Tag: DENIALOFSERVICE

The hacktivists at Anonymous have lately set their sights on Sony. The collective's latest action is in response to the company's lawsuit against hacker George Holtz, also known as GeoHot. Holtz previously published the code necessary to jailbreak the PS3, enabling users to run homebrew software on their consoles. The group's ongoing denial of service attack has taken down Playstation.com for ...

At the moment, Visa.com is down. Earlier today, a group of 4chan hackers known as Anonymous crippled MasterCard's website with a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, claiming that it had done so to punish MasterCard for its refusal to transmit funds to controversial website WikiLeaks. As the group promised earlier today via Twitter, Anonymous has now successfully taken down Visa.com. ...

Share Last November, Florida dentist Robert Thousand, Jr. was the victim of a denial-of-service attack where crooks initiated transfers totaling $399,000 from Thousand's Ameritrade retirement account. When Ameritrade attempted to call Thousand to confirm the transfer requests, Wired reports, the thief (or thieves) used several VoIP accounts and automated dialing software to tie up Thousand's ...

It used to be that distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks were strictly the realm of digital gangsters and elite hacker crooks. But, as part of a worrying trend, a growing number of political and activist groups have begun to employ such tactics as a form of protest. What's more, these hacktivists, as they're called, are developing new techniques for taking out servers and defacing Web sites ...

With old-fashioned, barbaric crusades having gone the way of the Pet Rock, it seems people have started to take their religious beefs from the war-grounds to the Web. The most recent cyber-attack, though, might be the most confusing yet. As the Huffington Post reports, Dmitriy Guzner, a 19-year-old from New Jersey, has been sentenced to a 366-day term in federal prison for participating in a ...

Months before the Global Atheists Convention is held in Melbourne this March, a couple of major atheist Web sites have been forced to shut down due to coordinated, denial-of-service attacks. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) and the Global Atheist Convention both had their sites paralyzed by the attack, which overloaded both sites with traffic. At ...

Last week's Twitter outage really put a damper on our traditional work routine, which involves wasting copious amounts of time sending and receiving 140-character morsels of information and pseudo-human contact. Some of us took the opportunity to rediscover the joys of being a productive member of society, while others, like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, just decided to continuously update ...

Oh that Conficker virus, it just won't go away. Despite its authors having a bounty placed on their heads by Microsoft, the thing is still spreading, updating itself, and becoming even more prevalent. That spells bad news for Southwest Airlines, discovered Mike Wood, a security expert at SophosLabs. In a recent SophosLabs corporate blog post, he explained that millions of computers infected ...

Cyber criminals have proven again and again that they're a step or two ahead of the law enforcement and computer techs that are trying to stop them, but a new report says criminals aren't restraining themselves to viruses and shady emails. The survey shows that distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks are increasing in number and potency and could threaten the largest Web sites and ...

Well, it looks like the war is on. The Church of Scientology's attempts to squash circulation of a video of Tom Cruise last week seem to have been the final straw for a group that calls itself "Anonymous." According to a recent report in Wired, the cryptically-named organization recently stated that its main goal is to destroy the leadership of the Church of Scientology. The first public salvo ...