Showing posts sorted by date for query outage. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query outage. Sort by relevance Show all posts

VOGH Exclusive: Xbox Live Outage Caused For Networking Misconfiguration, Not Hacker Attack

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 4/18/2013 06:08:00 pm

Microsoft Said Xbox Live Outage Caused For Networking Misconfiguration During Routine Maintenance, Not Hacker Attack 

Xbox Live -one of the world's most popular and usually very reliable gaming network which rarely has unexpected outages, nor does Microsoft ever take it down for any extended period of time. But accident occurs, and it happened in last Sunday. The software giant and the developer of Xbox - Microsoft has reported a significant Xbox Live outage, rendering the service unavailable since earlier last 13th afternoon, smack in the middle of the peak weekend usage period. The outage is preventing users from signing in to Xbox Live, blocking access to the online services normally available through the console. While acknowledging the issue, on their official Xbox Live Status page Microsoft said “There is still an issue members are having signing in to Xbox LIVE, we greatly appreciate you sticking it out with us while we work as hard as we can to get this problem fixed. Keep checking back here every 30 minutes for another update on our progress.” This update came from Microsoft at 3:30 Pacific time on 13th of April. As soon as this story get spotted, several hikes rises. Among this buzz, it was a few unnamed hacker who took credit of the Xbox outage, while declaring that a cyber attack. Another buzz which just got spread so quickly, was that the outage of Xbox Live network has been caused by hacker collective Anonymous.  Here we must have to say that those buzz have some solid reasons as couple of months ago Windows Azure faced an organized cyber attack which effected the service of Azure storage, Xbox Live and 52 other. And that outage or in other word service interruption stays for 12 long hours. But unlike earlier, this time the issue get resolved immediately. Within one hour all the service get restored and came back to its normal order. On the same Xbox Live Status page Microsoft said “If you were one of the members who was having issues signing in to Xbox LIVE, good news! This issue has been fixed! Thank you so much for your patience during this time, feel free to go enjoy your favorite games and content!”
So far we have discussed about the story of the outage and it's restoration. Now we will talk about the cause of this interruption. As I have said earlier that the rumor of hacker's attack was there which was claiming responsibility of the Xbox Live outage. But in reality it was not due to cyber attack but some internal network problems. In their official respond of the situation and those buzz Microsoft completely dines all those rumors and said  "The Xbox Live service outage on 13 April resulted from networking misconfiguration during routine maintenance and was in no way related to false claims of hacking the service." 
While talking about Xbox outage, we would like to remind you that - another world famous gaming console 'PlayStation' had fallen victim to cyber attacks. It was Anonymous who hit Sony PSN and caused massive outage, data leak and many other devastating damages. 







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Anonymous & RedHack Breached Israeli Intelligence Agency 'Mossad' Leaked Personal Data of 35K Officials

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 3/30/2013 02:18:00 am

Anonymous & RedHack Breached Israeli Intelligence Agency 'Mossad' Claimed to Have Personal Data of 35K Officials (#OpIsrael)

A week ago infamous hacker collective group Anonymous called for Operation Israel (#OpIsrael) second phase, where they vows to engage massive cyber attack against Israeli cyberspace in order to interrupt all the necessary service, which the hacker called a complete outage. The main phase of attack was planned at 7th April, but now it looks that those hacker collectives changed their strategy, or may be they can't wait till April, and as result anti-Israel hacking collective affiliated with Anonymous managed to breach several Israeli government servers, causing a big data leak of more than 35,000 Israeli government officials, including politicians, military leaders, and police officers. The hack was done under the banner of #OpIsrael, and from the twitter feed of Anonymous, the hacker group took responsibility of the cyber attack. A comprehensive spreadsheet purporting to include the information of all 35,000 Israeli officials was published by the website Cryptome, though it did not independently verify the information. The coalition of hackers appears to have ties to the Iranian government, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and the terror group Hezbollah, according to a report published by Cryptome. 
In our last report on this story we covered that, the attack will be organized as Anon ask other hackers and other underground communities to join the campaign. As expected, it happens; RedHack, a Turkey-based Marxist hacker group responded to Anonymous and they claimed to breach Israeli intelligence agency known as 'Mossad.' RedHack claimed to gain access inside Mossad's server; which lead them release personal information including phone numbers, emails and addresses of Mossad officials. "Yes, we realize we are sailing in dangerous water but we like swimming,” said hackers of RedHack. From a report of RT we came to know that not only data breach but also hackers performed massive denial of service attack against Mossad. In spite of RedHack’s claims, some argue that the names and information do not belong to Mossad officers or informants. 
“Whatever they stole, it probably wasn’t secure details of top Israeli brass, either from the army or the Mossad,” internet researcher Dr. Tal Pavel told the media. “There is no doubt that they got some identification information about Israelis, but the claims that they hacked the Mossad site and got a list of Mossad agents is most likely psychological warfare, and not a hack into an important database,” Pavel added. 
Whether those leaks are not that classified, whether those data does not belongs to Mossad, but one thing is clear and that is in-spite of having precaution, Israel government yet again failed to protect themselves from massive attack which caused a massacre. And from this story it is also predictable that hackers around the globe came under one shade or one unity, in order to target Israel over Gaza issue. As 7th April is still a week away from today so lets wait for the time, and stay tuned with VOGH to get all the latest update on this story and also other cyber issues.







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Hackers Hit Microsoft Windows Azure Causing 12 Hour Outage, Affecting Xbox & 52 Other Services

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/27/2013 08:17:00 pm

Hackers Hit Microsoft Windows Azure Causing 12 Hour Outage, Affecting Xbox & 52 Other Services 

Windows Azure the cloud computing platform of Microsoft for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters  faced an unwanted disaster due to organized cyber attack which interrupted its service world wide. While looking at the scenario the Redmond based software giant sincerely apologize for the interruption and any issues it has caused and declared that they will  refund Windows Azure customers impacted by the said outage last week caused by an expired SSL certificate. The Windows Azure Storage outage affected at least 52 services, including Xbox Live on Thursday night and Friday. 
In a blog post while describing the situation Microsoft said - "HTTP traffic was unaffected but the event impacted a number of Windows Azure services that are dependent on Storage.  We executed the repair steps to update the SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and availability was restored to >99% worldwide by 1:00 AM PST on February 23.  At 8:00 PM PST on February 23, we completed the restoration effort and confirmed full availability worldwide. Given the scope of the outage, we will proactively provide credits to impacted customers in accordance with our SLA. The credit will be reflected on a subsequent invoice.  Our teams are also working hard on a full root cause analysis (RCA), including steps to help prevent any future reoccurrence."






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#OpIsrael: Anonymous Hacked Israeli Defense Force & 40 Other Israeli Sites While Protesting Gaza Attacks

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 11/16/2012 05:16:00 pm

#OpIsrael: Anonymous Hacked Israeli Defense Force & 40 Other Israeli Sites While Protesting Gaza Attacks

So far the world have seen an instance of cruelty and inhumane of Israeli army, where the people of Gaza have been tortured brutally. The peace loving people across the world have already stood against this relentless practice. Earlier we have seen many times, where hackers around the globe protested against this implacable practice of Israeli defense.  But so far it was mainly hacker collective from Pakistan who was mainly fighting for the Gaza cause, dubbed Freedom For Palestine (#OpFreePalestine), yesterday the dangerous & mysterious hacktivist group Anonymous joined the campaign. This Thursday Anonymous released a manifesto, vowing revenge on Israel for an escalating offensive in Gaza. The group's new campaign named Operation Isreal (#OpIsrael) comes after rumors that Israeli forces would shut down telecommunications in Gaza, including the internet. OpIsrael started with a series of attacks where Anonymous went on a spree of website defacement and takedown, while calling their members to flood forty sites with junk web traffic designed to knock them offline and defacing websites including the privacy firm Israeli Security Academy and a blog the group described as belonging to the Israeli Defense Forces. “We Anonymous will not sit back and watch a cowardly Zionist State demolish innocent people’s lives.” reads one message posted to a defaced site, along with an image of smoke rising over what appears to be a Palestinian city. Another message on a hacked site attributes the attack to Pakistani Anonymous hackers: “The people of Pakistan are always supporting the brave people of Gaza, we love you!” 
Here we would like to remind you, that in 2011, members of Anonymous threatened to engage cyber attack against Israel, while protesting the same issue. That time also Israeli Defense Force was shutdown by  Anon. 
Anonymous Twitter accounts provided links to what they described as an Anonymous Gaza Care Package with tools for staying online if Israel cuts Internet service the Gaza Strip during its military action. Another hacker group, Telecomix, provided its own detailed instructions in English and Arabic for using dial-up connections, a technique it first suggested during the Egyptian Internet outage surrounding the Arab Spring protests there last year. 

Operation Israel (Full Press Release of Anonymous):-
"Greetings World --

For far to long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so called "Occupied Territories" by the Israel Defense Force. Like so many around the globe, we have felt helpless in the face of such implacable evil. And today's insane attack and threatened invasion of Gaza was more of the same.

But when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way - we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch. To the IDF and government of Israel we issue you this warning only once. Do NOT shut down the Internet into the "Occupied Territories", and cease and desist from your terror upon the innocent people of Palestine or you will know the full and unbridled wrath of Anonymous. And like all the other evil governments that have faced our rage, you will NOT survive it unscathed.

To the people of Gaza and the "Occupied Territories", know that Anonymous stands with you in this fight. We will do everything in our power to hinder the evil forces of the IDF arrayed against you. We will use all our resources to make certain you stay connected to the Internet and remain able to transmit your experiences to the world. As a start, we have put together the Anonymous Gaza Care Package - http://bit.ly/XH87C5 - which contains instructions in Arabic and English that can aid you in the event the Israel government makes good on it's threat to attempt to sever your Internet connection. It also contains useful information on evading IDF surveillance, and some basic first aid and other useful information. We will continue to expand and improve this document in the coming days, and we will transmit it to you by every means at our disposal. We encourage you to download this package, and to share it with your fellow Palestinians to the best of your ability. 

We will be with you. No matter how dark it may seem, no matter how alone and abandoned you may feel - know that tens of thousands of us in Anonymous are with you and working tirelessly around the clock to bring you every aid and assistance that we can.

We Are Anonymous
We Are Everywhere
We Are Legion
We Do Not Forgive
We Do Not Forget

To the oppressors of the innocent Palestinian people, it is to late to EXPECT US"


-Source (Forbes) 






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Teen Hacker "Cosmo the God" of Underground Nazi Sentenced 6 Yrs Internet Ban By California Court

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 11/12/2012 06:38:00 am

Teen Hacker "Cosmo the God" of Underground Nazi Sentenced 6 Yrs Internet Ban By California Court

A teenager hacker from an infamous hacker collective group named Underground Nazi faced Internet ban. On Wednesday the 15 years old hacker known as "Cosmo" or "Cosmo the God" was sentenced in juvenile court in Long Beach, California. According to sources, Cosmo pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in exchange for a probation, encompassing all the charges brought against him, which included charges based on credit card fraud, identity theft, bomb threats, and online impersonation. 
This newly formed hacker group Underground Nazi had taken the spot light in January this year, when they hacked UFC.com (Ultimate Fighting Championship). Later they involved them selves in mass protest against controversial privacy act SOPA & PIPA. The protest was dubbed Operation Megaupload (#OpMegaupload), where hacktivist Anonymous  along with hackers around the globe stand together against the take down of Megaupload.com. In the middle of 2012 Cosmo was also responsible for Twitter outage, where Cosmo along with few other UG Nazi members performed massive denial of service attack to interrupt the service of Twitter. Also it has been found that, Cosmo pioneered social-engineering techniques that allowed him to gain access to user accounts at Amazon, PayPal, and a slew of other companies. He was arrested in June during a part of a multi-state FBI sting. 
Representatives from both the Long Beach district attorney and public defenders offices refused to comment on the case, given Cosmo’s status as a juvenile. However, according to Cosmo, the terms of the plea place him on probation until his 21st birthday. During that time, he cannot use the internet without prior consent from his parole officer. Nor will he be allowed to use the Internet in an unsupervised manner, or for any purposes other than education-related ones. He is required to hand over all of his account logins and passwords. He must disclose in writing any devices that he has access to that have the capability to connect to a network. He is prohibited from having contact with any members or associates of UG Nazi or Anonymous, along with a specified list of other individuals. He had to forfeit all the computers and other items seized in the raid on his home. Also, according to Cosmo, violating any of these terms will result in a three-year prison term. The probationary period lasting until age 21 is standard, but other terms were more surprising.



-Source (Wired) 









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Facebook Outage in Many European Countries Not Caused By Anonymous But DNS Problem

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 10/14/2012 06:26:00 pm

Facebook Outage in Many European Countries Not Caused By Anonymous But DNS Problem 

World's most popular and largest social network Facebook faced another downtime. This time the outage effected millions of users in European countries including Denmark, France, Norway, Germany and Italy. After June this is the second outage which effected large number of Facebook users. Last time Facebook users faced disturbance while using their favorite social network. Facebook users across the globe experienced log-in difficulties for several hour. But this time, the social networking giant remain down for a decent time. The outage may have caused Facebook’s share price to go down. For a site with 900 million users worldwide, even a minor outage has a huge effect. Like the June issue, here also hacker collective came first and took credit of the outage. According to a twitter account of the hacktivist group named  Anonymous Own3r, took responsibility of the outage, In his tweet he claimed to figure out several vulnerabilities in Facebook, which causes the outage. In a pastebin note, the hacker publishes those so called vulnerabilities. Also in his tweet the hacker claimed to have control in many servers owned by Facebook. 

But Facebook completely denies the hacker attack & said the cause of the outage was nothing but DNS issue, neither hacker attack nor DDoS.  Here we want yo give you reminder that in 2011 Anonymous openly declared to take down Facebook. The operation was dubbed #Op-Facebook and Anonymous told that they will hit FB on the 5th of November last year. But in reality it was just a threat and as expected Anonymous failed to execute Operation Facebook. Later in June this year, Anonymous took credit for a couple of hours outage of Facebook, and here again Anonymous affiliated member repeated the same story, which again proves completely baseless, and in short it was nothing but a publicity stunt. 

In case of large social network like Facebook, such kind of DNS issues can be happened. Whatever immediately after this outage Facebook released a statement saying -
"There has not been a hack of Facebook. We have investigated these claims, and they are not valid. The evidence cited was produced by an automated vulnerability scanner that alerts developers of potential vulnerability, and we have found these all to be false alerts.
We expect Anonymous just like we expect any other attack on any other day. Due to our size, we face the same threats as seen everywhere else on the Web, but we have developed partnerships, back-end systems, and protocols to confront the full range of security challenges we face. Facebook has always been committed to protecting our users’ information, and we will continue to innovate and work tirelessly to defend this data.
Earlier (Thursday), we made a change to DNS as part of a traffic-optimization test, and that change resulted in some users being temporarily misrouted. We detected and resolved the issue immediately, but a small number of users located primarily in Western Europe experienced issues accessing the site while the DNS addresses repopulated. We are now back to 100 percent, and we apologize for any inconvenience..."



-Source (All Facebook)




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GoDaddy Outage Was Not Beacuse of Hacker Attack But Technical Difficulties

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 9/13/2012 11:57:00 pm

GoDaddy Outage Was Not Beacuse of Hacker Attack But Technical Difficulties 

GoDaddy -the website which is widely known as a DNS and hosting provider remained down for most of time on 10th September came back online in the 10th evening. As expected thousands of other web sites reportedly went offline as their hosting provider GoDaddy experienced massive service disruptions. GoDaddy, which claims to be the world's biggest web hosting company, confirmed the problems on its official Twitter account but has not yet stated the cause of the disruptions. A hacker code named "Anonymous Own3r" on Twitter took responsibility of the outage. The attack came on behalf of the hacker collective group 'Anonymous' as a protest against GoDaddy's support of the SOPA act. The hacker stated the reason of the outage is a massive denial of service (DDoS) attack which was generated from an IRC-Botnet. A tweet from the @AnonOpsLegion account: "#TangoDown -- http://www.godaddy.com/ | by@AnonymousOwn3r" was the initial public promotion of the outage, leading some to believe that the Anonymous online activist collective was behind the disruption. However, the AnonymousOwn3r account clarified in various tweets that: "it's not Anonymous coletive [sic] the attack is coming just from me." But this claim was later disputed by posts from the @YourAnonNews account which is known to be one of the legitimate twitter source of Anon. 
After completing the investigation of the outage, GoDaddy released a press note where they have clearly said that the outage was not because of DDoS attack but internal technical difficulties. According to Scott Wagner Go Daddy CEO -
"GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT. The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.
At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised. Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it. We take our business and our customers' businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience."





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Outage Day -Google Talk & Twitter Knocked Offline For Hours

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/27/2012 12:05:00 am

Outage Day -Google Talk & Twitter Knocked Offline For Hours 

Yet again social networking giant Twitter faced massive cyber attacks which interrupts its normal service. Millions of people across the planet were having problems while accessing Twitter on Thursday, a day before the 2012 Olympic Games are expected to cause a spike in use of the micro-blogging site. The San Francisco-based company acknowledged the problem, saying "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue". Visitors to the site were greeted with a half-formed message partially in code saying that "Twitter is currently down."
At the time of outage, VOGH team took the above screen shot which clearly indicating that twitter was indeed down. Sluggishness or outages were reported from countries in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Some users were apparently able to post updates known as 'tweets' through their phones or third-party  applications. About an hour after issues were first spotted, service appeared to be restored in parts of the U.S. and Asia, but users elsewhere continued to report problems. So far Twitter did not confirmed the reason of this disturbance. But its predictable that the cause of this outage was either cyber attack or some kind of technical issues. We also like to remind you that, this is not the first time; last month a hacker collective group named UG Nazi performed massive denial of service attack which send Twitter offline for a certain peroid. 

_________

Not only Twitter, Google Talk the popular instant messaging service used by millions across the world, suffered a massive outage lasting over four hours. The outage, which started around 4PM India time, affected users across the world. Millions of Google Talk users around the globe reported that they could log into the service, saw their contacts with the respective status but failed to send messages to them. Some other users could not log in. Google immediately acknowledged that Google Talk service was having some issues at 4.10pm, saying, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Talk."
The service is not only used by people to keep in touch with friends but has also become a popular way to interact with co-workers in offices.
According to Google, the service was restored around 8.25pm. "Google Talk service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change," said the company. Nearly 40 minutes after this message, the company declared that Google Talk service was fully restored. "The problem with Google Talk should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," it said. Earlier, Google responded fast to the problem. 
"We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users. The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 7/26/12 5.20pm detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change," the company said on the status page of Google Talk app. After that the company provided hourly report on the outage.
However, like Twitter Google also did not explain what caused the outage and how many users were affected by it.


-Source (TOI)



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Large Number of Dropbox User Targeted By Spammers

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/19/2012 12:15:00 am

Large Number of Dropbox User Targeted By Spammers 
One of the very popular file hosting service Dropbox which offers cloud storage & file synchronization have fallen victim to cyber criminals. A large numbers of Dropbox users have reported receiving spam mails to their e-mail address. So far the spammer is using different pieces of German-language spam at an email address used solely to register with Dropbox. Yesterday, a Dropbox user named David.P first  reported on the Dropbox forum that he received a spam message to an email account that he used exclusively for Dropbox and no other service.  Since then, various users in Germany, the Netherlands and United Kingdom reported receiving junk email touting online gambling sites. Similar reports can also be found on the Dropbox forums. In almost all cases, the spam is for suspicious-looking online casinos. Much of the spam appears to have been sent to users with their own domains who created a custom email address such as dropbox@domain.tld to register for the Dropbox file-sharing service. This would suggest that the spammers may simply have been lucky. According to forum discussions, however, emails have also been received by people who have not used this easily guessable address format.  
Immediately after this incident get spotted the announced that it has asked its security team to investigate the incident, and has also called in outside experts. At present, it has found no evidence of unauthorized access to Dropbox accounts, but this could change as the investigation moves forward. The company has reassured users that a recent thirty minute web site outage had nothing to do with this incident. 

In their Statement Dropox Said:-
"We‘re aware that some Dropbox users have been receiving spam to email addresses associated with their Dropbox accounts. Our top priority is investigating this issue thoroughly and updating you as soon as we can. We know it’s frustrating not to get an update with more details sooner, but please bear with us as our investigation continues.”


-Source (E Hacking News & The-H)






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DDoS Attack Send Twitter Offline, Lady Hacker Named 'Cosmo' From 'UGNazi' Took Responsibility

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/24/2012 05:41:00 pm

DDoS Attack Send Twitter Offline, Lady Hacker Named 'Cosmo' From 'UGNazi' Took Responsibility

One of the world famous and widely used social network Twitter again faced cyber attack. This time the site was unavailable for over 30 minutes in countries all over the world from Europe through to Asia. As expected the reason behind this outage is massive denial of service attack. According to the report of Telegraph an infamous hacker group named Underground Nazi also known as UG Nazi affiliated with hacktivist LulzSec, immediately, claimed responsibility for the downage attributing it to a prolonged DDoS attack. A lady hacker codenamed Cosmo, claimed taking down the site had been 'surprisingly simple'. "It wasn't really difficult at all, I myself honestly thought Twitter would be more protected from a DDoS Attack, but I guess not," she added. 
Meanwhile twitter completely denied the whole phenomena. A spokesman for Twitter said the issue was caused by 'a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components'. He declined to say whether it was a technical failure or a malicious attack.




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(Facebook Downtime) Users Faced Log-in Difficulties, FB Said -Outage Was Not Caused By Anonymous

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/04/2012 02:08:00 pm

(Facebook Downtime) Users Faced Log-in Difficulties, FB Said -Outage Was Not Caused By Anonymous
On first of June millions of Facebook users faced disturbance while using their favourite social network. Facebook users across the globe experienced log-in difficulties for several hour. For a site with 900 million users worldwide, even a minor outage has a huge effect, especially amidst criticism of the Facebook IPO. The outage may have caused Facebook’s share price to go down 5.95 percent this morning. The simple event was a tweet sent out by @YourAnonNews after the news broke that Facebook was having problems. The account appeared to claim responsibility for the attacks. Anonymous had made two tweets with regard to Facebook’s latest troubles, whereby one read as follows: “Looks like good old Facebook is having packet problems” to indicate that the shadows surrounding the calamitous IPO is not the only quandary, but a number of them. The second indecent tweet read, “RIP Facebook a new sound of tango down, b—–*."
Later hacker collective Anonymous has released a statement denying responsibility for Thursday’s Facebook slowdown and agreeing withe the Menlo Park company that there was in fact no attack at all. 
What ever the main twist is that Facebook completely denies the rumour that Anon was behind the downtime. In a statement FB said "Last night’s outage was not the result of a DDoS.” There was no attack on Facebook last Thursday. The company suffered from an internal problem that slowed down user’s connections and refused access to many of them. It doesn’t happen often but it happens often enough that it was a possibility. In the press release Facebook spokesman said, “Earlier today, some users briefly experienced issues loading the site. The issues have since been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience.” This is a public apology to its esteemed customers.
Being a responsible media its our duty to refresh the memory of our readers. In 2011 Anonymous openly declared to take down Facebook. The operation was dubbed #Op-Facebook and Anonymous told that they will hit FB on the 5th of November last year. But in reality it was just a threat and as expected Anonymous failed to execute Operation Facebook. 
 

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NSA Is Suspecting That Anonymous Could Shutdown The Entire U.S. Power Grid

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/23/2012 07:01:00 pm

NSA Is Suspecting That Anonymous Could Shutdown The Entire U.S. Power Grid
Earlier we have covered that Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told that U.S. power grid needs cyber security protection. Now the US Govt is suspecting that 'Hactivist' Anonymous may target this vulnerable point and shut down the entire U.S. power grid within the next two years. General Keith Alexander The head of the National Security Agency has warned- that the hacker collective group Anonymous may be able to bring about a limited national power outage through a cyber attack. In the meeting at White House has relayed his concerns. Though he has not publicly expressed his concerns about the potential for Anonymous to disrupt power supplies, he has warned publicly about an emerging ability by cyber attackers to disable or even damage computer networks. Still Anonymous has never indicated to perform cyber attack against US power grid, but in the last week they have called Operation Global Blackout, a plan to shut down the Internet on March 31. And the security experts are suspecting that while executing that attack Anon may target the US power grid.



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BlackBerry Service Fully Restored After The Largest Ever Network Disruption

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 10/18/2011 05:48:00 pm


RIM's BlackBerry service was fully restored around the world early Thursday morning after what the company called its largest-ever network disruption. Details on the outage, which began Monday and affected millions of users around the globe, came out during a conference call Thursday morning with top executives from BlackBerry maker Research in Motion.
RIM founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said the BlackBerry service's infrastructure "suffered a hardware error," and then the problem cascaded. A backup system "did not work the way we intended." Lazaridis said RIM is "working with vendors to fix the particular error that occurred Monday," but he declined to name specific vendors.
The BlackBerry service outage started in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. By Tuesday it spread to South America. That night, RIM assured customers that the glitch had been identified and was "now being resolved" -- but on Wednesday it got worse as customers in the United States and Canada were hit. The outage primarily affected text messaging and Internet access, leaving some voice calling services operational. Earlier Thursday, Lazaridis posted a taped message on the company's website, saying, "We've let many of you down." At a teleconference on Wednesday, executives pledged that despite a huge data backlog, RIM will not drop any e-mails -- all messages will eventually be delivered. The reps dodged several questions about make-good efforts for customers.


-News Source (CNN, NS & RIM)



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Welcome back, Linux kernel (kernel.org is back with latest stable kernel 3.0.4)

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 10/05/2011 05:50:00 pm


Just under a month ago, the official distribution site for the Linux kernel was put down. The site was down for almost a month. What ever  the good news is that kernel.org is back with latest stable kernel 3.0.4. It's not all roses, though. As the site itself remarks:
Thanks to all for your patience and understanding during our outage and please bear with us as we bring up the different kernel.org systems over the next few weeks. We will be writing up a report on the incident in the future.

For More information Click Here




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Bank of America Under Cyber Attack

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 10/02/2011 03:25:00 pm

Bank of America said Friday that problems with its website are not related to any online breaches or attacks. The $2.36 trillion bank posted a message on its homepage, saying simply that the site was temporary unavailable. Tara Burke, a spokeswoman for BofA, says "some" BofA customers reported having trouble accessing their online banking accounts. But "a majority of our customers can bank online."
Julie McNelley, a fraud analyst at Aite, says the timing of the outage is curious, coming only one day after BofA announced plans to begin charging fees associated with debit-card purchases. "It wouldn't be the first time a hacktivist group used a denial of service attack to express their displeasure over a company policy," McNelley says. But Burke says the bank's site troubles are not related to a hack or a breach, and that the site issues have been sporadic.
In November 2010, a similar outage struck BofA and several other institutions, including Chase, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo. Given the number of institutions affected, industry pundits speculated that the November outage was linked to a third-party or core processor that manages online banking for various institutions.


-News Source (BANK INFO SECURITY)


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TANGO DOWN brasil.gov.br & presidencia.gov.br by LulzSec

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/22/2011 11:48:00 pm



Hacker group LulzSec said it has taken two Brazilian government Web sites offline. The sites Brasil.gov.br and Presidencia.gov.br were both unavailable as of the time this story was written
"TANGO DOWN brasil.gov.br & presidencia.gov.br LulzSecBrazil", LulzSecBrazil tweeted in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
The outage, which probably stemmed from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, follows the arrest yesterday by the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit of a 19-year-old man who they suspect is involved with the group.
LulzSec has denied that the individual, who it names as Ryan Cleary, is part of the group.


"Ryan Cleary is not part of LulzSec; we house one of our many legitimate chatrooms on his IRC server, but that's it," the group tweeted last night.

News Source (ZDNet UK)

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Sony Hacked Again, 1 Million User Data Compromised

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/03/2011 07:35:00 pm


A group of hackers that recently gained notoriety for hacking PBS.org’s home page with an image of NyanCat, announced Thursday that it has stolen data from Sony. It’s yet another in a seemingly endless string of embarrassing security incidents for the company, but what’s shocking is just how exposed the data was to begin with.
In a press release posted to their Web site, LulzSec claims to have broken into SonyPictures.com and “compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts.”
The theft included 75,000 “music codes” and 3.5 million “music coupons,” according to the group. LulzSec has posted segments of data they claim to have taken from Sony’s server to serve as proof of their accomplishment.
There are two astonishing twists to this story - one is that LulzSec was apparently able to access the information fairly easily, using what they describe as “a very simple SQL injection, one of the most primitive and common vulnerabilities.” Secondly, “every bit of data we took wasn’t encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it’s just a matter of taking it. This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it.”
If true, it’s devastating news for Sony, which is just getting back on its feet after shutting down access to its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment servers after hackers made off with personal information on more than 100 million user accounts.
The PlayStation Network, which controls PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable users’ ability to connect to one another to play online games, was down for more than three weeks through the last half of April and first half of May as Sony struggled to secure the system.
And only in the past 24 hours has Sony brought back its PlayStation Store, which serves as a way for PS3 and PSP users to download games and content for their systems.
Sony hasn’t even yet initiated its “Welcome Back” package for consumers affected by the PSN blackout - a collection of about $100 worth of games and content, as well as access to the company’s premium “PlayStation Plus” service.
SonyPictures.com isn’t directly related to the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Network - it’s Sony’s consumer-facing Internet site for information on their movies, television and home entertainment offerings on Blu-Ray Disc and other formats. But Sony’s many Web sites and servers have been on the receiving end of security probes and hack attacks for some time, exacerbated by the company’s legal proceedings against George “Geohot” Hotz, a programmer who sought to “jailbreak” or enable the PlayStation 3 console to support Linux operating system software - a feature Sony once supported itself, but later removed in a firmware update. Since the widely-publicized outage of the PlayStation Network, hackers have stepped up their attempts to break into Sony’s systems.

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Researchers developing tools that tell who’s blocking Web information

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 5/15/2011 05:11:00 pm



You type in the address of a website, but nothing comes up. Did you make a mistake or is someone or something blocking the information you want?

Researchers at Georgia Tech are developing free tools that give Internet users worldwide the answer.
The device would have detected recent Internet blackouts in Egypt and Libya and could let people know if governments are throttling the Web without their knowledge, said Nick Feamster, a computer science professor who is one of the principal investigators on the project. It would also expose whether Internet service providers are delivering the upload and download speeds they promised consumers, he said.
Google recently awarded Tech professors at least $1 million to develop Web-based devices to improve transparency on the Web. The first tool should be available for anyone to download by the end of the year.
The goal isn’t to help people circumvent a blocked site, but rather to explain why it is inaccessible, said Wenke Lee, a computer science professor who is also a principal investigator.
“Information and our access to information has a lot of impact on who we are and how we live our lives,” Lee said. “Not having this information is similar to withholding knowledge from students or basically not giving children enough nutrition for them to grow.”
Feamster said they are not judging why a site is blocked. There are reasonable motives, such as protecting people from spam and cybercrime. And there are darker motives, such as censoring content, tampering with search results or altering information to promote propaganda.
“Users have the right to be aware of what is happening,” Feamster said. “This is a global issue.”
The Google Focused Research Awards program provided Tech with $1 million for two years’ worth of work on the project, plus an optional third year with an additional $500,000. The research program supports engineering and computer science projects that are of mutual interest to college researchers and the company.
“Georgia Tech has been a very strong partner for Google and we look forward to exciting things coming from this collaboration,” said Leslie Yeh Johnson, a Google university relations manager.
The project is in the early stages, but the team has developed a “browser extension” that would provide users with real-time information about blocked sites.
An icon, likely an exclamation point, would appear in the address bar. If users click on that, a message pops up saying the site is inaccessible and provides a link for more information. The link would explain, using a phrase such as “to the best of our knowledge” how long the site has been down, who or what caused it and whether users from a specific country or Internet service provider are impacted.
The project faces a couple of challenges, such as making sure governments or service providers can’t block or filter the device, Feamster said.
They must persuade people to use the tools and report network problems and issues so the team can gather information. The more people who report information, the more accurate the tool will be, Lee said. People at Google or Tech will vet the information to make sure it isn’t tainted or misleading, Feamster said.
Feamster and Lee have long worked to combat censorship. Censorship has become increasingly pervasive and studies find 60 nations restrict access to information on the Internet, they said. While much focus remains on the so-called Great Firewall of China, it also occurs in Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom, Feamster said.
Emory University professor Ramnath Chellappa said there is always interest in tools that promote transparency on the Web.
Chellappa, an expert on information security and privacy, said the new Tech effort could benefit users in the Mideast and North Africa, but will likely have a greater effect on the issue of net neutrality, which advocates for no restrictions on content or access.
Lee said the project aims to create a “transparency watchdog system.”
“The idea is to give people something that provides better information about the accessibility of content,” Feamster said. “It could be censorship or an outage or somehow the user’s fault. The point is to be clear about what is really going on.”

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Airtel Network Crashed, 8 million consumers became helpless

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 5/07/2011 03:43:00 am


The failure of Bharti Airtel’s network on Thursday— it crashed for several hours without notice leaving 8 million consumers helpless — has raised two fundamental issues. One, whether the launch of 3G value-added services is adversely affecting primary services. And two, whether India’s largest telecom company has over-outsourced its equipment and management to vendors.
The company did not give any reason for failure of its network. “An unforeseen technical outage had affected services on some of our circuits,” a Bharti spokesperson said. “As a result some of Airtel Delhi mobile subscribers have experienced connectivity issues.”
But the issues could be larger. “The network architecture has become very complex after the launch of 3G services,” said a former CTO of a large telecom company. “That’s why calls drop frequently on networks that are offering 3G services.
The 3G network is overlayed over the existing 2G network and use the same core network.
“There are about 15 to 20 main switching centres (MSC) of Airtel in Delhi,” said the head of another telecom company. “Possibility is that due to some software glitch a few MSCs may have stopped working.
It could also be the firm’s aggressive outsourcing model. When a company outsources its entire technology to outside vendors, it does not have control over it in crisis situations.
While Bharti was the first company to outsource its network management and IT to vendors, other private operators have followed suit.
Citing that all its officials were busy in internal meetings, the company refused to comment.
“The problem is that the Indian companies do not have enough technical expertise to monitor the outsource activities,” said a former CMD of a government-owned telecom service provider.

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Sony blames hacktivist group Anonymous for Playstation Network intrusion

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 5/05/2011 10:47:00 am


File this one under “things not to do when dealing with massive network outages.” Sony has kicked the hornet’s nest today by blaming Anonymous, a massive network of hackers that regularly takes up activist causes, for indirectly causing a breach of security in its PlayStation Network (PSN) online gaming network that led to the attack that brought PSN down.
While the company isn’t blaming Anonymous for the attack itself, it said the hackers that stole gobs of sensitive data about PSN users were able to break into the network while it was defending itself from denial of service attacks orchestrated by Anonymous. Anonymous took on Sony after the company went after famed PS3 hacker George Hotz, who reverse engineered the PlayStation 3 to run unauthorized programs.
When the PlayStation Network crashed on April 21, Anonymous said it was not behind the attack. Instead, the hacktivist group said, “Sony is incompetent.” But an observer of the IRC forum used by members of Anonymous said the attackers behind this current Sony outage appear to have learned their methods from Anonymous’ activities of two weeks ago.
This really is not the time for Sony to start playing with fire. Anonymous doesn’t regularly respond to blame and threats, but because the network of hackers has taken on Sony before, there is no guarantee Sony’s latest accusation won’t spark some kind of retaliation. Anonymous has proven time and again that it is a force to be reckoned with. Sony has to focus on beefing up its network, not trying to shift blame around and incite more attacks against the already feeble network.
Hackers attacked the PSN on April 19, forcing the Japanese company to bring down the network, which has more than 77 million registered users. The nightmare then continued after hackers broke into the company’s Station.com site, which serves as a host for its PC games like Everquest. Hackers were able to steal information from as many as 24.6 million accounts on that site, according to Sony. In all, more than 100 million accounts might have been compromised.
The PSN breach was a massive security gaffe that has caused the U.S. government to get involved and demand answers — such as who attacked the network and what users were affected. Sony has sent warnings to PSN users about the possible credit card theft. The whole ordeal spawned an apology from Sony that lasted more than an hour and a half.
The network has been down for more than a week, denying 77 million registered gamers the ability to play online games, watch movies, listen to music or download other entertainment to their PlayStation 3 consoles and PlayStation Portable handhelds. The PlayStation Network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service — as well as other online gaming services. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games.

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