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The environmental services industry witnessed an "unprecedented surge" in HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, accounting for half of all its HTTP traffic. This marks a 61,839% increase in DDoS attack traffic year-over-year, web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare said in its DDoS threat report for 2023 Q4 published last week. "This surge in cyber attacks coincided with  COP 28 , which ran from November 30th to December 12th, 2023," security researchers Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco  said , describing it as a "disturbing trend in the cyber threat landscape." The uptick in HTTP attacks targeting environmental services websites is part of a larger trend observed annually over the past few years, specifically during COP 26 and COP 27, as well as other United Nations environment-related resolutions or announcements. "This recurring pattern underscores the growing intersection between environmental issues and cyber security, a nexus that is increasingl

The recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting Apache ActiveMQ is being actively exploited by threat actors to distribute a new Go-based botnet called  GoTitan  as well as a .NET program known as  PrCtrl Rat  that's capable of remotely commandeering the infected hosts. The attacks involve the exploitation of a remote code execution bug (CVE-2023-46604, CVSS score: 10.0) that has been  weaponized  by various hacking crews, including the  Lazarus Group , in recent weeks. Following a successful breach, the threat actors have been observed to drop next-stage payloads from a remote server, one of which is GoTitan, a botnet designed for orchestrating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks via protocols such as HTTP, UDP, TCP, and TLS. "The attacker only provides binaries for x64 architectures, and the malware performs some checks before running," Fortinet Fortiguard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said  in a Tuesday analysis. "It also creates a file named &#

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Russian threat actors have been possibly linked to what's been described as the "largest cyber attack against Danish critical infrastructure," in which 22 companies associated with the operation of the country's energy sector were targeted in May 2023.  "22 simultaneous, successful cyberattacks against Danish critical infrastructure are not commonplace," Denmark's SektorCERT  said  [PDF]. "The attackers knew in advance who they were going to target and got it right every time. Not once did a shot miss the target." The agency said it found evidence connecting one or more attacks to Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, which is also tracked under the name  Sandworm  and has a track record of orchestrating disruptive cyber assaults on industrial control systems. This assessment is based on artifacts communicating with IP addresses that have been traced to the hacking crew. The unprecedented and coordinated cyber attacks took place on

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Google on Tuesday said they took steps to mitigate record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that relied on a novel technique called HTTP/2 Rapid Reset. The  layer 7 attacks  were detected in late August 2023, the companies said in a coordinated disclosure. The cumulative susceptibility to this attack is being tracked as  CVE-2023-44487 , and carries a CVSS score of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10. While the attacks aimed at Google's cloud infrastructure peaked at  398 million requests per second  (RPS), the ones that struck AWS and Cloudflare exceeded a volume of 155 million and 201 million RPS, respectively. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset refers to a zero-day flaw in the HTTP/2 protocol that can be exploited to carry out DDoS attacks. A significant feature of HTTP/2 is multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection, which manifests in the form of concurrent streams. What's more, a client that wants to abort a request can

Firewall and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack prevention mechanisms in Cloudflare can be circumvented by exploiting gaps in cross-tenant security controls, defeating the very purpose of these safeguards, it has emerged. "Attackers can utilize their own Cloudflare accounts to abuse the per-design trust-relationship between Cloudflare and the customers' websites, rendering the protection mechanism ineffective," Certitude researcher Stefan Proksch  said  in a report published last week. The problem, per the Austrian consulting firm, is the result of shared infrastructure available to all tenants within Cloudflare, regardless of whether they are legitimate or otherwise, thereby making it easy for malicious actors to abuse the implicit trust associated with the service and defeat the guardrails. The first issue stems from opting for a shared Cloudflare certificate to authenticate HTTP(S) requests between the service's reverse proxies and the customer's o

The  Internet of Things (IoT)  is transforming efficiency in various sectors like healthcare and logistics but has also introduced new security risks, particularly IoT-driven DDoS attacks. This article explores how these attacks work, why they're uniquely problematic, and how to mitigate them. What Is IoT? IoT (Internet of Things) refers to online, interconnected devices that collect and exchange data. This broad category of devices includes sensors, cameras, network routers, and advanced machinery, and their integration into everyday life and work processes results in an ecosystem that can automate operations, improve decision-making, and enhance user experience. IoT: A Breeding Ground for Botnets IoT's rapid adoption amplifies its vulnerability, as poorly secured devices become easy prey for attackers and may become part of a botnet. Controlled by attackers, botnets can scale and rapidly execute various attacks, including DDoS, data theft, ad fraud, cryptocurrency mining, spam a

There is a new battlefield. It is global and challenging to defend. What began with a high-profile incident back in 2007, when Estonia was hit by hackers targeting its government and commercial sector, has evolved into cyber warfare that is being waged constantly worldwide. Today, cyberattacks have become the norm, transforming how we think about war and international conflict as a whole.  From the 2009 South Korea DDoS attacks to the 2010 attacks on Burma and the 2016 US election interference attacks on the Democratic National Committee, the list of historical cyberwarfare incidents continues to expand. The main players? Nation-state-supported cybercriminal groups and organizations linked to Russia, North Korea, China, and several countries in the Middle East. This report dives into three top cyberwarfare trends in an effort to understand their impact. Russia: The Cyber Invasion of Ukraine  On August 31, 2023, Five Eyes Agency — an intelligence alliance network composed of agencie

A  Mirai botnet  variant called  Pandora  has been observed infiltrating inexpensive Android-based TV sets and TV boxes and using them as part of a botnet to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Doctor Web said the compromises are likely to occur either during malicious firmware updates or when applications for viewing pirated video content are installed. "It is likely that this update has been made available for download from a number of websites, as it is signed with publicly available Android Open Source Project test keys," the Russian company  said  in an analysis published Wednesday. "The service that runs the backdoor is included in boot.img," enabling it to persist between system restarts. In the alternative distribution methods, it's suspected that users are tricked into installing applications for streaming pirated movies and TV shows through websites that mainly single out Spanish-speaking users. The list of apps is as follows -

Several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnets have been observed exploiting a critical flaw in Zyxel devices that came to light in April 2023 to gain remote control of vulnerable systems. "Through the capture of exploit traffic, the attacker's IP address was identified, and it was determined that the attacks were occurring in multiple regions, including Central America, North America, East Asia, and South Asia," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said . The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-28771 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a command injection bug affecting multiple firewall models that could potentially allow an unauthorized actor to execute arbitrary code by sending a specifically crafted packet to the targeted appliance. Last month, the Shadowserver Foundation  warned  that the flaw was being "actively exploited to build a Mirai-like botnet" at least since May 26, 2023, an indication of how abuse of  servers running unpatched software  is on the rise.

Gcore Radar is a quarterly report prepared by Gcore that provides insights into the current state of the DDoS protection market and cybersecurity trends. This report offers you an understanding of the evolving threat landscape and highlights the measures required to protect against attacks effectively. It serves as an insight for businesses and individuals seeking to stay informed about the latest developments in cybersecurity. As we entered 2023, the cybersecurity landscape witnessed an increase in sophisticated, high-volume attacks. Here, we present the current state of the DDoS protection market based on Gcore's statistics. Key Highlights from Q1–Q2  The maximum attack power rose from 600 to 800 Gbps. UDP flood attacks were most common and amounted to 52% of total attacks, while SYN flood accounted for 24%. In third place was TCP flood. The most-attacked business sectors are gaming, telecom, and financial. The longest attack duration in the year's first half was sev

The threat actors behind the  DDoSia  attack tool have come up with a new version that incorporates a new mechanism to retrieve the list of targets to be bombarded with junk HTTP requests in an attempt to bring them down. The updated variant, written in Golang, "implements an additional security mechanism to conceal the list of targets, which is transmitted from the [command-and-control] to the users," cybersecurity company Sekoia  said  in a technical write-up. DDoSia is attributed to a pro-Russian hacker group called  NoName(057)16 . Launched in 2022 and a successor of the  Bobik botnet , the attack tool is  designed  for staging distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets primarily located in Europe as well as Australia, Canada, and Japan. Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Czechia, Denmark, Latvia, France, the U.K., and Switzerland have emerged as the most targeted countries over a period ranging from May 8 to June 26, 2023. A total of 486 different w

An active financially motivated campaign is targeting vulnerable SSH servers to covertly ensnare them into a proxy network. "This is an active campaign in which the attacker leverages SSH for remote access, running malicious scripts that stealthily enlist victim servers into a peer-to-peer (P2P) proxy network, such as Peer2Profit or Honeygain," Akamai researcher Allen West said in a Thursday report. Unlike cryptojacking, in which a compromised system's resources are used to illicitly mine cryptocurrency, proxyjacking offers the ability for threat actors to leverage the victim's unused bandwidth to clandestinely run different services as a P2P node. This offers two-fold benefits: It not only enables the attacker to monetize the extra bandwidth with a significantly reduced resource load that would be necessary to carry out cryptojacking, it also reduces the chances of discovery. "It is a stealthier alternative to cryptojacking and has serious implications th

A new malware called  Condi  has been observed exploiting a security vulnerability in TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) Wi-Fi routers to rope the devices into a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet. Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  the campaign has ramped up since the end of May 2023. Condi is the work of a threat actor who goes by the online alias zxcr9999 on Telegram and runs a Telegram channel called Condi Network to advertise their warez. "The Telegram channel was started in May 2022, and the threat actor has been monetizing its botnet by providing DDoS-as-a-service and selling the malware source code," security researchers Joie Salvio and Roy Tay said. An analysis of the malware artifact reveals its ability to terminate other competing botnets on the same host. It, however, lacks a persistence mechanism, meaning the program cannot survive a system reboot. To get around this limitation, the malware deletes multiple binaries that are used to shut down or reboot the