The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming efficiency in various sectors like healthcare and logistics but has also introduced new security risks, particularly IoT-driven DDoS attacks. This article explores how these attacks work, why they’re uniquely problematic, and how to mitigate them.
What Is IoT?
IoT (Internet of Things) refers to online, interconnected devices that collect and exchange
A sophisticated phishing campaign is using a Microsoft Word document lure to distribute a trifecta of threats, namely Agent Tesla, OriginBotnet, and RedLine Clipper, to gather a wide range of information from compromised Windows machines.
"A phishing email delivers the Word document as an attachment, presenting a deliberately blurred image and a counterfeit reCAPTCHA to lure the recipient into
A Mirai botnet variant called Pandora has been observed infiltrating inexpensive Android-based TV sets and TV boxes and using them as part of a botnet to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Doctor Web said the compromises are likely to occur either during malicious firmware updates or when applications for viewing pirated video content are installed.
"It is likely that this
Thousands of Openfire XMPP servers are unpatched against a recently disclosed high-severity flaw and are susceptible to a new exploit, according to a new report from VulnCheck.
Tracked as CVE-2023-32315 (CVSS score: 7.5), the vulnerability relates to a path traversal vulnerability in Openfire's administrative console that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to access otherwise restricted
Vulnerable Redis services have been targeted by a "new, improved, dangerous" variant of a malware called SkidMap that's engineered to target a wide range of Linux distributions.
"The malicious nature of this malware is to adapt to the system on which it is executed," Trustwave security researcher Radoslaw Zdonczyk said in an analysis published last week.
Some of the Linux distribution SkidMap
The P2PInfect peer-to-peer (P2) worm has been observed employing previously undocumented initial access methods to breach susceptible Redis servers and rope them into a botnet.
"The malware compromises exposed instances of the Redis data store by exploiting the replication feature," Cado Security researchers Nate Bill and Matt Muir said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
"A common attack
More details have emerged about a botnet called AVRecon, which has been observed making use of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) routers as part of a multi-year campaign active since at least May 2021.
AVRecon was first disclosed by Lumen Black Lotus Labs earlier this month as malware capable of executing additional commands and stealing victim's bandwidth for what appears to be an
Misconfigured and poorly secured Apache Tomcat servers are being targeted as part of a new campaign designed to deliver the Mirai botnet malware and cryptocurrency miners.
The findings come courtesy of Aqua, which detected more than 800 attacks against its Tomcat server honeypots over a two-year time period, with 96% of the attacks linked to the Mirai botnet.
Of these attack attempts, 20% (or
Several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnets have been observed exploiting a critical flaw in Zyxel devices that came to light in April 2023 to gain remote control of vulnerable systems.
"Through the capture of exploit traffic, the attacker's IP address was identified, and it was determined that the attacks were occurring in multiple regions, including Central America, North America,
As many as 196 hosts have been infected as part of an aggressive cloud campaign mounted by the TeamTNT group called Silentbob.
"The botnet run by TeamTNT has set its sights on Docker and Kubernetes environments, Redis servers, Postgres databases, Hadoop clusters, Tomcat and Nginx servers, Weave Scope, SSH, and Jupyter applications," Aqua security researchers Ofek Itach and Assaf Morag said in a
The threat actors behind the DDoSia attack tool have come up with a new version that incorporates a new mechanism to retrieve the list of targets to be bombarded with junk HTTP requests in an attempt to bring them down.
The updated variant, written in Golang, "implements an additional security mechanism to conceal the list of targets, which is transmitted from the [command-and-control] to the
A new malware called Condi has been observed exploiting a security vulnerability in TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) Wi-Fi routers to rope the devices into a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet.
Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said the campaign has ramped up since the end of May 2023. Condi is the work of a threat actor who goes by the online alias zxcr9999 on Telegram and runs a Telegram channel
Vietnamese public companies have been targeted as part of an ongoing campaign that deploys a novel backdoor called SPECTRALVIPER.
"SPECTRALVIPER is a heavily obfuscated, previously undisclosed, x64 backdoor that brings PE loading and injection, file upload and download, file and directory manipulation, and token impersonation capabilities," Elastic Security Labs said in a Friday report.
The
Spanish-speaking users in Latin America have been at the receiving end of a new botnet malware dubbed Horabot since at least November 2020.
"Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim's Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts' email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim's mailbox," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad
A nascent botnet called Andoryu has been found to exploit a now-patched critical security flaw in the Ruckus Wireless Admin panel to break into vulnerable devices.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-25717 (CVSS score: 9.8), stems from improper handling of HTTP requests, leading to unauthenticated remote code execution and a complete compromise of wireless Access Point (AP) equipment.
Andoryu was
A Vietnamese threat actor has been attributed as behind a "malverposting" campaign on social media platforms to infect over 500,000 devices worldwide over the past three months to deliver variants of information stealers such as S1deload Stealer and SYS01stealer.
Malverposting refers to the use of promoted social media posts on services like Facebook and Twitter to mass propagate malicious
Google on Wednesday said it obtained a temporary court order in the U.S. to disrupt the distribution of a Windows-based information-stealing malware called CryptBot and "decelerate" its growth.
The tech giant's Mike Trinh and Pierre-Marc Bureau said the efforts are part of steps it takes to "not only hold criminal operators of malware accountable, but also those who profit from its distribution.
Microsoft has confirmed that the active exploitation of PaperCut servers is linked to attacks that are designed to deliver Cl0p and LockBit ransomware families.
The tech giant's threat intelligence team is attributing a subset of the intrusions to a financially motivated actor it tracks under the name Lace Tempest (formerly DEV-0950), which overlaps with other hacking groups like FIN11, TA505,
A novel credential-stealing malware called Zaraza bot is being offered for sale on Telegram while also using the popular messaging service as a command-and-control (C2).
"Zaraza bot targets a large number of web browsers and is being actively distributed on a Russian Telegram hacker channel popular with threat actors," cybersecurity company Uptycs said in a report published last week.
"Once the
Critical security flaws in Cacti, Realtek, and IBM Aspera Faspex are being exploited by various threat actors in hacks targeting unpatched systems.
This entails the abuse of CVE-2022-46169 (CVSS score: 9.8) and CVE-2021-35394 (CVSS score: 9.8) to deliver MooBot and ShellBot (aka PerlBot), Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a report published this week.
CVE-2022-46169 relates to a critical
The emergence of smart mobility services and applications has led to a sharp increase in the use of APIs in the automotive industry. However, this increased reliance on APIs has also made them one of the most common attack vectors. According to Gartner, APIs account for 90% of the web application attack surface areas.
With no surprise, similar trends are emerging also in the smart mobility
A new Golang-based botnet dubbed HinataBot has been observed to leverage known flaws to compromise routers and servers and use them to stage distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
"The malware binaries appear to have been named by the malware author after a character from the popular anime series, Naruto, with file name structures such as 'Hinata-<OS>-<Architecture>,'" Akamai said in a
The cryptojacking group known as TeamTNT is suspected to be behind a previously undiscovered strain of malware used to mine Monero cryptocurrency on compromised systems.
That's according to Cado Security, which found the sample after Sysdig detailed a sophisticated attack known as SCARLETEEL aimed at containerized environments to ultimately steal proprietary data and software.
Specifically, the
A new Golang-based malware dubbed GoBruteforcer has been found targeting web servers running phpMyAdmin, MySQL, FTP, and Postgres to corral the devices into a botnet.
"GoBruteforcer chose a Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block for scanning the network during the attack, and it targeted all IP addresses within that CIDR range," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers said.
"The threat actor
An updated version of a botnet malware called Prometei has infected more than 10,000 systems worldwide since November 2022.
The infections are both geographically indiscriminate and opportunistic, with a majority of the victims reported in Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey.
Prometei, first observed in 2016, is a modular botnet that features a large repertoire of components and several proliferation
As threats grow and attack surfaces get more complex, companies continue to struggle with the multitude of tools they utilize to handle endpoint security and management. This can leave gaps in an enterprise's ability to identify devices that are accessing the network and in ensuring that those devices are compliant with security policies. These gaps are often seen in outdated spreadsheets that
A sophisticated botnet known as MyloBot has compromised thousands of systems, with most of them located in India, the U.S., Indonesia, and Iran.
That's according to new findings from BitSight, which said it's "currently seeing more than 50,000 unique infected systems every day," down from a high of 250,000 unique hosts in 2020.
Furthermore, an analysis of MyloBot's infrastructure has found
A new variant of the notorious Mirai botnet has been found leveraging several security vulnerabilities to propagate itself to Linux and IoT devices.
Observed during the second half of 2022, the new version has been dubbed V3G4 by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which identified three different campaigns likely conducted by the same threat actor.
"Once the vulnerable devices are compromised, they
At least 1,200 Redis database servers worldwide have been corralled into a botnet using an "elusive and severe threat" dubbed HeadCrab since early September 2021.
"This advanced threat actor utilizes a state-of-the-art, custom-made malware that is undetectable by agentless and traditional anti-virus solutions to compromise a large number of Redis servers," Aqua security researcher Asaf Eitani
The Zerobot DDoS botnet has received substantial updates that expand on its ability to target more internet-connected devices and scale its network.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is tracking the ongoing threat under the moniker DEV-1061, its designation for unknown, emerging, or developing activity clusters.
Zerobot, first documented by Fortinet FortiGuard Labs earlier this month,
An ongoing analysis of the KmsdBot botnet has raised the possibility that it's a DDoS-for-hire service offered to other threat actors.
This is based on the different industries and geographies that were attacked, web infrastructure company Akamai said. Among the notable targets included FiveM and RedM, which are game modifications for Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, as well as
Epic Games has reached a $520 million settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations that the Fortnite creator violated online privacy laws for children and tricked users into making unintended purchases in the video game.
To that end, the company will pay a record $275 million monetary penalty for breaching the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by
The operators of the Glupteba botnet resurfaced in June 2022 as part of a renewed and "upscaled" campaign, months after Google disrupted the malicious activity.
The ongoing attack is suggestive of the malware's resilience in the face of takedowns, cybersecurity company Nozomi Networks said in a write-up. "In addition, there was a tenfold increase in TOR hidden services being used as C2 servers
A novel Go-based botnet called Zerobot has been observed in the wild proliferating by taking advantage of nearly two dozen security vulnerabilities in the internet of things (IoT) devices and other software.
The botnet "contains several modules, including self-replication, attacks for different protocols, and self-propagation," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said. "It also
A previously undocumented Go-based malware is targeting Redis servers with the goal of taking control of the infected systems and likely building a botnet network.
The attacks involve taking advantage of a critical security vulnerability in the open source, in-memory, key-value store that was disclosed earlier this year to deploy Redigo, according to cloud security firm Aqua.
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An ongoing analysis into an up-and-coming cryptocurrency mining botnet known as KmsdBot has led to it being accidentally taken down.
KmsdBot, as christened by the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT), came to light mid-November 2022 for its ability to brute-force systems with weak SSH credentials.
The botnet strikes both Windows and Linux devices spanning a wide range of
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a critical flaw impacting Oracle Fusion Middleware to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-35587, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and impacts Oracle Access Manager (OAM) versions 11.1.2.3.0, 12.2.1.3.0, and 12.2.1.4.0.
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For 6 months, the infamous Emotet botnet has shown almost no activity, and now it's distributing malicious spam. Let's dive into details and discuss all you need to know about the notorious malware to combat it.
Why is everyone scared of Emotet?
Emotet is by far one of the most dangerous trojans ever created. The malware became a very destructive program as it grew in scale and sophistication.
Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed the intrusion activity aimed at Indian power grid entities earlier this year likely involved the exploitation of security flaws in a now-discontinued web server called Boa.
The tech behemoth's cybersecurity division said the vulnerable component poses a "supply chain risk that may affect millions of organizations and devices."
The findings build on a prior report
Google has won a lawsuit filed against two Russian nationals in connection with the operation of a botnet called Glupteba, the company said last week.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York imposed monetary sanctions against the defendants and their U.S.-based legal counsel. The defendants have also been asked to pay Google's attorney fees. The defendants' move to press
Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed new samples of malware called RapperBot that are being used to build a botnet capable of launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against game servers.
"In fact, it turns out that this campaign is less like RapperBot than an older campaign that appeared in February and then mysteriously disappeared in the middle of April," Fortinet
The threat actor behind the Fodcha distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet has resurfaced with new capabilities, researchers reveal.
This includes changes to its communication protocol and the ability to extort cryptocurrency payments in exchange for stopping the DDoS attack against a target, Qihoo 360's Network Security Research Lab said in a report published last week.
Fodcha first came to
The notorious Emotet botnet has been linked to a new wave of malspam campaigns that take advantage of password-protected archive files to drop CoinMiner and Quasar RAT on compromised systems.
In an attack chain detected by Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers, an invoice-themed ZIP file lure was found to contain a nested self-extracting (SFX) archive, the first archive acting as a conduit to launch
Web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare disclosed this week that it halted a 2.5 Tbps distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched by a Mirai botnet.
Characterizing it as a "multi-vector attack consisting of UDP and TCP floods," researcher Omer Yoachimik said the DDoS attack targeted the Minecraft server Wynncraft in Q3 2022.
"The entire 2.5 Tbps attack lasted about 2 minutes,
A variant of the Mirai botnet known as MooBot is co-opting vulnerable D-Link devices into an army of denial-of-service bots by taking advantage of multiple exploits.
"If the devices are compromised, they will be fully controlled by attackers, who could utilize those devices to conduct further attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a
A new botnet named Orchard has been observed using Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's account transaction information to generate domain names to conceal its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.
"Because of the uncertainty of Bitcoin transactions, this technique is more unpredictable than using the common time-generated [domain generation algorithms], and thus more difficult to defend
A new IoT botnet malware dubbed RapperBot has been observed rapidly evolving its capabilities since it was first discovered in mid-June 2022.
"This family borrows heavily from the original Mirai source code, but what separates it from other IoT malware families is its built-in capability to brute force credentials and gain access to SSH servers instead of Telnet as implemented in Mirai,"
A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems.
"It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems," Cisco Talos said in a report shared
The botnet behind the largest HTTPS distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June 2022 has been linked to a spate of attacks aimed at nearly 1,000 Cloudflare customers.
Calling the powerful botnet Mantis, the web performance and security company attributed it to more than 3,000 HTTP DDoS attacks against its users.
The most attacked industry verticals include internet and telecom, media,
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