News overview Politically-motivated cyberattacks dominated the DDoS landscape in the second quarter of 2022 just as they did in the previous reporting period. ALtahrea Team, a group targeting NATO and its partners, attacked public transportation websites in Israel and the United Kingdom. Israel saw a cyberattack on the Airports Authority, and UK, an attack o

The Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report is out. We are proud to collaborate as a supporting contributor to this year’s data efforts once again and to have contributed for the past 8 years. The report provides interesting analysis of a full amount of global incident data. Several things stand out in the 2022 report: Ransomware challenges co

In a Twitter thread, the Microsoft Security Intelligence team have revealed new information about the latest versions of the Sysrv botnet. The variant they focused on uses a range of known exploits for vulnerabilities in web apps and databases to install cryptocurrency miners on both Windows and Linux systems. Background The Sysrv botnet first recei

News overview The DDoS landscape in Q1 2022 was shaped by the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine: a significant part of all DDoS-related news concerned these countries. In mid-January, the website of Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko was hit by a DDoS attack, and the websites of a number of Ukrainian ministries were defaced. In mid-February, DDoS attacks

p>Microsoft has announced that its Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has taken legal and technical action to disrupt a malicious botnet called Zloader. Zloader or Zbot are common names used to refer to any malware related to the ZeuS family. There are a lot of those because the ZeuS banking Trojan source code was leaked in 2011, and so there’s been plenty o

p>Emotet was first found in the wild in 2014. Back then its main functionality was stealing user banking credentials. Since then it has survived numerous transformations, started delivering other malware and finally became a powerful botnet. In January 2021 Emotet was disrupted by a joint effort of different countries’ authorities. It took the threat a

p>The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and Microsoft have taken the sting out of two operations believed to be controlled by the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). On Wednesday, the DOJ announced that it had disrupted GRU’s control over thousands of internet-connected firewall devices compromised by the Russian Sandworm group. One

News roundup Q4 2021 saw the appearance of several new DDoS botnets. A zombie network, named Abcbot by researchers, first hit the radar in July, but at the time it was little more than a simple scanner attacking Linux systems by brute-forcing weak passwords and exploiting known vulnerabilities. In October, the botnet was upgraded with DDoS functionality. The

News overview Q3 2021 brought two new DDoS attack vectors, potentially posing a serious threat, including for major web resources. A team of researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado Boulder found a way to spoof the victim’s IP address over TCP. To date, amplification attacks have mostly been carried out using the UDP p

Organizations aren’t slowing down in their use of application programming interfaces (APIs). According to a survey covered by DEVOPSdigest, 61.3% of organizations used more APIs in 2020 than they did a year earlier. An even greater proportion (71.3%) said they plan to use even more APIs in 2021. Another 21.2% expected to use the same number of APIs ov

On the Cloudflare blog, the American web infrastructure behemoth that provides content delivery network (CDN) and DDoS mitigation services reports that it detected and mitigated a 17.2 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack. To put that number in perspective. The company reports that this is three times as large as anything it has seen before. DDoS

Synology PSIRT (Product Security Incident Response Team) has put out a warning that it has recently seen and received reports about an increase in brute-force attacks against Synology devices. PSIRT suspects the botnet commonly known as StealthWorker is responsible for this increase in activity. Synology Synology specializes in data storage and most pe

LemonDuck has evolved from a Monero cryptominer into LemonCat, a Trojan that specializes in backdoor installation, credential and data theft, and malware delivery, according to the Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team, which explained their findings in a two-part story [1][2] on the Microsoft Security blog. LemonDuck Trojan.LemonDuck has al

News overview In terms of big news, Q2 2021 was relatively calm, but not completely eventless. For example, April saw the active distribution of a new DDoS botnet called Simps — the name under which it introduced itself to owners of infected devices. The malware creators promoted their brainchild on a specially set-up YouTube channel and Discord server, wher

News overview Q1 2021 saw the appearance of two new botnets. News broke in January of the FreakOut malware, which attacks Linux devices. Cybercriminals exploited several critical vulnerabilities in programs installed on victim devices, including the newly discovered CVE-2021-3007. Botnet operators use infected devices to carry out DDoS attacks or mine crypto