security – Page 198

200-400 Gbps DDoS Attacks Are Now Normal

An anonymous reader writes “Brian Krebs has a followup to this week’s 400 Gbps DDoS attack using NTP amplification. Krebs, as a computer security writer, has often been the target of DDoS attacks. He was also hit by a 200Gbps attack this week (apparently, from a 15-year-old in Illinois). That kind of volume would have been record-breaking only a couple of years ago, but now it’s just normal. Arbor Networks says we’ve entered the ‘hockey stick’ era of DDoS attacks, as a graph of attack volume spikes sharply over the past year. CloudFlare’s CEO wrote, ‘Monday’s DDoS proved these attacks aren’t just theoretical. To generate approximately 400Gbps of traffic, the attacker used 4, 529 NTP servers running on 1, 298 different networks. On average, each of these servers sent 87Mbps of traffic to the intended victim on CloudFlare’s network. Remarkably, it is possible that the attacker used only a single server running on a network that allowed source IP address spoofing to initiate the requests. An attacker with a 1 Gbps connection can theoretically generate more than 200Gbps of DDoS traffic.’ In a statement to Krebs, he added, ‘We have an attack of over 100 Gbps almost every hour of every day.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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200-400 Gbps DDoS Attacks Are Now Normal

Google Earth’s New Satellites

Rambo Tribble writes “The BBC provides some insights into the next generation satellites being built for Google by contractor DigitalGlobe in Colorado. The resolution of these satellites’ cameras is sufficient to resolve objects that are only 25cm wide. Unfortunately, the public will be allowed only half that image quality, the best being reserved for the U.S. military. ‘The light comes in through a barrel structure, pointed at the Earth, and is bounced around by a series of mirrors, before being focused onto a CCD sensor. The big difference – apart from the size – between this and a typical handheld digital camera, is that the spacecraft will not just take snapshots but continuous images along thin strips of land or sea.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Earth’s New Satellites

Blogger Fined €3,000 for ‘Publicizing’ Files Found Through Google Search

mpicpp points out an article detailing the case of French blogger Olivier Laurelli, who had the misfortune to click links from search results. Laurelli stumbled upon a public link leading to documents from the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor. He downloaded them — over 7 Gb worth — and looked through them, eventually publishing a few slides to his website. When one of France’s intelligence agencies found out, they took Laurelli into custody and indicted him, referring to him as a ‘hacker.’ In their own investigation, they said, “we then found that it was sufficient to have the full URL to access to the resource on the extranet in order to bypass the authentication rules on this server.” The first court acquitted Laurelli of the charges against him. An appeals court affirmed part of the decision, but convicted him of “theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information.” He was fined €3, 000 (about $4, 000). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Blogger Fined €3,000 for ‘Publicizing’ Files Found Through Google Search

This Crazy-Advanced Malware Has Been Infecting Governments Since 2007

Kaspersky security researchers just revealed their discovery of a cyberespionage threat they say could be the most advanced in the world. Immensely powerful and hard to detect, it’s been active since at least 2007, targeting governments, embassies, and energy companies. And nobody knows where it came from. Read more…

Mac OS X Bitcoin Stealing Trojan Horse Called OSX/CoinThief Discovered

An anonymous reader writes “SecureMac.com has discovered a new trojan horse for Mac OS X called OSX/CoinThief.A, which spies on web traffic to steal Bitcoins. This malware has been found in the wild, along with numerous reports of stolen coins. The malware, which comes disguised as an app to send and receive payments on Bitcoin Stealth Addresses, instead covertly monitors all web traffic in order to steal login info for Bitcoin wallets.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mac OS X Bitcoin Stealing Trojan Horse Called OSX/CoinThief Discovered

Bitcoin Plunges After Mt. Gox Exchange Halts Trades

krakman writes with this excerpt from Bloomberg News: “Bitcoin plunged more than 8 percent [Friday] after a Tokyo-based exchange halted withdrawals of the digital currency, citing technical malfunction. Mt. Gox, claimed in a blog post it needed to ‘temporarily pause on all withdrawal requests to obtain a clear technical view of the currency processes.’ It promised an ‘update’ — not a reopening — on Monday, Feb. 10, Japan time. This is day after Russia’s Prosecutor General concluded Bitcoin and other digital currencies are illegal under current law.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Plunges After Mt. Gox Exchange Halts Trades

Florida Arrests High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers For Money Laundering

tsu doh nimh writes “State authorities in Florida on Thursday announced criminal charges targeting three men who allegedly ran illegal businesses moving large amounts of cash in and out of the Bitcoin virtual currency. Experts say this is likely the first case in which Bitcoin vendors have been prosecuted under state anti-money laundering laws, and that prosecutions like these could shut down one of the last remaining avenues for purchasing Bitcoins anonymously.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Florida Arrests High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers For Money Laundering

Graphene Conducts Electricity Ten Times Better Than Expected

ananyo writes “Physicists have produced nanoribbons of graphene — the single-atom-thick carbon — that conduct electrons better than theory predicted even for the most idealized form of the material (abstract). The finding could help graphene realize its promise in high-end electronics, where researchers have long hoped it could outperform traditional materials such as silicon. In graphene, electrons can move faster than in any other material at room temperature. But techniques that cut sheets of graphene into the narrow ribbons needed to form wires of a nano-scale circuit leave ragged edges, which disrupt the electron flow. Now a team led by physicist Walt de Heer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta has made ribbons that conduct electric charges for more than 10 micrometres without meeting resistance — 1, 000 times farther than in typical graphene nanoribbons. The ribbons made by de Heer’s team in fact conduct electrons ten times better than standard theories of electron transport they should, say the authors.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Graphene Conducts Electricity Ten Times Better Than Expected

Dried Meat "Resurrects" Lost Species of Whale

sciencehabit writes “A gift of dried whale meat—and some clever genetic sleuthing across almost 16, 000 kilometers of equatorial waters—has helped scientists identify a long-forgotten animal as a new species of beaked whale. The ‘resurrection’ raises new questions about beaked whales, the most elusive and mysterious of cetaceans. Overall, the saga shows ‘that there are probably even more species of beaked whales that we don’t know about, ‘ says Phil Clapham, a marine mammalogist at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. ‘We don’t see them because they’re very deep-diving and live far from land.’ They also live in a poorly surveyed part of the ocean, Baker says, where very few people dwell on remote atolls.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dried Meat "Resurrects" Lost Species of Whale

Last Month’s Massive Target Hack Was the Heating Guy’s Fault

The source of the massive Target security breach that allowed hackers to swipe the credit and debit card data of up to 40 million customers may have finally been tracked down. The culprit? One extremely unfortunate HVAC repairman. Read more…

Ken May

Tag: security