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posted by janrinok on Monday September 12 2016, @04:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the black-hats-white-hats dept.

After Brian Krebs exposed a DDoS-for-hire service disguised as "stress testing", a denial-of-service attack was launched against his website. Now, the two alleged operators of the service have been arrested:

Krebs describes vDos as a DDoS-for-Hire service that offered paid accounts to users who wanted to launch DDoS attacks on their targets or developers who planned to build DDoS services (stressers) of their own. The investigator provided the vDos database to Krebs, who discovered that, in the last two years, vDos customers launched over 150,000 DDoS attacks that totaled more than 277 million seconds of attack time. The database also contained payment records. Krebs discovered that the site's two operators made $618,000 only in the last two years, based on financial records dating back to 2014. vDos launched in 2012, so it might be accurate to say that its creators have made over $1 million since its creation.

The investigator also told Krebs that vDos was hosted on servers in Bulgaria, but its two creators were from Israel, as revealed by support tickets. The site's two creators had banned the ability to launch DDoS attacks against Israeli IPs so that it would not cause problems with local authorities.

[...] Soon after the article went live and users started sharing it on social media, Reddit, Slashdot, and HackerNews, a DDoS attack hit Krebs' website. According to Krebs, the attack was initially small, only 20 Gbps, but more than enough to bring down his website. In reality, 1 Gbps is more than enough to bring down most web servers. This initial attack later turned into a 128 Gbps attack. [...] UPDATE: Minutes after publishing this story, reports came in that Israeli law enforcement arrested the two alleged vDos owners named in the Krebs report.

Also at The Register, which notes that the two men authored a paper about DDoS attacks signed with their real names, and that one of them had previously claimed to have attacked the Pentagon.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @05:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @05:38PM (#400832)

    I hope nobody takes your post seriously. The lack of punctuation, capitalization, and proper grammar probably puts off most, but there are a few starry-eyed youngsters who can look past that and I want them to understand that your characterization of cyber-war is so incomplete, inadequate, and flatly wrong that I can only assume you are deliberately trying to dumb down the public discourse over these issues at the behest of what is probably an underground criminal or communist detachment of cyber warriors, possibly under the influence of government-supplied psychedelic compounds.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by aristarchus on Monday September 12 2016, @07:53PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday September 12 2016, @07:53PM (#400899) Journal

    Not to mention all the run-on sentences. I said, don't mention them!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:02PM (#401328)

    there's no "cyber war".
    if it would start, the internet would wink out in 2 seconds.
    like i said, the internet is super complex, fickle and is build on trust. it is not suitable for war waging.
    if you want to use "cyber" with something, you can use it as "cyber vandalism", "cyber extortion" or "cyber brainwashing".

    "cyber war" was "invented" by american military to get MEOR access (and funds?) and using the word "war" made it really really scary (circa ~1996).

    for example, the internet depends on stable, constant electricity supply and well behaved backhoes and ship anchors.
    having everything "concentrated" in server-farm ware houses doesn't really bode well for all the airplanes on
    pearl harbour bunched together to make sabotage easier to spot and then you tomahawk-rocket the nearest electricity distribution yard or
    some central baghdad electricity power plant and the poor country still hasn't fully recovered from the well-destroyed power-grid.

    see you next hurricane, internet! cheers!

    the term "cyber war" is so bad i don't want even use correct English to tell you have stupid it is but it makes a nice fractal:
    stupid english to describe a stupid term ^_^