Tag Archives: DDOS

Computers

Largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, 'throttles' trading to tame price swings

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The largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, is in a continuing battle with miscreants trying to manipulate the price of the virtual currency.

Early Monday, Mt. Gox wrote on its Facebook page that it was once again struggling with a very large distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. The exchange said earlier this month it has been hit by attacks upwards of 80Gbps, which it believed were intended to swing bitcoin’s price.

The virtual currency can be bought on exchanges around the world. But Mt. Gox’s market tends to set the price of bitcoin since it is has the highest volume of trades and users. Confidence in the bitcoin market is somewhat dependant on Mt. Gox’s ability to keep its exchange running smoothly.

Mt. Gox, based in Tokyo, said it was working hard to mitigate the attack and said it is close to implementing better defenses. The company already uses a Florida-based security firm called Prolexic that specializes in mitigating DDOS attacks.

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From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2036060/largest-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-throttles-trading-to-tame-price-swings.html#tk.rss_all

Computers

DDOS attacks have increased in number and size this year, report says

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The volume, duration and frequency of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks used to flood websites and other systems with junk traffic have significantly increased during the first three months of this year, according to a report released Wednesday by Florida-based DDOS mitigation provider Prolexic.

The average attack bandwidth seen by Prolexic during the first quarter of 2013 was of 48.25 Gbps, an eightfold increase over the last quarter of 2012, when attack bandwidth averaged at 5.9Gbps.

The size of a high-profile attack last month against a spam-fighting organization called Spamhaus that was reported to have peaked at over 300Gbps, making it the largest in history, was grossly overestimated, Prolexic said in its report. However, Prolexic did mitigate a 130Gbps attack in March, it said.

About 25 percent of attacks against Prolexic’s customers during the first three months of 2013 were modest and had an average bandwidth of under 1Gbps. However, 11 percent had an average bandwidth of more than 60Gbps, suggesting that attackers are becoming more organized and better equipped to launch large-scale attacks, the company said.

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From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2035407/ddos-attacks-have-increased-in-number-and-size-this-year-report-says.html#tk.rss_all

Computers

CloudFlare comes back online after weekend router crash

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CloudFlare’s Juniper routers choked on a slight programming change designed to deflect a distributed denial-of-service attack, knocking the company’s services off the Internet for about an hour early Sunday morning.

The San Francisco-based company provides a service that speeds up the delivery of web pages and reduces bandwidth. It also provides a suite of security tools that helps website owners identify and filter malicious traffic.

CEO Matthew Prince wrote that a bug in its routers caused its services to effectively drop off the Internet around 1:47 a.m. PST on Sunday. The routers had been modified with a new rule, or a type of filter, intended to deflect a DDOS attack underway against one of its customers.

CloudFlare saw that the attack used data packets that appeared to be between 99,971 and 99,985 bytes, far larger than the 500- to 600-byte average. The company’s engineers wrote a rule for the routers to drop the extra large packets, which was then distributed to the routers using the Flowspec protocol, Prince wrote.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld