DDoS

Two attacks on consecutive days left Web host and domain name registry Network Solutions' customers unable to access their Web sites and servers.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was carried out against Network Solutions on yesterday afternoon, and again this morning, according to a post on the company's official blog by spokesman Shashi Bellamkonda.

"Our engineers worked quickly to mitigate the attacks and services are in the process of being restored," he wrote. "We continue to monitor this situation, as potential risk still exists for these attacks to recur."

Some customers complained of outages and … Read more

After hacker group Anonymous' apparently successful Operation Turkey to protest Internet censorship, the country's authorities have detained 32 people in connection with the attack on Turkish government Web sites.

After Friday's attack, Turkey's telecommunications authorities investigated and took the people into custody, according to a report today by Turkey's state news agency. Eight of those detained were under 18 years old, the report said.

The arrests come just days after Spain said Friday it arrested three Anonymous hackers in connection with attacks on Sony's PlayStation Network, governments, banks, and others. Retribution followed quickly, with an … Read more

The popular blogging-site hoster WordPress.com was hit with another distributed denial-of-service attack this morning, the second in two days.

"Unfortunately, the DDoS attack from yesterday returned in a different form this morning and affected sitewide performance," the company said in a notice on its Automattic site, which serves as a dashboard for the service. "The good news is that we were able to mitigate it quickly and performance returned to normal around 11:15 UTC. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely."

Stats on Automattic.com show that the site was affected for about … Read more

Blog host WordPress.com was the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack earlier today described by the company as the largest in its history.

As a result, a number of blogs--including those that are a part of WordPress' VIP service--suffered connectivity issues. That includes the Financial Post, the National Post, TechCrunch, along with the service's nearly 18 million hosted blogs.

According to a post by Automattic employee Sara Rosso on the company's VIP Lobby (which had been down at the time of the attacks, though was archived by Graham Cluley over at Naked Security), the size … Read more

The group Anonymous has issued a warning to the U.K. government after five men suspected of having connections to the group were arrested yesterday.

The group, which has claimed responsibility for a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks launched in support of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, said it viewed the arrests as a "declaration of war" by the British authorities.

"Anonymous believes...that pursuing this direction is a sad mistake on your behalf. Not only does it reveal the fact that you do not seem to understand the present-day political and technological reality, we also … Read more

The FBI is on the hunt for the hackers responsible for a recent wave of cyberattacks launched in defense of WikiLeaks.

FBI agents yesterday executed more than 40 search warrants in the United States as part of their ongoing investigation. Pointing to the group Anonymous, which has taken responsibility for the attacks, the FBI said that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults were facilitated by software the group makes available as free downloads.

Late last year, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and other companies were hit by DDoS attacks triggered by activists in support of WikiLeaks after the companies cut off … Read more

Police in England have arrested five young men on suspicion of taking part in distributed denial-of-service attacks launched by Anonymous, the group that has targeted corporate sites for attack in defense of WikiLeaks.

The five, aged 15 to 26, were detained at 7am local time today at addresses in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey, and London, the Metropolitan Police Central eCrime Unit said in a statement. The suspects were taken to local police stations and remain in custody.

The Anonymous group of activists undertook a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks last year, using a tool called the Low … Read more

Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Based on a survey of 45 groups, the report "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites" found that a large percentage said they've been targeted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from those who disagree with their viewpoints. The Web sites typically have been knocked offline for short periods of time but in some cases have … Read more

An outage that took down some of Amazon's European Web sites yesterday was caused by hardware error and not hackers, according to the company.

The online retailer's shopping sites in the U.K, France, Spain, and Germany were down for about half an hour starting around 9:15 p.m. GMT, leading to initial speculation that Amazon had been hit by hackers associated with the pro-WikiLeaks group Anonymous.

But in a statement released to Reuters, Amazon attributed the cause to hardware problems.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure … Read more