The New Zealand stock exchange (NZX) website has gone down again in what appears to be the latest disruption caused by cyber attackers. The NZX website has been targeted by repeated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks over the last week, beginning last Tuesday. Such attacks disrupt service by saturating the network with significant volumes of internet traffic, and have caused…
Up until recently, Docker servers misconfigured and left exposed online have been historically targeted with cryptocurrency-mining malware, which has helped criminal groups generate huge profits by hijacking someone else’s cloud resources. However, in a report published this week, security researchers from Trend Micro have discovered what appears to be the first organized and persistent series of attacks against Docker servers…
After the death of George Floyd and the subsequent protests across the U.S., cyberattacks on advocacy groups spiked by an astonishing 1,120 times. It’s unclear who is behind the attacks, but they included attempts to neuter anti-racist organizations’ freedom of speech. The data comes from Cloudflare, a Silicon Valley company that protects a vast number of websites from distributed denial…
A team of Chinese academics has found a new way to abuse HTTP packets to amplify web traffic and bring down websites and content delivery networks (CDNs). Named RangeAmp, this new Denial-of-Service (DoS) technique exploits incorrect implementations of the HTTP “Range Requests” attribute. HTTP Range Requests are part of the HTTP standard and allow clients (usually browsers) to request only…
New vulnerability in DNS server software can be leveraged for DDoS attacks with an 1620x amplification factor. A team of academics from Israel has disclosed today details about NXNSAttack, a vulnerability in DNS servers that can be abused to launch DDoS attacks of massive proportions. According to the research team, NXNSAttack impacts recursive DNS servers and the process of DNS…
The scourge of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has been a major concern for businesses and governments for more than two decades. First reported in 1996, this is a destructive and ever-evolving vector of cyber raids that knocks electronic networks offline by flooding them with the traffic they can’t handle. Not only is DDoS a way for hacktivists to manifest protest…
A previously unknown SQL injection vulnerability in the Sophos XG Firewall gave hackers access to customers’ local usernames and hashed passwords for several days. The Abingdon, U.K.-based platform security vendor said it learned late Wednesday of an attack against its physical and virtual XG Firewall units when a suspicious field value was discovered inside the device’s management interface. The attack…
There is no escaping it. COVID-19 is dominating headlines and has impacted virtually every corner of the world. Like most people at this point, I’m 30 days into isolation and trying everything in my power to ignore the elephant in the room and the politics that go along with it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, cyber security is an essential business. As…
Dutch law enforcement has shut down 15 DDoS-for-hire services that were used to run cyberattacks aimed at knocking websites and networks offline. Although they did not reveal the names of the DDoS-for-hire booters that they stopped, Police in The Netherlands were able to arrest a 19-year-old man from The Netherlands, who is suspected of orchestrating a DDoS attack against two websites that provide…
US Health Agencies Are Fending off DDoS Attacks and Disinformation Campaigns in the Midst of a Pandemic Unfettered by social distancing measures or economic concerns, cyber threat actors are taking full advantage of opportunities created by the coronavirus pandemic. United States health agencies are being tested by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and social media disinformation campaigns as they…
