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Are Teens Giving The CIA A Headache?
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Teenage hackers are making merry with the online world of CIA director of national intelligence James Clapper.
This is the second bout of attacks from the group of technology tearaways, according to Motherboard, which reports on the Clapper problem and its connection to a group known as Crackas With Attitude.
A member of the group, a young chap called Cracka, told Motherboard that access to a range of Clapper accounts had been seized, and that Clapper and the CIA haven’t a clue what’s going on.
“I’m pretty sure they don’t even know they’ve been hacked. You asked why I did it. I just wanted the gov to know people aren’t fucking around, people know what they’re doing and people don’t agree #FreePalestine,” he said.
The claims were supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which confirmed that something has happened and that the authorities are looking into it.
“We’re aware of the matter and we reported it to the appropriate authorities,” said spokesman Brian Hale, before going mute.
Cracka, representing himself on Twitter as @dickreject, is less quiet. He has tweeted a number of confirmatory and celebratory messages that are not particularly flattering about the CIA and its abilities.
This is the group’s second bite at the CIA cherry. The teenagers walked into the personal email account of CIA director John Brennan last year and had a good look around. Some of the impact of this was washed away when it was discovered that Brennan used an AOL account for his communications.
“A hacker, who describes himself as an American high school student, has breached the CIA boss’s AOL email account and found a host of sensitive government files that one assumes a government official shouldn’t be sending to his personal email address,” said security comment kingpin Graham Cluley at the time.
“I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing. Being hacked or having an AOL email account.”
Courtesy-TheInq
DDoS Attacks Rising
One in five UK businesses experienced a DDoS attack last year according to a new survey.
Analytics firm Neustar said that while the percentage is significantly lower than that experienced by their US equivalents it is still fairly high. More than 22 percent of the 381 organisations participating in the annual trends study reported DDoS attacks, compared to 35 percent experiencing the same in a separate study carried out among US firms in 2012.
Neustar set out to measure revenue ‘risk per hour’ which is a measure of what it might cost a business in a particular sector to experience DdoS downtime. They found that the majority of organisations reckoned this at less than $1,500 per hour.
Most of the rest put it somewhere between $1,500 and $15,000 although one in four financial services firms put the number at $250,000 per hour. This cost included brand damage and unexpected customer service calls.
Bonets Attack U.S. Banks
January 18, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Evidence collected from a website that was recently used to flood U.S. banks with junk traffic suggests that the responsible parties behind the ongoing DDoS attack campaign against U.S. financial institutions — thought by some to be the work of Iran — are using botnets for hire.
The compromised website contained a PHP-based backdoor script that was regularly instructed to send numerous HTTP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) requests to the websites of several U.S. banks, including PNC Bank, HSBC and Fifth Third Bank, Ronen Atias, a security analyst at Web security services provider Incapsula, said Tuesday in a blog post.
Atias described the compromised site as a “small and seemingly harmless general interest UK website” that recently signed up for Incapsula’s services.
An analysis of the site and the server logs revealed that attackers were instructing the rogue script to send junk traffic to U.S. banking sites for limited periods of time varying between seven minutes and one hour. The commands were being renewed as soon as the banking sites showed signs of recovery, Atias said.
During breaks from attacking financial websites the backdoor script was being instructed to attack unrelated commercial and e-commerce sites. “This all led us to believe that we were monitoring the activities of a Botnet for hire,” Atias said.
“The use of a Web Site as a Botnet zombie for hire did not surprise us,” the security analyst wrote. “After all, this is just a part of a growing trend we’re seeing in our DDoS prevention work.”
China Denies Hack Attack
China has denied involvement in hacking US environment monitoring satellites.
Last week the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a draft report about several incidents where US satellites were interfered with in 2007 and 2008.
The Commission did not say that the attacks were traced back to China, but it did cite China’s military as a prime suspect, due to the similarity of the techniques used with “authoritative Chinese military writings” on disabling satellite control.
The hackers gained access to the satellites on at least four occasions through a ground station in Norway. The unauthorised access lasted for between two and 12 minutes. While the attacks did no real damage, they did demonstrate that it is possible to hijack satellites, which is a worrying realisation when military satellites are taken into consideration.
China has a bad reputation throughout the world for alleged cyber attacks, often being the first to blame when a major attack has been discovered. The US has not been the only target either, with alleged attacks against Canada and France having been reported earlier this year.
“[The US] has always been viewing China with colored lenses. This report is untrue and has ulterior motives. It’s not worth a comment,” said Hong Lei, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, according to Reuters.
Chinese Government Questioned About Cyber-attack
June 18, 2011 by admin
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The U.S. State Department questioned the Chinese government regarding an attack that had temporarily shut down the website Change.org after the site hosted a petition urging Chinese authorities to release artist Ai Weiwei from custody.
U.S. deputy assistant secretary Daniel Baer raised concerns about the attack in April with China’s foreign ministry, according to an official letter sent from the State Department to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). Change.org obtained a copy of the letter and released it Tuesday.
The nature of those talks is still somewhat vague. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said it had no current information on the matter and deferred to the State Department. China’s foreign ministry has yet to respond to a request for comment.
Change.org, an online petitioning platform, was the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack originating from China on April 17. The attacks nearly brought down the site for days.
DDoS attacks can do this by using hundreds or thousands of hacked computers to drive traffic to a website. The data will become so overwhelming that the site will become inaccessible to users.
Change.org said the DDoS attacks from China continue to bring down the site intermittently. The FBI is investigating the case, said Benjamin Joffe-Walt, an editor with Change.org.
Hackers Go After WordPress
March 6, 2011 by admin
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We found out Bloggers using the WordPress platform was shutdown by a DDos attack yesterday that apparently affected many blog sites.The DDos hostilities began in the morning and lasted for a couple of hours. The estimates on the DDos attack was thought to be “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second”, according to sources, WordPress is working with their providers to prevent such acts from ever taking place again.WordPress the attack is over, though in Chicago, Dallas and San Antonio. The good news is that the site is back up. However, while the attack was in progress sources say it was on of the “largest” the organization has ever seen. Even centersThe attack unfortunately hit main three data. Read More…..