CloudFlare

August 26, 2016

Inside ‘The Attack That Almost Broke the Internet’

This post was originally published on this siteIn March 2013, a coalition of spammers and spam-friendly hosting firms pooled their resources to launch what would become the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack the Internet had ever witnessed. The assault briefly knocked offline the world’s largest anti-spam organization, and caused a great deal of collateral damage to innocent bystanders in the process. Here’s a never-before-seen look at how that attack unfolded, and a rare glimpse into the shadowy cybercrime forces that orchestrated it. The following are excerpts taken verbatim from a series of Skype and IRC chat room logs generated by […]
September 10, 2016

Alleged vDOS Proprietors Arrested in Israel

This post was originally published on this siteTwo young Israeli men alleged to be the co-owners of a popular online attack-for-hire service were reportedly arrested in Israel on Thursday. The pair were arrested around the same time that KrebsOnSecurity published a story naming them as the masterminds behind a service that can be hired to knock Web sites and Internet users offline with powerful blasts of junk data. 18-year-old Yarden Bidani. According to a story at Israeli news site TheMarker.com, Itay Huri and Yarden Bidani, both 18 years old, were arrested Thursday in connection with an investigation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of […]
September 10, 2016

Alleged vDOS Proprietors Arrested in Israel

This post was originally published on this siteTwo young Israeli men alleged to be the co-owners of a popular online attack-for-hire service were reportedly arrested in Israel on Thursday. The pair were arrested around the same time that KrebsOnSecurity published a story naming them as the masterminds behind a service that can be hired to knock Web sites and Internet users offline with powerful blasts of junk data. Alleged vDOS co-owner Yarden Bidani. According to a story at Israeli news site TheMarker.com, Itay Huri and Yarden Bidani, both 18 years old, were arrested Thursday in connection with an investigation by the U.S. Federal […]
October 19, 2016

Spreading the DDoS Disease and Selling the Cure

This post was originally published on this siteEarlier this month a hacker released the source code for Mirai, a malware strain that was used to launch a historically large 620 Gbps denial-of-service attack against this site in September. That attack came in apparent retribution for a story here which directly preceded the arrest of two Israeli men for allegedly running an online attack for hire service called vDOS. Turns out, the site where the Mirai source code was leaked had some very interesting things in common with the place vDOS called home. The domain name where the Mirai source code was originally placed for download […]