[ISN] Techwatch weathers DDoS extortion attack

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 00:04:27 -0600 (CST)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/30/techwatch_ddos/

By John Leyden 
The Register
30th January 2009

Techwatch is back online following a sustained denial of service attack 
that left the digital TV news site unavailable for two days earlier this 
week.

The botnet-powered assault was accompanied by blackmail demands posted 
on the site's forum through compromised zombie machines. These 
threatening messages claimed the site was being carpetbombed with 
spurious traffic generated through a 9,000 strong botnet of compromised 
machines.

Techwatch was able to restore the site to normal after applying advanced 
traffic filters.

Brian Turner, Executive editor of Techwatch, told El Reg that the 
assault is evidence that denial of service extortion attacks are a 
problem not just for traditional targets such as bookmakers but for 
mainstream web businesses.

Techwatch was hit by a 446Mbps distributed denial of service attack on 
Tuesday, 27 January which rose to 2Gbps on Wednesday. The deluge of 
spurious (SYNflood) requests left the site unable to cope with genuine 
visitors.

[...]


_______________________________________________      
Best Selling Security Books &amp; More!
http://www.shopinfosecnews.org/
Received on Sun Feb 01 2009 - 22:04:27 PST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Sun Feb 01 2009 - 22:14:11 PST