Yandex

June 7, 2021

Adventures in Contacting the Russian FSB

This post was originally published on this siteKrebsOnSecurity recently had occasion to contact the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the process of doing so, I encountered a small snag: The FSB’s website said in order to communicate with them securely, I needed to download and install an encryption and virtual private networking (VPN) appliance that is flagged by at least 20 antivirus products as malware. The FSB headquarters at Lubyanka Square, Moscow. Image: Wikipedia. The reason I contacted the FSB — one of the successor agencies to the […]
September 10, 2021

KrebsOnSecurity Hit By Huge New IoT Botnet “Meris”

This post was originally published on this siteOn Thursday evening, KrebsOnSecurity was the subject of a rather massive (and mercifully brief) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The assault came from “Meris,” the same new “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet behind record-shattering attacks against Russian search giant Yandex this week and internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare earlier this summer. Cloudflare recently wrote about its attack, which clocked in at 17.2 million bogus requests-per-second. To put that in perspective, Cloudflare serves over 25 million HTTP requests per second on average. In its Aug. 19 writeup, Cloudflare neglected to assign a name to the botnet […]