At the end of last week, Google slipped out a blog post that probably went under the radars of some folks. In it, they revealed that they had mitigated against the largest known distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, when its infrastructure blocked a whopping 2.5 Tbps (Terabits per second) attack.
Graham Cluley
Enlarge (credit: US Justice Department)
Six men accused of carrying out some of the world’s most destructive hacks—including the NotPetya disk wiper and power grid attacks that knocked out electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians—have been indicted in US federal court.
The indictment said that all six men are officers in a brazen hacker group best known as Sandworm, which works on behalf of Unit 74455 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate, abbreviated from Russian as GRU. The officers are behind the “most disruptive and destructive series of computer attacks ever attributed to a single group,” prosecutors said. The alleged goal: to destabilize foreign nations, interfere with their internal politics, and cause monetary losses.
Among the hacks is NotPetya, the 2017 disk-wiping worm that shut down the operations of thousands of companies and government agencies around the world. Disguised as ransomware, NotPetya was in fact malware that permanently destroyed petabytes of data. The result, among other things, was hospitals that turned away patients, shipping companies that were paralyzed for days or weeks, and transportation infrastructure that failed to function.
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One of the highest-impact Windows vulnerabilities patched this year is now under active exploitation by malicious hackers, Microsoft warned overnight, in a development that puts increasing pressure on laggards to update now.
CVE-2020-1472, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows hackers to instantly take control of the Active Directory, a Windows server resource that acts as an all-powerful gatekeeper for all machines connected to a network. Researchers have dubbed the vulnerability Zerologon, because it allows attackers with only minimal access to a vulnerable network to login to the Active Directory by sending a string of zeros in messages that use the Netlogon protocol.
Zerologon carries a critical severity rating from Microsoft as well as a maximum of 10 under the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. Despite the high rating, the escalation-of-privileges vulnerability received scant, if any, attention when Microsoft patched it in August, and Microsoft deemed the chances of actual exploitation “less likely.”
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Cyber Warfare Market Ongoing Trend with Most Demanding Players as Airbus, BAE System, DXC, General Dynamic, IBM, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Proofpoint, Raytheon, Zscaler The Daily Chronicle
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