Tag Archives: Denial-of-service attack

James Hall ~ The Risk And Reward Of Bitcoins

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BATR April 17, 2013

Money is supposed to be a store of value. After the recent collapse in the dollar convertible price of Bitcoins, the inevitable scrutiny in the viability of the monetary system is warranted.

The official description of Bitcoin states: Bitcoin is an experimental, decentralized digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority managing transactions and issuing money carried out collectively by the network. Purported myths and ground rules on how the alternative currency operates, provides calculated reading. Whether this accounting system can or would be accepted as an credible medium of exchange on any large scale is certainly an open question.

The need for an alternative currency to fiat debt created tender is apparent. However, establishing faith and acceptance in a competing and digital method of payment for transactions is almost inconceivable to the average consumer.

The Business Insider in Bitcoin Is Changing The World provides an analysis and a risk warning report.

“Bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, is a mysterious hacker (or a group of hackers) who created it in 2009 and disappeared from the internet some time in 2010.

Reddit, a social-media site, and WordPress, which provides web hosting and software for bloggers. The appeal for merchants is strong. Firms such as BitPay offer spot-price conversion into dollars. Fees are typically far less than those charged by credit-card companies or banks, particularly for orders from abroad. And Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed, so frauds cannot leave retailers out of pocket.

Yet for Bitcoins to go mainstream much has to happen, says Fred Ehrsam, the co-developer of Coinbase, a Californian Bitcoin exchange and “wallet service”, where users can store their digital fortune. Several Bitcoin exchanges have suffered thefts and crashes over the past two years.

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Dan Goodin ~ Huge Attack On WordPress Sites Could Spawn Never-Before-Seen Super Botnet

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ARSTechnica April 12 2013

Ongoing attack from >90,000 computers is creating a strain on Web hosts, too.

Security analysts have detected an ongoing attack that uses a huge number of computers from across the Internet to commandeer servers that run the WordPress blogging application.

The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using more than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses.

“These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, wrote in a blog post describing the attacks.

It’s not the first time researchers have raised the specter of a super botnet with potentially dire consequences for the Internet. In October, they revealed that highly debilitating DDoS attacks on six of the biggest US banks used compromised Web servers to flood their targets with above-average amounts of Internet traffic. The botnet came to be known as the itsoknoproblembro or Brobot, names that came from a relatively new attack tool kit some of the infected machines ran. If typical botnets used in DDoS attacks were the network equivalent of tens of thousands of garden hoses trained on a target, the Brobot machines were akin to hundreds of fire hoses. Despite their smaller number, they were nonetheless able to inflict more damage because of their bigger capacity.

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Michael Snyder ~ All Of The Money In Your Bank Account Could Disappear In A Single Moment

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Economic Collapse blog April 3 2013

What would you do if you logged in to your bank account someday and it showed that you had a zero balance and your bank had no record that you ever had any money in your account?  What would you do if all of the money in your bank account suddenly disappeared in a single moment?  If you had not kept any paper records, which most Americans do not, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove to the bank that you actually had any money in the bank.  If you don’t think that something like this could ever happen in the United States, you might want to think again.  Cyber attacks against major banks in the United States are becoming more powerful and more sophisticated with each passing month.  In fact, major U.S. bank websites have been offline for a total of 249 hours over the past six weeks.  And just last month, thousands upon thousands of Chase customers logged into their bank accounts only to discover that their balances had all been reset to zero.  Anyone that would want to cause complete and total economic chaos in the United States could accomplish it very easily by wiping out all of our bank account records.  So please do not keep all of your money in a single bank, and from now on please keep a paper copy of all of your bank account statements.  At some point it is likely that one of these cyber attacks will cause permanent damage to our banking system, and you want to be protected.

The mainstream media has generally been very quiet about the massive cyber attacks against our major banks, but behind the scenes authorities are truly alarmed.  They don’t know how to stop these attacks, and they just keep getting more intense and more sophisticated.

Could you imagine how you would feel if you logged in to your bank account and all of your money was gone?  That is exactly what happened to some Chase customers last month.  The following is from a recent CNET article…

JP Morgan Chase denied this evening that it had suffered a hack that many customers claimed had suddenly reduced their checking account balances to zero.

After discovering the apparently empty accounts via the Internet or mobile devices, many Chase banking customers turned to Twitter to express their frustration and show screen shots of zero balances. Other users were greeted with messages that their bank account balances were unavailable.

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Mike Adams ~ GoDaddy Attack Likely A Psyop To Discredit Anonymous While Pushing Cyber Security Executive Order

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Natural News | September 11 2012

Natural News ~ It is likely no coincidence that on the verge of President Obama’s plan to sign an unconstitutional Executive Order (EO) implementing police state cyber security measures, the internet gets hit with one of the worst DDoS attacks ever perpetrated. Today, GoDaddy got “nuked” with a highly-coordinated DDoS attack, taking down its name servers, websites, hosted email and all its internal phone systems. (See original story here.)

The mainstream media is blaming “Anonymous” for the attack, but this is almost certainly a cover story. The problem with being an anonymous group is that anyone can claim to be you. What’s even more revealing is that the attacker who claimed responsibility for the attack openly stated he is not part of Anonymous. His twitter name was “Anonymous Own3r,” eluding to the hacker slang of someone “owning” a selected target. This term is often used in online video games. It means this user is saying he achieved victory over Anonymous, not that he IS Anonymous.

The attack itself was devastating not only to GoDaddy’s customer base, but also to the reputation of Anonymous itself. That was probably the whole point: to make Anonymous look like a group of online terrorists when, in reality, the real Anonymous group historically only attacks selective targets with strong ties to the police state.

Across the mainstream media, from PC Magazine (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409516,00.asp) to CBS News (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57509744-501465/godaddy-goes-d…), the mainstream media is falsely reporting that “Anonymous” claimed responsibility for the attack. But that’s simply not true: the “Anonymous Own3r” user claimed responsibility for it. And he added, in a Tweet, these words:

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Millions Of GoDaddy Sites Go Offline [Video]

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RTAmerica | September 10 2012

Shift Frequency was caught up in this outage but neither my domain name nor service is from Go Daddy. So this attack is bigger than Go Daddy. Thanks in advance for your patience. The site may blink in and out a couple more times before this Denial Of Service manipulation concludes. Blessings ~G

The largest domain registrar on the Internet – GoDaddy.com – was taken offline on Monday, shutting down thousands and potentially million of users from websites hosted on affected servers. On Twitter, a person who claims to be affiliated with the loose knit Anonymous collective has taken credit for the attack, saying the action was necessary to test cyber security. RT web producer Andrew Blake breaks it down.

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RT News ~ Stratfor Emails Reveal Secret, Widespread TrapWire Surveillance System

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IntelHub | August 13 2012

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence.

It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it’s the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community.

The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation’s ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason.

For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing.

Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed to be more than five million emails from within the company.

WikiLeaks began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year and, of those, several discussing the implementing of TrapWire in public spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter.

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