Free Republic

As many of you know, my site was taken offline for the better part of this week. The outage came in the wake of a historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which hurled so much junk traffic at Krebsonsecurity.com that my DDoS protection provider Akamai chose to unmoor my site from its protective harbor. ... Today, I am happy to report that the site is back up — this time under Project Shield, a free program run by Google to help protect journalists from online censorship. And make no mistake, DDoS attacks — particularly those the size of the assault...

The international movement calling for a boycott against Israel on Thursday said its website was repeatedly attacked earlier this year and raised suspicions that Israel was behind the attacks. The BDS movement released a report Thursday showing that its main website suffered six attacks in February and March. The denial of service attacks, which work by flooding a target website with bogus traffic, knocked out the BDS website for several hours at a time. The report, compiled by nonprofit online security service eQualit.ie, said the attacks had a level of “sophistication and commitment” it normally does not see. It also...

LizardSquad copycats are trying to ruin Christmas for gamers Last year, the LizardSquad hacking group managed to ink its name into the history of Internet after taking down the Xbox Live and PlayStation networks during Christmas. With this year's holiday just around the corner, a new group, unoriginally named Phantom Squad, is now threatening to carry out similar attacks as well. If we believe their Twitter timeline, the hackers seem to have launched a DDoS attack against Reddit yesterday, even if nobody noticed its effects. Of course, a behemoth like Reddit is hard to take down in its entirety, but...

The internet's root servers came under a concerted distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last week that effectively knocked three of the 13 critical pillars of the internet offline for several hours. The attack came just days before the Janet academic network received a similar DDoS attack. According to a first analysis of the root server attack, published by the root server operators on Tuesday, the attack occurred on November 30, 2015 between 06:50 and 09:30 UTC and then again the next day for an hour. Many, but not all, of the root servers received roughly five million queries per...

The world’s largest bitcoin exchange OKCoin has suspended some of its services indefinitely, following a malicious cyber attack from unknown hackers. Due to an increasing number of complaints on bitcoin forums and panels including Bitcointalk.org and Bitcoin Reddit, OKCoin, which processes almost 40% of all bitcoin trades, announced to its users: “OKCoin is currently suffering from malicious cyber attacks and as a result, some services may be suspended, Sorry for the inconvenience.”

When I went to post a comment I was redirected to a presumed Firefox warning page that Free Republic was a reported malware/phishing site. The below second warning message indicates that Google's blacklist was invoked. I don't know if this is a malware warning generated on my computer or a real issue that Free Republic should be quickly investigating. I'll post the link here for investigative purposes, DO NOT click on this link. https://www.stopbadware.org/firefox?hl=en-US&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freerepublic.com%2Ffocus%2Fnews%2F3353488%2Fposts ===== Wait! Please don't visit that site right now! Google detected badware on the site you were visiting. Firefox uses Google's blacklist to warn you about...

I mostly browse FreeRepublic on my phone, opening several links at a time as I scroll down the page. I just had 4 pages with this warning. When I clicked on the bottom to ignore the warning, it says that FreeRepublic is a known phishing scam. Looks like someone is spreading a few untruths about us.

What gives?

Millions of children and adults who received the latest video games were prevented from playing them on Chirstmas thanks to a DOS attack on Xbox and PlayStation networks. USA Today: Online game networks Xbox Live and PlayStation Network were knocked offline much of Christmas Day in an apparent DDos (distributed denial of service) attack. Taking credit for the takedown: a group called Lizard Squad, which previously claimed credit for August attacks on the PlayStation Network and online games World of Warcraft and League of Legends. Both networks were still having problems Friday morning. The network status Web page for...

Conservative Websites are being subjected to denial of service attacks and worm virus infection. In particular Freeper Beckwith is fighting this battle right this moment. The left is ginning up to limit free speech of Conservatives, treating them as they would terrorists, using sophisticated software likely provided by the Obama Campaign, with hacker research likely funded by Tax Payer dollars for Community Workers. Whether we win in November depends on our success in protecting our internet speech rights.If anyone has techniques which would protect from these attacks, including encryption or the use of alternate OS such as LINUX, and mirror...

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

Brute bandwidth attacks are disappearing in favour of application-layer incursions, a Canadian ISP conference has been told Be prepared for application layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, a security expert has warned Canadian service providers. Jim Deleskie, (pictured) former director of network security for global service provider Tata Communications, told the Canadian ISP Summit on Monday that hackers are turning away from brute bandwidth attacks by infecting hundreds of PCs. “The bad guys are getting smarter because those are a lot easier to see coming in and defend against,” he said. Instead, increasingly hackers with one PC can generate...

Question: are you folks experiencing that ESPN.com and all its related web sites are current offline (as of 10:23 pm PDT on April 23, 2011)? On my home computer, the system thinks all the ESPN web sites are not accessible, even though I'm using Firefox 4.0 and Chrome 10.0.648.205.

(LEAD) S. Korean Web sites suffer DDoS attack SEOUL, March 4 (Yonhap) -- The Web sites of South Korea's presidential office and other major institutions came under a cyber attack on Friday, but there were no immediate reports of damage, industry sources said. The presidential office Cheong Wa Dae, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and top lender Kookmin Bank were among some 40 institutions whose Web sites were infected by the so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) from 10 a.m., AhnLab Inc. said in a statement. Additional attacks were expected to begin at 6:30 p.m., said AhnLab, South Korea's top...

Is FR under a denial of service attack? I've had a lot of server errors trying to read and/or post an article today...

An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger e-commerce companies--including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia--took several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days before Christmas. Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour. A representative who answered the customer support line said the attacks were directed against Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif., and Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications for Neustar, confirmed that at about 4:45 p.m....

Peter Schiff's campaign website has been repeatedly targeted by cyber attackers, his brother and spokesman said this afternoon. The campaign has notified the FBI. Schiff, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, had planned a "moneybomb'' -- a one-day online fundraising blitz -- for today, but just minutes before midnight, when the moneybomb was set to start, the website went down, his brother, Andrew Schiff, said. "These are coordinated attacks,'' Andrew Schiff said in a brief phone interview. It wasn't the first time the website has been hit, Andrew Schiff said. The campaign had been targeted several times in the past...

Last week, Twitter was vexed by a DDoS attack that took it offline for a few hours. In that case, Russian hackers were suspected. This week's DDoS attack, however, may have different origins -- and they could be related to the attacks that took out a few U.S. and South Korean government sites last Fourth of July, according to AVG's chief of research. The latest attack hit the site in waves. "We're currently experiencing another wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against our system," Alex Payne, platform lead at Twitter, wrote on the service's Web dev blog on...

The distributed denial-of-service attack that hampered access to social networking and blogging sites all went after one pro-Georgia blogger, according to security company reports. According to a post from F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen, the attacks focused on Cyxymu's accounts at Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Livejournal, and also included a "Joe Job" spam campaign that was designed to look as if the unwanted messages had been sent by Cyxymu. McAfee offers a similar analysis with a post that ties the spam campaign to the same botnet that launched the DDoS attack, and says that a cyxymu account at Fotki.com was also targeted....