Myanmar Hit by Massive Cyber Blitz Days before Election

A deluge of cyber attacks have paralyzed Internet services in Myanmar, just days before the Nov. 7 election, raising fears of a communications blackout for the vote, AFP reports.

Internet users have reported slow connections and intermittent outages for more than a week, and some suspect the junta is may be intentionally disrupting services to block news from reaching out. However, web service providers have blamed the…

Anonymous Strikes Again; DDoS Attacks Spain’s Copyright Society

After recently cyber assaulting anti-piracy advocates and threatening to attack until it “stops being angry,” hacker collective Anonymous has struck again. The target this time: the Spanish copyright protection society.

PandaLabs reported how Anonymous yesterday launched a DDoS attack against the Spanish copyright protection society. As of 2:30 p.m. EDT yesterday, PandaLabs had witnessed more than 20 service interruptions to the society’s site, as well…

4chan Launches Cyber Attacks in Protest of Anti-Piracy Efforts

Members of 4chan this past weekend launched DDoS attacks against the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America in retaliation for hiring a software firm to act as cyber hitmen to take down websites hosting illegal movies, Panda Security reports.

Aiplex Software was recently chosen by MPAA to pursue sites that illegally shared copyrighted movies. Aiplex Director Girish Kuman told Sydney Morning Herald…

Chinese Botnet Herders Offer ‘Commercial’ DDoS Services

Researchers have identified a new botnet based in China that was openly advertising DDoS-for-hire services and had managed to plant roots inside a number of major U.S. ISPs.

Damballa researchers discovered the botnet known as IMDDOD a few months ago when coming across suspect domains while investigating another incident. They traced the domains back to a single domain in China. The more they looked into the botnet, the more…

Mexican Twitter-Controlled Botnet Detected

Security researchers have discovered another botnet that uses Twitter as a command and control channel, The Register reports.

Malware-infected drones in the Mehika Twitter botnet take instructions from a Twitter account maintained by hackers instead of conventional command and control servers. The use of Twitter as a botnet command channel was first discovered in August 2009 before similar methods were used to abuse Facebook profiles as …

DDoS Attack Hits DNS Made Easy

Over the weekend, the website DNS Made Easy was subjected to a concentrated denial of service attack that peaked on Saturday at around 50Gbps. Currently, the identity of the attackers and their motivation remains unclear.

The attack, which lasted eight hours according to the firm, effectively shut-down the site for 1.5 hours. DNS Made Easy offers global IP Anycast enterprise DNS services.

A Twitter feed documenting the attacks is available

Cyber War Part of Kyrgyzstan Ethnic Conflict

The recent ethnic troubles in Kyrgyzstan have also included attacks in cyberspace against government and media websites, according to Russian cybersecurity experts.

The assaults appear to be a result of distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks which flood websites with illegitimate data requests from “bot” computers, blocking any legitimate data requests from getting through. The DDoS attacks targeted websites in the .kg domain, leaving individuals without access to…

Banks Under Siege in Eastern Europe

A group of cyber criminals are placing banks in Russia and the Ukraine under siege with a next-generation exploitation kit that hacks the authentication system and uses a denial of service attack.

The attacks use a revised version of BlackEnergy, which was commonly used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The criminals are using the new and improved version to transfer funds from electronic bank accounts and then attack…

Vietnam Accused of Cyber Attacking Bloggers

The Vietnamese government is being accused of conducting cyber attacks to bring down the websites of independent bloggers, as well as arresting some of the dissidents.

Human Rights Watch recently listed a series of arrests and police harassment of web dissidents since mid-April. The organization alleges the Vietnamese government masterminded a series of malware and distributed denial-of-service attacks on alternative political websites over the past year.

HRW said police beat one…

Get Your Botnet Here

Cyber miscreants can now purchase botnets relatively cheaply, according to an article on SiliconIndia. The botnets, a string of infected computers run by a “control server,” allow a purchaser to use the botnet to assail websites and servers and effectively cripple them.

Botnets are often used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that shut down websites by making illegitimate data requests, blocking legitimate users from accessing the website. Some…