Since Julian Assange’s arrest and removal from London’s Ecuadorian embassy last week, the websites of Ecuador’s public institutions have been subjected to roughly 40 million cyberattacks, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday. The attacks have primarily originated from the U.S., Brazil, Ecuador itself, and European nations including the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, France, Austria and the UK, said…
Cybercriminals upped their game in a big way in 2018, dramatically increasing the number and severity of DDoS attacks and refining their IoT attacks to entirely new levels. The main takeaway from Netscout’s Threat Report that looked at the second half of 2018 was that cybercriminals built and used cheaper, easier-to-deploy and more persistent malware…
The British man who orchestrated a series of DDoS attacks that disrupted Internet access across the African nation of Liberia in November 2016 has been sentenced to two years and eight months in prison. Daniel Kaye, 30, from Egham, Surrey, pleaded guilty last December of using botnets and stressors to bombard Liberian telecom provider Lonestar…
A man convicted of launching DDoS attacks against two Boston-area health care facilities was sentenced in U.S. District Court on Thursday to 10 years in prison. Martin Gottesfeld, 34, of Somerville, Mass., was found guilty last August of attacking Boston Children’s Hospital and the Wayside Youth & Family Support Network back in 2014. Gottesfeld has…
A federal court last Friday ordered one of the co-developers of the Mirai IoT botnet to pay $8.6 million in restitution and serve six months of home incarceration as punishment for using the malware to launch DDoS attacks against Rutgers University, where he was studying at the time. Paras Jha, 22, of Fanwood, N.J., who…
A pair of new malware-as-a-service schemes have been uncovered with one designed as an easy to use point of entry for beginner DDoS attackers, while the second offers a sliding commission pay scale that rises if more ransomware victims are infected. The Fortinet research team of Rommel Joven and Evgeny Ananin has dived into a…
Hosting control panel solution VestaCP was compromised in a supply chain attack that installed malware used to carry out DDoS attacks. Earlier this week ESET researchers learned the official VestaCP distribution was compromised to install a malware dubbed Linux/ChachaDDoS onto its systems, according to an Oct. 18 blog post. It is unclear how the supply…
A set of DDoS attacks plagued a series of gaming publishers including Final Fantasy XIV’s creator Square Enix and Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft, respectively on the day of the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey launch on Friday. Ubisoft began experiencing connectivity issues around Oct. 4 when the officials first tweeted an alert to users informing them of issues…
Researchers have discovered seven additional third-stage modules in the VPNFilter malware that has been infecting hundreds of thousands of global networking devices in Ukraine and around the world since at least 2016. Believed to be the creation of Russian APT group Fancy Bear, VPNFilter remains a credible threat, despite recent efforts taken to expose the…
Multiple school districts are reportedly suffering the effects of a denial of service attack perpetrated against Blaine, Minn.-based Infinite Campus, a third-party online services provider. As a result, district residents may be unable to reliably use services such as the “Parent Portal, through which teachers, parents and students can access information such as grades, class…
