Tens of thousands of MikroTik and Ubiquiti routers are currently available online, featuring alarmistic hostnames such as "HACKED FTP server," "HACKED-ROUTER-HELP-SOS-WAS-MFWORM-INFECTED," or "HACKED-ROUTER-HELP-SOS-HAD-DEFAULT-PASSWORD."

In reality, these devices have not been hacked, just defaced, and appear to be the subject of some prank of vigilante's actions. Attackers aren't taking over devices, but merely changing the devices' names, as a warning for device owners, hoping that users will take action and secure their routers. Spotted by Ankit Anubhav, these benign hacks have been going on since last summer.

Malware which targeted IoT devices was doing more than launching DDoS attacks, researchers discovered, but they question how effective it would be. Security researchers have unearthed code in a Mirai botnet enabling it to mine for bitcoins using IoT devices.

Researchers at IBM's X-force found late last month the functionality in a variant of the ELF Linux/Mirai malware. The bitcoin attack started on 20 March, peaking on 25 March, but three days later the activity subsided. What the researchers found in a sample of the code was the same Mirai functionality ported over from the Windows version but with a focus on attacking Linux machines running BusyBox.

You’ve probably heard the word botnet more than once recently, and that’s hardly surprising. Any connected device can be zombified — turned into a part of a botnet.

These include PCs, smartphones, tablets, routers, Wi-Fi refrigerators, smart toys, and a lot of other gadgets. In this post we explain what a botnet is, the bad things a botnet can do, and how to protect your gadgets from becoming a part of a botnet. Botnets: What are they? A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices that have been infected with special malware. The kind of malware that creates bots, or zombies, works covertly, acquiring administrative rights.

Just Imaging — What if, you enter into your home from a chilling weather outside, and the heating system fails to work because of a cyber attack, leaving you in the sense of panic? The same happened late last month when an attack knocks heating system offline in Finland.

Last week, a Distributed Denial of Service attack led to the disruption of the heating systems for at least two housing blocks in the city of Lappeenranta, literally leaving their residents in subzero weather. Both the apartments are managed by a company called Valtia, a facilities services company headquartered in Lappeenranta. Valtia CEO Simo Rounela confirmed that the central heating system and hot water system in both buildings had become a target of DDoS attacks.

Cyber attacks are getting evil and worst nightmare for companies day-by-day, and the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one such attacks that cause a massive damage to any service.

Recently, the Internet witnessed a record-breaking largest DDoS attack of over 1 Tbps against France-based hosting provider OVH, and now the latest victim of the attack is none other than Dyn DNS provider. A sudden outage of popular sites and services, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Shopify, for many users, is causing uproar online. It's because of a DDoS attack against the popular Domain Name System (DNS) service provider Dyn.

Sierra Wireless is warning customers to change their default access credentials on AirLink gateway products after discovering the wireless products are being compromised by Mirai malware.

Mirai, a malware and botnet combination recently publicized after a 620 Gbps distributed DDoS attack on the prominent security blog Krebs on Security, enslaves thousands of vulnerable Internet of Things devices. Now, it seems the malware's operators could be scanning the web for Sierra Wireless gateway devices vulnerable to exploit. Experts issued a security advisory warning that these products are vulnerable to the Linux-based malware.

A new trojan named Mirai has surfaced, and it's targeting Linux servers and IoT devices, mainly DVRs, running Linux-based firmware, for the purpose of enslaving these systems as part of a large botnet used to launch DDoS attacks. Mirai is an evolution of an older trojan, also used for DDoS attacks.

Mirai's mode of operation is largely the same as Gafgyt, targeting IoT devices running Busybox, a slimmed-down version of select GNU tools and libraries, usually deployed on small embedded hardware. The trojan also targets only a specific set of platforms, on which IoT devices are usually built.

Thousands of web-connected CCTV cameras and webcams have been taken over by hackers to carry out cyber attacks on government department websites and online banks.

The network of compromised cameras was uncovered by researchers at security firm Arbor Networks, who reported that large scale distributed denial of service attacks took down websites by flooding them with traffic. The botnet has been assembled by the notorious hacker collective Lizard Squad, best known for taking down the Xbox Live and Playstation gaming networks, as well as knocking North Korea’s Internet offline in 2014 using its LizardStresser DDoS tool.

Staminus Communications – a California-based hosting and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection company – is recovering a massive data breach after hackers broke down into its servers and leaked personal and sensitive details of its customers.

Though the company acknowledged that there was a problem in a message posted to Twitter on Thursday morning, it did not specify a data breach. Staminus's website went offline at 8 am Eastern Time on Thursday, and on Friday afternoon, a representative said in a Twitter post that "a rare event cascaded across multiple routers in a system-wide event, making our backbone unavailable."

A group of hackers is threatening to take the gaming networks related to Xbox and PlayStation consoles offline for a week during Christmas, mirroring a similar attack last year that stopped gamers around the world from accessing games.

The group, which calls itself Phantom Squad, says it has already started attacking various gaming networks, including PlayStation Network, Xbox Live and Grand Theft Auto 5, and on Tuesday morning it said it had taken Reddit offline with a cyberattack. Experts have contacted Reddit to ask if it went offline as a result of a cyberattack, but at the time of publication there has been no response.