Items tagged with krebsonsecurity
The Mirai botnet started making waves publicly during the fall of 2016 with a high-profile DDoS attack on the security site KrebsOnSecurity. The DDoS attack, which was at the time the largest on record, pummeled the site with 620 gigabits per second of traffic. Since that time, Mirai has “zombified” hundreds of thousands of IoT devices, sucking them into the botnet at an alarming rate to attack other high-profile targets. Considering that Brian Krebs, who runs KrebsOnSecurity, was directly affected by Mirai (and lost his cloud service provider, Akamai, as a result), it’s almost poetic that he is the one that has seemingly uncovered the originator of the malware. A person using the alias Anna...
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Earlier this morning, we reported on the troubling news that the source code for the Mirai IoT DDoS botnet is now out in the open. If you recall, Miari is the botnet that was able to flood KrebsOnSecurity with 620 gigabits per second of traffic using a horde of zombie IoT devices (the attack was so devastating that Akamai cancelled its pro bono hosting arrangement with Brian Krebs). However, with Mirai source code now out for anyone to take advantage of, we may be seeing even more wide-scale DDoS attacks taking place in the future. And while KrebsOnSecurity might not exactly be a site that you have frequented in the past, Miari has the potential to cripple some big name properties. As Hans Gruber...
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If you thought that the massive DDoS attack earlier this month on Brian Krebs’ security blog was record-breaking, take a look at what just happened to France-based hosting provider OVH. OVH was the victim of a wide-scale DDoS attack that was carried via network of over 152,000 IoT devices. According to OVH founder and CTO Octave Klaba, the DDoS attack reached nearly 1 Tbps at its peak. Of those IoT devices participating in the DDoS attack, they were primarily comprised of CCTV cameras and DVRs. Many of these types devices' network settings are improperly configured, which leaves them ripe for the picking for hackers that would love to use them to carry our destructive attacks. Klaba originally...
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The web is becoming the wild, wild west all over again it seems. You could argue the Internet's always been a potentially dangerous place, but with the proliferation of smart devices becoming increasingly commonplace, cybercriminals now have more points of entry into home networks than ever before. Smart home automation gadgets collectively comprise much of what's referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), and just like your PC, they can be silently hijacked and enlisted into a botnet, a malicious network of systems under the control of a foreign party. Individually, all these smart lighting, media streamers, Nest thermostats, and other IoT gadgets don't pose a major threat, just as a...
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Today the bad guys have won. Not the war, mind you, but a skirmish with renowned security journalist Brian Krebs, author of The New York Times bestseller "Spam Nation," a former writer for the The Washington Post, and owner of KrebsOnSecurity, a popular security blog that's no longer live after cloud service provider Akamai gave Krebs just 2 hours to pack his things and leave. Of course, there's more to the story than that. Akamai isn't some evil company secretly working for the bad guys (we hope not, anyway). But it was providing free service to Krebs for his blog. You get what you pay for. In this case, Krebs wasn't paying a dime, so Akamai decided enough was enough when Krebs found himself...
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Target, Home Depot, Sears, and Kmart have all come under attack in the past year, with hackers breaching their insufficiently protected internal networks to obtain customer credit card data. The Home Depot breach was the largest, with 53 million email addresses and 56 million customer credit and debit card compromised. Thanks to Brian Krebs of KrebsonSecurity, we’re now learning that yet another retailer has had its credit card data compromised: Bebe Stores Inc. The chain caters to women and has 200 stores nationwide. Krebs is a little light on the details of the hack, but says that he began receiving information from various banks that customer credit cards that had been recently used at Bebe...
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