There are many doomsday cyber scenarios that keep security professionals awake at night. Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and current vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, speaking at an event in Washington, D.C., in 2015, shared his: waking up to the headline that 1,000 smart refrigerators were used to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to take down a critical piece of...
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A type of denial of service attack relevant in the 1990s has resurfaced with surprising potency against modern-day firewalls. Dubbed a BlackNurse attack, the technique leverages a low-volume Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) -based attack on vulnerable firewalls made by Cisco, Palo Alto, SonicWall and others, according to researchers. TDC Security Operations Center, a security firm that published a technical report (PDF) on BlackNurse this week, said the attack is more traditionally...
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On October 21st, waves of crippling Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks left some of the most prominent names on the web struggling to ensure consistent access. Dyn, Inc., a company that provides domain name services for about 6% of Fortune 500 Companies, including Twitter, PayPal and Netflix, found itself battling DDoS attacks from a group of hackers. This, in turn, created access problems for an array of popular websites. What makes this DDoS...
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Distributed denial of service attacks — long serving as the weapon of choice for low-skill hackers — are getting more complex, with nearly two-thirds involving multiple kinds of attack traffic, according to new figures. If you need a refresher on what a DDos attack is, check out this definition here. The figures, from Internet infrastructure giant Verisign, cover the second quarter of 2016. They show that DDoS attacks also continue to grow in size. The average peak size of...
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Irony- the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, or in this case, a company who falls victim to the very thing they exist to defend against. On March 10, 2016 global DDoS protection company, Staminus, was the recipient of a DDoS attack. This distributed denial of service attacks rendered their network inoperable for over 20 hours. Staminus released a statement confirming that issue was a result...
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