BitTorrent is extremely popular – be it because it is just a great tool to get your programs and other files distributed or because of other less legal reasons.
The post BitTorrent Vulnerability Can Be Exploited for DDoS Attacks appeared first on Avira Blog.
A new study shows that applications belonging to the BitTorrent family are vulnerable to DRDoS attacks.
The post BitTorrent family susceptible to DRDoS attacks appeared first on We Live Security.
British teen Seth Nolan Mcdonagh, aka “narko” has been sentenced for his role in a 2013 attack which slowed the internet around the world.
The post British teenager sentenced for massive Spamhaus attack appeared first on We Live Security.
An advisory from Akamai warns of a recent reflection style DDoS attack in which the deprecated RIPv1 routing protocol was leveraged against targets.
Researchers who discovered a half-dozen vulnerabilities in the free Hola VPN said today that fixes rolled out by Hola do not address the security issues they identified.
Sounds good, right? Especially in times when you just want to access Netflix U.S. for this one show but can’t because of licensing restrictions; or when everyone might be spying on you. Yes, now is the perfect time for a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Normally you have to pay for the service though. And that’s where Hola comes into play. Hola is a free Chome browser plugin and according to the ratings left on its’ Chrome page VERY popular.
So how come a service like this can afford to stay free? It’s pretty simple really: they sell your bandwidth. “When a user installs Hola, he becomes a VPN endpoint, and other users of the Hola network may exit through his internet connection and take on his IP. This is what makes it free: Hola does not pay for the bandwidth that its VPN uses at all, and there is no user opt out for this,” says Fredrick Brennan, the operator of 8chan in a note on his site. He continues: “Hola has gotten greedy. They recently (late 2014) realized that they basically have a 9 million IP strong botnet on their hands, and they began selling access to this botnet (right now, for HTTP requests only) at https://luminati.io. […] An attacker used the Luminati network to send thousands of legitimate-looking POST requests to 8chan’s post.php in 30 seconds, representing a 100x spike over peak traffic and crashing PHP-FPM.”
This is definitely not cool, but what does it mean for you? Well, if you are using Hola your connection will be used by other users to access pages in your country that are blocked for their IP but are available with yours. This is perhaps annoying, but not all that bad. But what of you IP might be one of those that get abused by people to perform illegal acts online?
Now is probably the best time to rethink using this specific free service.
The post Popular Free VPN Hola Sells Users Bandwidth for Botnets appeared first on Avira Blog.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise, according to cloud service provider Akamai, with more than double the number reported from this time a year ago.
The post DDoS attacks have doubled in a year, says Akamai appeared first on We Live Security.
With Watch OS 1.0.1 Apple has released the first update for its watch. While it doesn’t include any flashy new features you should definitely make sure to install the patch as soon as possible, since it includes fixes for several critical security issues.
One of them is the well known FREAK bug, the SSL/TSL vulnerability which was disclosed in March. The vulnerability can allow hackers to perform a Man in the Middle (MITM) attack on traffic routed between a device that uses the affected version of OpenSSL and many websites, by downgrading the encryption to an easy to crack 512 bits (64KB).
Other than that the update includes fixes for vulnerabilities that could lead to arbitrary code execution, disclose information, cause a denial of service, redirect user traffic to arbitrary hosts, and bypass network filters.
According to Macworld Watch OS 1.0.1 also improves your Apple Watch’s performance, adds seven new languages, and support for new emoji.
To install the new Watch OS just do the following: Open your Apple Watch app on your iPhone and go to My Watch > General > Software Update. Make sure that the watch is within range of the iPhone and connected to a charger. It should also be at least 50 percent charged.
The post Watch OS 1.0.1 for the Apple Watch Released appeared first on Avira Blog.
The reason why botnets like that can even exist? According to a study by Incapsula it’s simple negligence – by ISPs, vendors and users alike.
The attacks were first spotted last year in December and seem to be ongoing ever since. More than 40,000 infected routers from 1,600 ISPs all over the world have been documented. When not used to execute DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks the routers do something rather scary: In their idle time they use their resources to scan for additional routers to recruit!
“Our analysis reveals that miscreants are using their botnet resources to scan for additional routers to add to their “flock.” They do so by executing shell scripts, searching for devices having open SSH ports which can be accessed using default credentials.
Facilitating the infiltration, all of these under-secured routers are clustered in the IP neighborhoods of specific ISPs, which provide them in bulk to end users. For perpetrators, this is like shooting fish in a barrel, which makes each of the scans that much more effective. Using this botnet also enables perpetrators to execute distributed scans, improving their chances against commonplace blacklisting, rate-limiting and reputation-based defense mechanisms”, the study says.
The researchers believe that the routers were not hacked by means of vulnerabilities in the firmware but were hijacked due to other issues: all units are remotely accessible via HTTP and SSH on their default ports and nearly all of them are configured with vendor-provided default login credentials.
This combination invites trouble and DDoS attacks are only one of the possible threats resulting from it. Attackers could just as well:
Make sure to always change the default login credentials. That’s something every router owner should do from the start. You should also think twice before enabling remote access to your router management interface.
The post Mass-Scale Abuse of Routers Due to Lax Security appeared first on Avira Blog.
Tens of thousands of home and office-based routers have been hijacked over the last several months to stage a distributed denial of service attack campaign.