For at least the past hour, hackers have been hammering the back end of American Express's website with a DDoS attack, and insiders say it's potentially part of the largest attack ever, which made headlines on Wednesday.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks like the one that resulted from an altercation between a Dutch company and Spamhaus last week are on the rise, according to a report by security firm Kaspersky Labs.
The security vendor was responding to the huge DDoS attack that occurred last week, described as the biggest cyber attack in history. The attack affected millions of rank and Internet users, slowing hundreds of processes down.
Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox faced a distributed denial-of-service attack late Thursday, at a time the digital currency is seeing an upward swing.
The Japanese company, which is rated as the largest exchange for bitcoins, was hit by a DDoS attack that was "stronger than the average," the exchange's support team said. Such attacks aim to overwhelm systems by sending an overload of requests to websites.
A major cyberattack against a European spam tracking company this past week appears to have originated from a gang of Russian hackers, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
Spamhaus, a Geneva-based spam tracking firm, had been the target of a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack, where at one point traffic flowing to the site reached levels of 300 Gbps.
Massive distributed denial of service attacks on Spamhaus this week focused widespread attention on the huge security threats posed by millions of poorly configured Internet Domain Name System (DNS) servers.
The attacks on Spamhaus that began March 19 were apparently launched by a group opposed to the Geneva, Switzerland-based volunteer organization's antispam work.
DDoS attacks appear to be morphing from volumetric battering rams into sophisticated, highly targeted and extremely angry political point-scoring systems, a detailed survey of large enterprises and data centre managers has found.
Ask any enterprise-level manager for their experience of DDoS attacks and the results are likely to be interesting but the opinions of Arbor Networks’ 193 customers used to compile its 8th Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report count more than most.
Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in a top DDoS attack tool that provides a handy means to neutralise onslaughts.
The Dirt Jumper Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Toolkit is one of the most popular attack tools available. It was deployed in a digital siege against security news website KrebsonSecurity.com among many, many other victims in recent months. The weapon works by instructing an army of compromised computers to flood a website with traffic until legitimate visitors are unable to connect.
A 25-year-old Russian hacker has been arrested for allegedly orchestrating two DDoS (Denial-of-Service) attacks on Amazon.com and eBay in 2008.
"Cyber bandit" Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha was indicted in 2011, but he was just arrested in Cyprus on Wednesday. Zubakha was arrested on an international warrant and is currently in custody pending extradition to the United States.
The Anonymous group appears to be most effective when launching a distributed denial of service attack, even though that doesn't appear to be its preferred strategy.
