Greennet (previously) is the oldest ISP in the UK, tracing its origins back to Fidonet, where it was a hub for radical progressive political movements, which has attracted retaliations (in the form of DDoS attacks by repressive states) and surveillance (Greennet was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against GCHQ over surveillance activities that ended with the spy agency “admitting clandestine hacking activities”).
Continue reading “UK’s oldest ISP blames DoS attack on attempt to suppress human rights report about West Papua (read it now!)”
Tag: ddos
Gamers propose punishing Blizzard for its anti-Hong Kong partisanship by flooding it with GDPR requests
Being a global multinational sure is hard! Yesterday, World of Warcraft maker Blizzard faced global criticism after it disqualified a high-stakes tournament winner over his statement of solidarity with the Hong Kong protests — Blizzard depends on mainland China for a massive share of its revenue and it can’t afford to offend the Chinese state.
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Zoom has slow-walked a fix for a bug that allows randos to take over your Mac’s camera
Zoom is an incredibly popular videoconferencing tool. In late March, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh notified the company that its Mac software contained a ghastly vulnerability that allowed attackers to take over your camera after tricking you into clicking a malicious link. Leitschuh gave Zoom 90 days to fix the bug before going public (a common courtesy extended by security researchers when they discover dangerous bugs) then watched in dismay as the company slow-walked a response, so that when the deadline rolled around, the vulnerability was still in place.
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The latest “reflection attack” gooses Denial of Service attacks by a factor of 51,000
To launch an effective Denial of Service attack, your bots need to overwhelm your target with a flood of requests; the more bandwidth and computing-power your target has, the more you need to knock them off the internet.
Continue reading “The latest “reflection attack” gooses Denial of Service attacks by a factor of 51,000″
Playing low frequency noise to disrupt hard-drives: denial of service for CCTVs, data-centers, and other computing environments
A group of Princeton and Purdue researchers have demonstrated a successful acoustic attack against mechanical hard-drives where low-frequency noise keyed to the resonant frequency of the drive components is played nearby, causing the drive to vibrate so that the drive can neither be read nor written to.
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Mirai’s creators plead guilty, reveal that they created a DDoS superweapon to get a competitive edge in the Minecraft server industry
Last year, the Mirai botnet harnessed a legion of badly secured internet of things devices and turned them into a denial of service superweapon that brought down critical pieces of internet infrastructure (and even a country), and now its creators have entered guilty pleas to a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act federal case, and explained that they created the whole thing to knock down Minecraft servers that competed with their nascent Minecraft hosting business.
A new IoT botnet called Reaper could be far more virulent than Mirai
In 2016, an Internet of Things worm called Mirai tore through the internet, building botnets of millions of badly designed CCTVs, PVRs, routers and other gadgets, sending unstoppable floods of traffic that took down major internet services from Paypal to Reddit to Dyn.
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An IoT botnet is trying to nuke Wcry’s killswitch
Whoever created the Wcry ransomware worm — which uses a leaked NSA cyberweapon to spread like wildfire — included a killswitch: newly infected systems check to see if a non-existent domain is active, and if it is, they fall dormant, ceasing their relentless propagation.
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185,000+ IoT security cameras are vulnerable to a new worm
Persirai is a new strain of Internet of Things malware that infects more than 1,250 models of security camera, all manufactured by an unnamed Chinese manufacturer that has sold at least 185,000 units worldwide.
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How hackers tried to knock blacklivesmatter.com offline
DBO writes, “A new report by Deflect Labs tracks the complex ways that hackers have sought to take down the Black Lives Matter website. The attacks, which relied on harvesting WordPress sites, increased in sophistication and left a murky, unsavory trail by actors who did everything from try to extort the website to taking it down entirely.”
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