Reddit’s had a bumpy week. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, the site’s amateur sleuths attempted to crowdsource a suspect, which landed an innocent high-school runner on the front page of the New York Post.
Now, on top of everything else, the site is under attack. Read More
Bitcoin day traders are at loose ends again today, as the major exchange Mt. Gox just announced they’ve shut down trading, in order to “allow the market to cooldown following the drop in price.”
The press release is, we are very sorry to report, not terribly reassuring: Read More
Notice that your Internet’s been a little slow lately? A cyber fight between an anti-spam group and a Dutch Internet company has spiraled so far out of control that it’s threatening the infrastructure of the Internet and clogging connectivity for everyday web users, including those–gasp–trying to access Netflix. Read More
Amazon.com’s homepage appears to be temporarily down, showing a “service unavailable” message to users. Links within Amazon are still functional, but the homepage is inaccessible.
As TechCrunch notes, the site is serving a 503 error, indicating that “the server powering the site is down due to maintenance or overloading,” which can mean the server is being DDOS’d. Amazon Web Services’ dashboard says all hosting services appear to be operating normally. Read More
The loosely organized Internet philosophizers of Anonymous have decided to take a brief break from hassling Steubenville, the Westboro Baptist Church and Hunter Moore for a bit of good, old-fashioned soapboxery. The Daily Dot reports that the group has just launched a petition on WhiteHouse.gov titled “Make, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), a legal form of protesting.”
In short, they want DDoS attacks considered free speech, and they want anyone arrested for DDoS attacks released immediately. A provocative idea! Read More
Earlier this week the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters announced new distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks on U.S. banks, part of what they’ve referred to as Phase 2 of their “Operation Ababil.” It appears that they have been true to their word.
As of 1:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon, virtually all of the most recent site outage reports on SiteDown.co, one of the largest website outage notification services, were for either Wells Fargo or Bank of America. Comments from Wells Fargo customers ranged from the questioning–”What idiots do you hire to manage to your website?” to the timely: “Did the mayans shut down wells fargo as well no world no monies (sic).” Read More
CIA.gov, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s official web portal, went down this afternoon and continues to be inaccessible, according to Down For Everybody or Just Me. Osama the God, “leader of #UGNazi,” a hacktivist crew, has taken responsibility on Twitter.
“#TangoDown #UGNazi #OpAntiGov http://cia.gov,” he tweeted, following that message up with several retweets that credit UGNazi for the attack. The move is part of #OpAntiGov, a longstanding UG Nazi operation. Read More
Denial of service elves Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters issued a new statement Tuesday and apparently renewed DDoS attacks on American bank websites.
In a brief Pastebin post the hackers–who claim they are mainly motivated by outrage over the anti-Muslim video, Innocence of Muslims–acknowledged the horrific school shootings that took place in Newtown Connecticut on December 14th, but re-committed to their efforts against U.S. financial institutions: Read More
Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have discovered a way to turn cloud computing into hacker heaven.
Disguising data transfers with URL-truncating services like TinyURL or Bit.ly, researchers found that cloud-based processing power intended to shift computing tasks from laptops, tablets and mobile devices could be converted to crack encoded passwords or used for a large scale denial-of-service attack. Read More
Back in late September, you probably went a couple of weeks unable to access your bank account, thanks to a massive wave of cyberattacks against Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and others. Well, Dennis Lockhart, the president of the Atlanta Federal Reserve, certainly hasn’t forgotten about it.
