Being a global multinational sure is hard! Yesterday, World of Warcraft maker Blizzard faced global criticism after it disqualified a high-stakes tournament winner over his statement of solidarity with the Hong Kong protests -- Blizzard depends on mainland China for a massive share of its revenue and it can't afford to offend the Chinese state. Read the rest

Zoom is an incredibly popular videoconferencing tool. In late March, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh notified the company that its Mac software contained a ghastly vulnerability that allowed attackers to take over your camera after tricking you into clicking a malicious link. Leitschuh gave Zoom 90 days to fix the bug before going public (a common courtesy extended by security researchers when they discover dangerous bugs) then watched in dismay as the company slow-walked a response, so that when the deadline rolled around, the vulnerability was still in place. Read the rest

To launch an effective Denial of Service attack, your bots need to overwhelm your target with a flood of requests; the more bandwidth and computing-power your target has, the more you need to knock them off the internet. Read the rest

A group of Princeton and Purdue researchers have demonstrated a successful acoustic attack against mechanical hard-drives where low-frequency noise keyed to the resonant frequency of the drive components is played nearby, causing the drive to vibrate so that the drive can neither be read nor written to. Read the rest

Last year, the Mirai botnet harnessed a legion of badly secured internet of things devices and turned them into a denial of service superweapon that brought down critical pieces of internet infrastructure (and even a country), and now its creators have entered guilty pleas to a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act federal case, and explained that they created the whole thing to knock down Minecraft servers that competed with their nascent Minecraft hosting business. Read the rest

In 2016, an Internet of Things worm called Mirai tore through the internet, building botnets of millions of badly designed CCTVs, PVRs, routers and other gadgets, sending unstoppable floods of traffic that took down major internet services from Paypal to Reddit to Dyn. Read the rest

Whoever created the Wcry ransomware worm -- which uses a leaked NSA cyberweapon to spread like wildfire -- included a killswitch: newly infected systems check to see if a non-existent domain is active, and if it is, they fall dormant, ceasing their relentless propagation. Read the rest

Persirai is a new strain of Internet of Things malware that infects more than 1,250 models of security camera, all manufactured by an unnamed Chinese manufacturer that has sold at least 185,000 units worldwide. Read the rest

DBO writes, "A new report by Deflect Labs tracks the complex ways that hackers have sought to take down the Black Lives Matter website. The attacks, which relied on harvesting WordPress sites, increased in sophistication and left a murky, unsavory trail by actors who did everything from try to extort the website to taking it down entirely." Read the rest

The unprecedented denial-of-service attacks powered by the Mirai Internet of Things worm have harnessed crappy, no-name CCTVs, PVRs, and routers to launch unstoppable floods of internet noise, but it's not just faceless Chinese businesses that crank out containerloads of vulnerable, defective-by-design gear -- it's also name brands like Sony. Read the rest

When the heat goes out during Finnish winter, it's a matter of life and death, so when two automated buildings controlled by Valtia systems suffered DDoS attacks that shut off the heat, Finns were understandably alarmed about the new threat. Read the rest

The Mirai worm -- first seen attacking security journalist Brian Krebs with 620gbps floods, then taking down Level 3, Dyn and other hardened, well-provisioned internet giants, then spreading to every developed nation on Earth (and being used to take down some of those less-developed nations) despite being revealed as clumsy and amateurish (a situation remedied shortly after by hybridizing it with another IoT worm) -- is now bigger than ever, and you can rent time on it to punish journalists, knock countries offline, or take down chunks of the core internet. Read the rest

A DDoS attack that incidentally affected the internet connections for at least two housing blocks in Lappeenranta, Finland caused their heating systems to shut down, leaving their residents without heat in subzero weather. Read the rest

The various Mirai botnets, which use "clumsy, amateurish code to take over even more clumsy and amateurish CCTVs, routers, PVRs and other Internet of Things devices, have been responsible for some eye-popping attacks this season: first there was the 620Gbps attack on journalist Brian Krebs (in retaliation for his coverage of a couple of petty Israeli crooks); then there was the infrastructure attack that took out Level 3, Netflix, Twitter, Dyn, and many more of the internet's best-defended services. Read the rest

Some of the internet's most popular, well-defended services -- including Twitter -- were knocked offline yesterday by a massive denial-of-service attack that security experts are blaming on botnets made from thousands of hacked embedded systems in Internet of Things devices like home security cameras and video recorders. Read the rest

Much of the web struggled to stay on its feet today, with outages bringing down U.S.-based services and sites such as Amazon, Twitter and Netflix. A massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Dyn DNS is reportedly the cause: as a popular provider of domain-name lookup services, it falling over means that browsers simply don't know where to find websites.

Monitoring: Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC. Posted about 1 hour ago. Oct 21, 2016 - 13:36 UTC

Update : This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue. Posted about 2 hours ago. Oct 21, 2016 - 12:45 UTC

Investigating: Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.

This is "probably why half the internet is shut down today," reports Gizmodo, which offers the following list of sites that were down for the count.

ActBlue, Basecamp, Big cartel, Box, Business Insider, CNN, Cleveland.com, Esty, Github, Grubhub, Guardian.co.uk, HBO Now, Iheart.com (iHeartRadio), Imgur, Intercom, Intercom.com, Okta, PayPal, People.com, Pinterest, Playstation Network, Recode, Reddit, Spotify, Squarespace Customer Sites, Starbucks rewards/gift cards, Storify.com, The Verge, Twillo, Twitter, Urbandictionary.com (lol), Weebly, Wired.com, Wix Customer Sites, Yammer, Yelp, Zendesk.com, Zoho CRM,

Update: The Amazon AWS status page is a useful bookmark, as the service backends many websites and services. Read the rest

Mirai, the clumsily written Internet of Things virus that harnessed so many devices in an attack on journalist Brian Krebs that it overloaded Akamai, has now spread to devices in either 164 or 177 countries -- that is, pretty much everywhere with reliable electricity and internet access.

Imperva, a company that provides protection to websites against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, is among the ones who have been busy investigating Mirai. According to their tally, the botnet made of Mirai-infected devices has reached a total of 164 countries. A pseudonymous researcher that goes by the name MalwareTech has also been mapping Mirai, and according to his tally, the total is even higher, at 177 countries.

Internet of Things Malware Has Apparently Reached Almost All Countries on Earth [Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/Motherboard] Read the rest