Cyber Bombs Hit Financial Institutions

Have you been paying attention to the news lately? Chances are you will have heard the term DoS or DDoS, but haven’t had a clue, or a care, what it is or what it means.

You should.

It means major financial institutions and corporations are under frequent attack. Charles Schwab. JP Morgan Chase. Bank of America. Citibank. SunTrust. Just to name but a few on an ever growing list.

DoS stands for Denial of Service.DDoS is a Distributed Denial of Service. All right, great, but what does this mean to you?

These are attacks by hackers intended to make a website inaccessible to the intended users. They do this by brute force using BOTNETs. By infecting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of computers with a trojan that delivers a nasty payload that turns the infected PC into, well, basically a zombie. Once under the control of the hacker, these PCs are called a BOTNET. All of these computers then literally bombard the targeted website with “fake” nuisance requests, “cyber bombs” so to speak, so that real legitimate traffic can’t get through.

The targeted website thinks that suddenly thousands of people are visiting the website at the same time, and gets so overwhelmed trying to serve up the website, well, it gets real ugly from there.

Financial institutions and corporations are spending untold millions to try as best they can to ward off and deflect DDoS attacks, and many are successfully detected and blocked.

Businesses are turning to companies like Prolexic for help mitigating DDoS attacks. Recently, they helped defend against the largest attack they have seen in 10 years, clocking in at 160 gigabytes per second, with 120 million packets per second. Here is a video:

 

Actual DDoS attack

So, now you read this, and you are outraged. Good. Because I have one other little tidbit for you.

Not only are botnets used to carry out DDoS attacks, they are also used to perpetrate wire transfer fraud and other serious crimes, and you don’t want your PC being involved in something like that do you?

Well you can do something about it and do YOUR part to stop this by making sure your computer isn’t one of the legion being controlled by the hacker botnets.

Botnets start by your computer being infected with a TROJAN, so make sure your antivirus software is installed, current, and run a deep scan, and take normal preventative measures with your computer to keep it secure.

 

Jacques Redmond

About Jacques Redmond

I'm an I.T. Security Professional, Technology Analyst, Consultant, & Tech Writer Protecting You From Viruses, Malware, Trojans, Hackers, and other Cyber Threats. I enjoy taking complicated subjects, and putting them in a way that's easy for everyone to understand. My site INFORMATIONWARFARE.US gives free advice to combat threats to your system.