How common are crippling denial of service attacks aimed at Western banks? Here’s one sign: Wednesday is unofficially “DDoS day” at Citi, according to a Senior Vice President for Information Security at the financial services powerhouse. Speaking on Wednesday at an event hosted by Perdue University, Mamani Older told an audience at CERIAS 2013 that massive distributed denial of service – or DDoS – attacks have become “business as usual” for Citi, and that those launching the attacks have fallen into a predictable schedule of attacks. Hump day, she said, is Citi’s turn to fend off a torrent of Internet traffic designed to interrupt the bank’s operations and sever its connections to its customers, she said. “We should be getting hit right now,” she said. Older was speaking on a panel on the topic of “security metrics” and “security analysis.” The panel was part of CERIAS 13, an annual information security symposium […]
Tag: denial of service
Home Invasion: Home Routers May Be The Next Big Hack
Most of us have broadband at home. It’s always there. It works and, for the most part, we don’t think about it until it goes down. Our amnesia extends to the humble home gateway or broadband router that is our connection to the global Internet. That piece of CPE (or customer-premises equipment) probably sits on our desk, or down in our basement gathering dust. Strong password? Meh. Firmware update? Hey, ‘if it ain’t broke…don’t fix it!” But all those small, insecure devices could add up to a major security crisis for users and their Internet Service Provider (ISP), according to researchers at the firm IOActive. Writing on the IOActive blog, researchers Ehab Hussein (@_obzy_) and Sofiane Taimat (@_sud0) say that millions of vulnerable home routers and gateways are vulnerable to trivial attacks. Those devices could be harnessed by cyber criminal groups, state-backed actors or hacktivists for malware distribution, spam or […]