Hackers have targeted three Greek banks for a third time in five days, demanding a ransom from each lender of 20,000 bitcoin, according to Greek police and the country’s central bank.
A group demanded the bitcoin ransom after staging its first attacks, and then threatened a full collapse of the unnamed banks’ websites if they refused to pay up. These initial attacks took the form of a distributed denial of service — flooding the banks’ websites with requests so that they crashed under the strain. They succeeded in disrupting electronic transactions at all three banks for a short period, but customer information was protected, a police official said.
Read moreProtonMail decided to pay a $6000 ransom to cyberattackers lobbing a crippling DDoS attack at the service -- but this did nothing to prevent the attack.
The encrypted email service revealed on Thursday the extent of the distributed denial-of-service attack which began on Tuesday, 3 November. The attack, which sent vast amounts of traffic to ProtonMail leading to the overload of systems to the point that legitimate traffic could not get through, has stopped -- but the service has warned it may come under attack again. ProtonMail is used by the privacy-conscious to protect their online communication.
Read moreSalted Hash has followed the extortion attempts from a group of scammers overseas who are targeting the leaked Ashley Madison email list. Most of the emails threaten exposure, but others threatened DDoS as well as offered help collecting government aid.
Following the money, the group has earned more than $20,000 off the scam, and their emails are still going out. Here's a brief overview of the scams, and the other technical data for anyone wishing to research further. The first email from the group hit a catch-all address used by Salted Hash. However, it was one of the addresses used by this blog in 2014 to investigate extortion claims against Ashley Madison.
Read moreCyber-attackers have taken down the website of the National Crime Agency in apparent revenge for arrests made last week. The NCA website was temporarily down, four days after six teenagers were released on bail on suspicion of using hacking group Lizard Squad’s cyberattack tool to target websites and services.
The six suspects are accused of usinga tool that bombards websites and services with bogus traffic to attack a national newspaper, a school, gaming companies and a number of online retailers. The NCA is the latest body to fall foul of what is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, stopping real visitors from reaching the site.
Read moreSome of the most widely used BitTorrent applications, including uTorrent, Mainline, and Vuze are also the most vulnerable to a newly discovered form of denial of service attack that makes it easy for a single person to bring down large sites.
The distributed reflective DoS attacks exploit weaknesses found in the open BitTorrent protocol, which millions of people rely on to exchange files over the Internet. But it turns out that features found uTorrent, Mainline, and Vuze make them especially suitable for the technique. DRDoS allows a single BitTorrent user with only modest amounts of bandwidth to send malformed requests to other BitTorrent users.
Read moreThe US FBI just released a public service announcement to the public about a large number of websites being exploited and compromised through WordPress plugin vulnerabilities.
The defacements have affected Web site operations and the communication platforms and a variety of other domestic and international Web sites. Although the defacements demonstrate low-level hacking sophistication, they are disruptive and often costly in terms of lost business revenue and expenditures on technical services to repair infected computer systems. The FBI explained what happens when a site gets compromised.
Read moreIBM Security has identified an active campaign using a variant of Dyre malware that has successfully stolen more than $1 million from targeted enterprise organizations. The campaign shows a brazen twist from the once-simple Dyre malware by adding sophisticated social engineering tactics likely to circumvent two-factor authentication.
In recent incidents, organizations have lost millions to attackers. While many popular banking Trojans have targeted individuals, Dyre has always been used to target organizations. Dyre has evolved to become simultaneously sophisticated and easy to use.
Read moreThe now famous and most hated hackers in the world, the Lizard Squad, have struck again. Most people familiar with cyber attacks and hacking have heard about the Lizard Squad and that they are known for DDoS attacks. They hacked and defaced Google Vietnam’s home page.
The attack started and many Internet users in Vietnam were unable to get access to google.com.vn. The defaced screen showed an image of a teenager holding an iPhone and a video along with a tweet from Lizard Squad. Another tweet from Lizard Squad further confirmed their likely hand in the hacking and defacement. However, surprisinglym the official Twitter account of Lizard Squad was silent about the hacking.
Read moreFile integrity monitoring, patching, key defence. Criminals are ransoming database backups, after compromising web applications to change databases' encryption settings. Security consultancy claimed the attacks start with an attack on a web site that yeilds acess to a database server.
Once in, attackers change the encryption settings used by the database and store the key on an HTTPS server somewhere, an operation that apparently escapes some admins' attention. To pull off the attack, the attackers remove the key from the remote server, at which point the website operator notices their site is down.
Read moreThe cyber-assaults disabling Sony PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox game consoles may have been done by hackers 'for laughs' - but is something more sinister going on?
Every week, Ann and Jim Johnson put away a few pounds in their Christmas club. Their younger daughter got a doll’s house, their middle son a bike. But their oldest, Jamie, got a Sony PlayStation 4 – followed by several hours of anguished, then tearful, failure to make it work properly. He wanted to play with his friends and he couldn’t. It was the second disastrous cyberassault on Sony in a month.
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