets users more easily manage their downloaded files, download embedded videos, speed up downloads, and more. Unfortunately, it’s also apparently now an effective tool for delivering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The ESET security...Read more...
Of all the current Internet curiosities, Bitcoin is one of the most fascinating. The digital/virtual currency is decentralized, has no change fees, and no state oversight to speak of, and nobody seems to know exactly what to do with it even as it grows in popularity and value. Case in point: On Mt. Gox, a major...Read more...
Just because an attack is bizarre doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. According to security researcher Brian Krebs (pictured), the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a security bulletin concerning TDoS (telephony denial-of-service) attacks on PSAPs (public safety answering points). “Information received from...Read more...
DDoSing a Web server has become the de facto way to exact revenge on someone, or some company. Not a week, or sometimes even a day, will go by when you can't read about some ongoing DDoS attack. We've seen them spawned by Internet goofs to professional criminals. DDoSing is easy, and it's effective. That's why it's so heavily-used....Read more...
If you've had a difficult time connecting to select websites over the past few days, there's a very good chance that an on-going attack against spam-prevention agency Spamhaus is to blame. Spamhaus, based in London and Geneva, helps e-mail providers filter spam, and to do this, it manages a blocklist that includes any...Read more...
A company that protects against DDoS attacks, Prolexic Technologies, released its attack report for Q3 2011. There’s a lot to the report, including that Prolexic mitigated what it claims is the largest event in 2011 (in terms of packet-per-second volume). That attack occurred between November 5-12 and, according to Prolexic, portends...Read more...
Rather than taking action against Sony that could affect end users, Anonymous is planning a public event that will target Sony stores in a 24-hour, in-store boycott around world on Saturday, April 16. The public Facebook event has more than 1,100 RSVPs at the time of this writing. The event is called Operation Sony and will begin at 12:00...Read more...
A distributed denial-of-service attack on one (yes, one) person yesterday left news media in a quandary. With no Twitter, and no Facebook either, how was the news to be obtained? Seriously, however, the outage was the result of attacks across several services aimed directly at a blogger named Cyxymu from the Eastern...Read more...