Collaborate Disseminate
Global internet traffic to IP addresses belonging to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other high-profile tech companies was rerouted Tuesday through a little-known ISP in Russia. Researchers suspect the traffic was hijacked. The incident lasted f… Continue reading Global Traffic to High-Profile Sites Believed Hijacked
The Department of Homeland Security wants help identifying, attributing and combatting major internet outages and disruptions — and it will pay. Last week, at an industry day and in solicitation documents posted online, the department’s Science and Technology Directorate invited research proposals under its “Predict, Assess Risk, Identify (and Mitigate) Disruptive Internet-scale Network Events,” or PARIDINE. These large-scale internet outages or slowdowns can have many causes, explained PARIDINE program manager Ann Cox — from natural disasters like hurricanes or tsunamis, to accidents that can knock out physical infrastructure, through geo-political events like a country trying to cut itself off from the internet, to the mass-scale re-routing of internet traffic. Large-scale re-routing incidents can happen by accident; but they can also be caused by malicious actors using a technique called border gateway protocol, or BGP, hijacking. On Twitter, security analyst Richard Bejtlich called BGP hijacking, “Probably[the] biggest Internet weakness hardly any[one] knows/cares about.” […]
The post DHS wants help to identify, attribute major web outages appeared first on Cyberscoop.
Continue reading DHS wants help to identify, attribute major web outages
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how BackConnect Inc. — a company that defends victims against large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — admitted to hijacking hundreds of Internet addresses from a European Internet service provider in order to glean information about attackers who were targeting BackConnect. According to an exhaustive analysis of historic Internet records, the BackConnect appears to have a history of such “hacking back” activity. Continue reading DDoS Mitigation Firm Has History of Hijacks
Two young Israeli men alleged to be the co-owners of a popular online attack-for-hire service were reportedly arrested in Israel on Thursday. The pair were arrested around the same time that KrebsOnSecurity published a story naming them as the masterminds behind a service that can be hired to knock Web sites and Internet users offline with powerful blasts of junk data. Continue reading Alleged vDOS Proprietors Arrested in Israel