Showing posts with label attack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label attack. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Snapchat User Accounts Vulnerable to Brute Force Attack

Snapchat User Accounts Vulnerable to Brute Force Attack


Snapchat User Accounts Vulnerable to Brute-Force Attack
Snapchat, a Smartphone application that lets users share snapshots with friends is catching fire among teenagers. It was first hacked in December when 4.6 million Snapchat users were exposed in a database breach.

Later, the denial-of-service attack and CAPTCHA Security bypass were discovered by other researchers within last two-three weeks. Snapchat has no Vulnerability Reward Program, but still many penetration testers are working hard and free of cost to make the application more secure by disclosing flaws.
Interestingly, this is not the end of vulnerabilities, Mohamed Ramadan, a security researcher with Attack-Secure from Egypt, has spotted a new vulnerability on Snapchat that allow an attacker to brute-force login credentials of the users. Brute-force is a process of trying multiple passwords against a username until you get a correct password.
"This vulnerability allows anyone who knows your SnapChat email to brute force your account’s password without any protection from snapchat side, there is no lockout. Limited tries or even Captcha." he said in a blog post.
He found this security flaw late in 2013, reported it to Snapchats Security Team and they took 2 Months to fix the flaw. However, vulnerability has been fixed; but users are recommended to use Strong passwords always.

The security flaws doesnt mean that SnapChat is losing its reputation in the market as security issues are common in every app we use today, and moreover it is the popularity and easiness of the app that Facebook offered $3 Billion to purchase it but the SnapChat CEO rejected the offer.

Available link for download

Read more »

Monday, January 23, 2017

Largest Ever 400Gbps DDoS Attack Hits Europe Uses NTP Amplification

Largest Ever 400Gbps DDoS Attack Hits Europe Uses NTP Amplification


Largest Ever 400Gbps DDoS Attack Hits Europe Uses NTP Amplification
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is the one of favorite weapon for the hackers to temporarily suspend services of a host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack.
Since 2013, Hackers have adopted new tactics to boost Distributed Denial of Service attack sizes, which is known as ‘Amplification Attack’, that provide the benefits of obscuring the source of the attack, while enabling the bandwidth to be used to multiply the size of the attack.

Just yesterday, hackers have succeeded in reaching new heights of the massive DDoS attack targeting content-delivery and anti-DDoS protection firm Cloudfare, reaching more than 400Gbps at its peak of traffic, striking at the company’s data servers in Europe.
Very big NTP reflection attack hitting us right now. Appears to be bigger than the #Spamhaus attack from last year. Mitigating,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Price said in a tweet. “Someone’s got a big, new cannon. Start of ugly things to come,”
This massive DDoS attack was greater than ever in history of the Internet, and larger than previous DDoS record-holder Spamhaus DDoS attack i.e. 300Gbps, that almost broke the Internet.
Attackers leveraged weaknesses in the Network Time Protocol (NTP), which is used to synchronize computer clocks, but hackers are abusing the NTP servers by sending small spoofed 8-byte UDP packets to the vulnerable server that requests a large amount of data (megabytes worth of traffic) to be sent to the DDoSs target IP Address.
The frequency of NTP reflection attacks has grown in recent months. While researchers have long-predicted that NTP might someday become a great vector for DDoS attacks and ideal DDoS tool, and the trend has recently become popular, causing an issue for some gaming websites and service provider.
Recently, The US-CERT issued an alert warning, listed certain UDP protocols identified as potential attack vectors for Amplification Attack, including DNS, NTP, SNMPv2, NetBIOS, SSDP ,CharGEN, QOTD, BitTorrent, Kad, Quake Network and Protocol Steam Protocol.
As all versions of ntpd prior to 4.2.7 are vulnerable by default, the simplest recommended course of action is to upgrade all versions of ntpd that are publically accessible to at least 4.2.7. Until all the misconfigured NTP servers are cleaned up, attacks of this nature will continue.

Available link for download

Read more »