ddos

Online activists with Anonymous said they took out a site associated with the Euro 2012 games in Ukraine to protest the country's rounding up and slaughter of stray dogs in advance of the soccer championship that started there today.

The account for YourAnonNews tweeted: "#OpUkraine?: Revenge for your Animal Holocaust: http://www.kieveuro2012.org ==>> TANGO DOWN!! | ?#Euro2012? via @AnonOpsLegion| ?#Anonymous? ?#Ukraine?"

However, the site appeared to be back up as of midday Pacific Time. Distributed denial-of-service attacks that shut down Web sites are Anonymous' tool of choice in its ops, or operations. The activists have … Read more

The CIA's Web site was down Friday afternoon in what looked like a distributed denial-of-service attack publicized by members of the online activist group Anonymous.

With the CIA site inaccessible, the Twitter account for @YourAnonNews tweeted "CIA TANGO DOWN: cia.gov #Anonymous" and included a link to a news story about the outage on Russian site RT.com.

A CIA representative declined to comment on the matter to CBS News beyond offering this statement: "We are looking into these reports."

The site was back online Saturday.

The Anonymous account also posted on Friday a Pastebin … Read more

Security and network management vendors Prolexic and Arbor Networks recently reported that distributed-denial-of-service attacks are on the rise. What can we do to make prevention a forethought?

According to Prolexic Chief Technology Officer Paul Sop, the recent trends include a shorter attack duration, but a bigger packet-per-second attack volume. This "bigger packet-per-second attack volume" is likely going to be generated by a DDoS (distributed denial of system), which is a coordinated attack from lots of dispersed nodes usually with a few central controllers.

A recent high-profile example was the hacker group "Anonymous" allegedly using the LOIC … Read more

If you clicked a link distributed by Anonymous yesterday, you may have unwittingly helped the online activists in their attacks against U.S. government and entertainment industry sites that were organized to protest proposed antipiracy legislation.

Anonymous has launched distributed denial-of-service attacks, designed to shut down Web sites, against government and corporate sites in the past. Typically, supporters download software called Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) that directs their computer to repeatedly try to connect to a target Web site. So many digital knocks on the door, as it were, can shut a site down so no one can get … Read more

In the aftermath of Wednesday's SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, the Internet community amassed quite a bit of goodwill, flexed its muscles in a friendly, humorous, civil-disobedience kind of way, and, remarkably, even managed to change quite a few minds.

Just 24 short hours later, Anonymous legions nuked that goodwill and took cyber security into thermonuclear territory. The real question now is: were they played?

As I write this, #OpMegaUpload is in full effect. The Internet is seemingly coming down all around me. Global Internet traffic is fluctuating between 13 percent and 14 percent above normal, and, as you can … Read more

4chan, a site known for launching memes and harboring trolls, was down early today following an outage earlier this week that could be attributed to a digital version of a lunchroom food fight with users of Tumblr, according to a knowledgeable source.

The evidence is in what appear to be tit-for-tat online fliers circulating among users of the sites. One flier titled "Operation Overlord: Final Phase Tumblr" vowed to take down the popular microblogging site. It urged people to download the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) software so their computers could be used to overwhelm Tumblr with traffic … Read more

Hacktivist group Anonymous says it will take the Web site of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system off line later today for six hours while also inundating BART fax lines and e-mail accounts. A press release published online detailing the group's plans says the actions are in retaliation for BART's unilateral shutdown of cell phone service Thursday night at some BART stations to prevent another planned protest.

The Thursday demonstration had been planned to protest the fatal shooting of a man by a BART police officer last month. BART officials said they took cell phone service offline … Read more

Several Sony Web sites were offline today only days after the Anonymous hacker group threatened to target the company over its lawsuit against PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz.

The main Sony site, as well as the Sony Style.com site and the PlayStation U.S. site, which has information on the PlayStation 3, were down as of midday.

"We are currently investigating, including the possibility of targeted behavior of an outside party," Sony said in a statement. "If this is indeed caused by such an act, we want to once again thank our customers who have borne … Read more

Researchers have uncovered a botnet that uses compromised Web servers instead of the usual personal computers to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

Security firm Imperva said on Wednesday it uncovered a botnet of about 300 Web servers after the company witnessed traffic coming from a compromised server and then searched for the attack code via Google. Web servers were commonly used in such attacks a decade ago but had been replaced by the more ubiquitous Windows-based PCs, said Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva.

In the DoS attack Imperva observed, two Web servers were targeting an unnamed hosting provider based … Read more