Its seems that the efforts of Ukrainian hacktivists have decided to focus their efforts on a new and interesting target. In addition to other strategic targets, they have gone after one of the central portals for Russian alcohol distribution. The attack is currently manifested in the form of a distributed denial of service attack(s) targeting the portal to render it inaccessible. This means that distillers and distributors of alcoholic beverages are not able to get their products into consumers hands.

In early January 2021 North Korean hackers were in the midst of a campaign targeting western security researchers. They were looking to gather tools, vulnerability information and anything else of value they could get. The US, after learning about this attack did not have a significant response to the threat. Of course, the country was going through a bit of a political turmoil at the time, but there still should have been some sort of response to help prevent further attacks.

One cool thing about working in IT is that things are very predictable. You generally know how a system or application will react if you do this or that to it. This is how people find and use exploits in software and even hardware. You look at how an application works and identify ways you can use those processes against it. It is like digital judo. However, what many people do not really get is that this also works when setting up a larger organization for an attack. If you can track how they will respond to a particular threat, you can use it against them in very interesting ways.

It looks like a fairly large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on both the PlayStation Network and the Sony Entertainment Network caused gamers some trouble yesterday. The attack caused the service to be unavailable intermittently throughout the day. At this time Sony says that no user information was accessed or taken. As of this writing a group that is calling themselves the “lizard squad” is claiming responsibility for the attack.

Black Hat 2014, Las Vegas, NV - If you have ever had to build a network or add in a new service then you know the joys that can bring to your life. Not only do you have to plan for power, space, cooling for the systems that actually run the service you want, but you also have to plan for all of the myriad of devices that keep this service safe from the bad guys. You have Web Application Firewalls (WAF), SSL offloading, load balancers, traditional firewalls and sometimes much more. Even with all of that you may (probably will) find yourself with a breach or hack that makes all of that work and hardware seem useless. Traditionally there is no easy way to protect a web service or site with a single solution.

A warning has been sent out to financial institutions and government agencies as the collective known as Anonymous has announced their OpUSA. The Operation as put forth by the hackvist group is supposed to target banks and government websites and is supposed to kick off on May 7th. Some security experts are advising the targeted organizations to prepare for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks and harden their sites against them.

As we see an even bigger push to cloud services there is also an interesting increase in online attacks. According to numbers from security firms the number of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack have skyrocketed in Q1 of 2013. This increase in number of attack has also been accompanied by an increase in power and sophistication. In particular a recent attack on Spamhaus topped 130Gbps which is an almost unheard of number when talking about this type of attack.

WikiLeaks was having a bad time of it about a week ago when the group AntiLeaks popped up on the scene seemingly out of nowhere and started hammering them and their mirrors with a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. When the news hit that the site was under attack many jumped to the conclusion that it was a state sponsored attack. At least people did until AntiLeaks claimed responsibility through someone that uses the name Diet Pepsi. This led to a merry round of speculation about the group and who they really were. We covered this news from the angle of the technology involved and came up with a good case for the use or Torrent Blocking technology that has popped up on the scene.

About a week ago we first learned of a Russian company called Pirate Pay. This little startup that had its beginning as a traffic routing system for ISPs had come up with a very interesting way to protect movies from being downloaded by BitTorrent users. They would literally attack the torrent swarms with poisoned clients and generate what amounts to a DDoS (Distributed Denial or Service). At the time we discussed the implications of this type of protection as well as the legality of it.

Wow, who would have thought that a site like The Pirate Bay would ever be taken down by a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service), but that is exactly what it looks like is happening to the world famous torrent listing site. What makes the situation interesting is thinking about who might be behind the attack and, of course why? So let’s walk through a few likely scenarios and a few that are a little off the deep end.