Our security operations team investigate and mitigate multiple denial of service (DDoS) attacks every single day. One recent case caught our attention because of the intensity and duration of the attack, and – as we discovered through some research – how it was being done. In this article, we’ll share the specifics in an effort to track… […]
Tag Archives: ddos
The Growing DDoS Threat to Website Owners
As website attacks continue to evolve, we see growing levels of sophistication in the way attackers are expanding the economics of their industry. The monetization potential of attacking websites continues to grow exponentially as more website come online (currently estimated to be over a billion live sites). With this evolution comes new tactics that we’ve… […]
Lizard Squad Ransom Threats: New Name, Same Faux Armada Collective M.O.
CloudFlare recently wrote about the group of cyber criminals claiming to be be the “Armada Collective.” In that article, we stressed that this group had not followed through on any of the ransom threats they had made. Quite simply, this copycat group of cyber criminals had not actually carried out a single DDoS attack—they were […]
Empty DDoS Threats: Meet the Armada Collective
Beginning in March 2016, we began hearing reports of a gang of cybercriminals once again calling themselves the Armada Collective. The calling card of the gang was an extortion email sent to a wide variety of online businesses threatening to launch DDoS attacks if they weren’t paid in Bitcoin. From The Wizard of Oz (1939) […]
WordPress Sites Leveraged in Layer 7 DDoS Campaigns
We first disclosed that the WordPress pingback method was being misused to perform massive layer 7 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks back on March 2014. The problem, as previously described,was that any WordPress website with the pingback feature enabled (which is on by default) could be used to attack the availability of other websites. The attacks wouldRead […]
The Risks of Hiring a Bad SEO Company
Today we are not going to explore malware or any other overtly malicious traffic. Instead this post is a warning about dishonest marketing tactics used by services claiming to improve your website traffic or Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We recently received a report from one our clients claiming that their website was experiencing a DistributedRead […]
Increased Popularity in DDoS Extortion Campaigns
Over the past few months, our security operations group have identified and mitigated an increasing number of DDoS attacks tied to extortion attempts from different cyber crime groups, including DD4BC, Armada Collective and a few more unnamed ones. These DDoS extortion attempts are starting to exploit smaller websites that may be less able to defendRead […]
Analyzing Popular Layer 7 Application DDoS Attacks
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been a major concern for website owners for a while. All types of sites, from small to big, have been taken down and kept offline because of them. Even over-provisioned servers can be taken offline by the smallest of DDoS attacks; caused by IP addresses being null routed byRead […]
Common Website Security Terminology Defined
If you want to keep your website safe, it is important to understand the terminology used to describe the causes and effects of hacks. Software vulnerabilities and access control issues are two of the main causes of website infections, and in this post we will define some of the terminology used to describe them. WeRead […]
DDoS from China – Facebook, WordPress and Twitter Users Receiving Sucuri Error Pages
Over the past few weeks, our Security Operation Center (SOC) has been seeing some different, and very suspicious requests to some of our servers. At first we thought it was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, mainly due to the high concentration of requests (thousands per second). Looking further however, it actually seemed like […]
