DoS

Making DDoS prevention a priority

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

Anonymous to target Iran with DoS attack

The hacker group Anonymous has its next denial-of-service (DoS) target in sight: Iran, CNET has learned.

Members of the loosely organized group are planning "Operation Iran," an attack designed to shut down Iranian Web sites beginning Sunday, according to their latest online proclamation. May 1 is International Worker's Day.

"The people of Iran have the admiration of Anonymous, and the entire world," the statement says. "We can see that Iran still suffers at the hands of those in power. Your former government has seized control, and tries to silence you. People of Iran--your rights … Read more

BMI site latest target of Anonymous DDoS attacks

The Web site of Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) has been down since last night after being targeted by a distributed denial-of-service attack launched by the Anonymous hacker group as part of what it calls its "war on copyright."

BMI took the site offline after the attack started last night, a spokeswoman told CNET today. It remained inaccessible as of 11:30 a.m. PT today. BMI handles licensing and royalty payment collections on behalf of songwriters, composers, and music publishers.

"In a protective measure, BMI.com has been temporarily taken down due to a denial-of-service attack reportedly … Read more

China-related DoS attack takes down Codero-hosted Web sites

A distributed denial-of-service attack that affected thousands of customers at Codero and other hosting providers appeared to come from within China and to be launched at a Chinese site that is critical of communism or its Domain Name System provider, Codero said today.

The disruptions that took Codero's customers offline for most of the morning were collateral damage in the attack, Ryan Elledge, chief operating officer at Codero, told CNET.

Directly in the path of the attack was a Codero customer that hosts DNS records for sites on the Internet, including a Web site critical of communism that appeared … Read more

WordPress.com hit with second big attack in two days

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

Infected U.S. PCs may have attacked Georgia

When political tensions flared last month between Georgia and its large neighbor to the north, the country was ready to block Internet traffic from Russia, hoping to avoid the denial-of-service attacks that shut down Internet service in Estonia for several days in 2007. Instead, most of the DoS attacks that were directed against Georgia came from an unlikely place: the United States.

"Russia is one of the most capable countries when it comes to launching system intrusion hacking attempts, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and operation of botnets," said Don Jackson, director of Threat Intelligence for SecureWorks. "Yet you'll notice the number of attacks coming from Russia are very low."

SecureWorks on Monday released a list ranking the countries with the most infected computers enlisted for use with botnets. On that list, Russia ranks 7th, far behind the United States, China, Brazil, South Korea, Poland, and Japan. The reason Russia is so low, Jackson said, is that hackers from Russia don't attack from within Russia.

Instead of attacking using Russian IP addresses, Jackson said, the hackers who wanted to attack Georgia used "computers and control servers located in Turkey while the bots (the infected computers) that they controlled were mostly in the United States." … Read more

Web code locks up iPhones and iPod Touch

A new exploit will either lock up your iPhone or iPod Touch or crash your Safari browser on your PC or Mac OS desktop if you simply visit a maliciously coded Web site. Unlike an earlier exploit that required users to click to become infected, the new code published by iPhoneWorld requires no user interaction.

So far, Apple has had no comment.

The code was first reported in January and exhausts the memory in Safari, which in turn will cause your iPhone or iPod Touch to freeze, or your desktop Safari to crash. "Given the nature of this issue,&… Read more