Tag Archives: botnet

KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Record DDoS

September 21, 2016
122 Comments

On Tuesday evening, KrebsOnSecurity.com was the target of an extremely large and unusual distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack designed to knock the site offline. The attack did not succeed thanks to the hard work of the engineers at Akamai, the company that protects my site from such digital sieges. But according to Akamai, it was nearly double the size of the largest attack they’ve seen previously, and was among the biggest assaults the Internet has ever witnessed.

Slicing Into a Point-of-Sale Botnet

June 8, 2016
87 Comments

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news of an ongoing credit card breach involving CiCi’s Pizza, a restaurant chain in the United States with more than 500 locations. What follows is an exclusive look at a point-of-sale botnet that appears to have enslaved dozens of hacked payment terminals inside of CiCi’s locations that are being relieved of customer credit card data in real time.

Crooks Use Hacked Routers to Aid Cyberheists

June 29, 2015
54 Comments

Cybercriminals have long relied on compromised Web sites to host malicious software for use in drive-by download attacks, but at least one crime gang is taking it a step further: New research shows that crooks spreading the Dyre malware for use in cyberheists are leveraging hacked wireless routers to deliver their password-stealing crimeware.

Battling the Zombie Web Site Armies

January 26, 2011
27 Comments

Peter Bennett first suspected his own Web site might have been turned into a spam-spewing zombie on Nov. 11, the night he discovered that a tiny program secretly uploaded to his site was forcing it to belch ads for rogue Internet pharmacies.

Bennett’s site had been silently “infected” via an unknown (at the time) vulnerability in a popular e-commerce software package. While most site owners probably would have just cleaned up the mess and moved on, Bennett — a longtime anti-spam vigilante — took the attack as a personal challenge.