Tag Archive for: vigilante

Russian vigilante hacker: 'I want to help beat Ukraine from my computer'



But the BBC has learned that at least some of the cyber-attacks that afternoon and since have come not from the Kremlin but from groups of so called “patriotic” Russian hackers. They work in small …

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Vigilante or bug hunter?

Vigilante or bug hunter?

A website is taken down after a vulnerability researcher discovers a way to extract customers’ personal details.

The media, however, describe him as a “vigilante”. And the website’s owner say it’s a “false alarm.”

Graham Cluley

A vigilante is putting a huge amount of work into infecting IoT devices

Enlarge (credit: Gammew)

Last week, Ars introduced readers to Hajime, the vigilante botnet that infects IoT devices before blackhats can hijack them. A technical analysis published Wednesday reveals for the first time just how much technical acumen went into designing and building the renegade network, which just may be the Internet’s most advanced IoT botnet.

As previously reported, Hajime uses the same list of user name and password combinations used by Mirai, the IoT botnet that spawned several, record-setting denial-of-service attacks last year. Once Hajime infects an Internet-connected camera, DVR, and other Internet-of-things device, the malware blocks access to four ports known to be the most widely used vectors for infecting IoT devices. It also displays a cryptographically signed message on infected device terminals that describes its creator as “just a white hat, securing some systems.”

Not your father’s IoT botnet

But unlike the bare-bones functionality found in Mirai, Hajime is a full-featured package that gives the botnet reliability, stealth, and reliance that’s largely unparalleled in the IoT landscape. Wednesday’s technical analysis, which was written by Pascal Geenens, a researcher at security firm Radware, makes clear that the unknown person or people behind Hajime invested plenty of time and talent.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica

Spanish police swoop on vigilante hackers – YAHOO!

In these attacks, web servers crash under the sheer volume of connections made by “zombie” computers worldwide that have been infected with a virus and enslaved to carry out the hackers’ commands. The cell is also accused of attacking Spain’s central …
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