One Million IP Addresses Used In Brute-Force Attack On A Bank

Cisco says in just one week in February they detected 1,127,818 different IP addresses being used to launch 744,361,093 login attempts on 220,758,340 different email addresses -- and that 93% of those attacks were directed at two financial institutions in a massive Account Takeover (ATO) campaign. An anonymous reader writes: Crooks used 993,547 distinct IPs to check login credentials for 427,444,261 accounts. For most of these attacks, the crooks used proxy servers, but also two botnets, one of compromised Arris cable modems, and one of ZyXel routers/modems. Most of these credentials have been acquired from public breaches or underground hacking forums. This happened before the recent huge data breaches such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and VK.com.
It's apparently similar to the stolen-credentials-from-other-sites attack that was launched against GitHub earlier this week.

Re:

[Beeftopia]

Money is a measure of effort required to get a unit of it. It is also like a claim on goods and services. It is a logical construct, but it is not meaningless. The construct has persisted for millennia as a result of the benefits it provides to individuals.

To a central bank which can have it printed, it can seem meaningless. And the effort required to obtain a unit of it by an agricultural field hand versus the CEO of a financial services company are obviously very different. Central banks can distribute

Re:

[bloodhawk]

what a load of bullshit, you have been reading too much of the crap printed by those that put their faith in bitcoin or those that think it is a Zero sum game. money depending on country is backed by various securities or comodities and is a unit of effort or goods and is simply a substitute for having to directly barter goods or labour, you can think of money as an note or I Owe You, except being tied to an individual it is tied to any unit within a given economy that utilises that note.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

we owe 19 TRILLION dollars, thats 19 million million. America has been DESTROYED under obama's rule.

So it's perfectly OK when Bush increased our national debt by 6 trillion, but not OK for Obama to increase it by 6.5 trillion ?

Re:One Million is nothing

[Imrik]

First, you should recheck your numbers. Second, Obama called it treasonous when Bush did it.

Re:

[Archangel Michael]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Name Calling vs Facts: Facts always win.

Re:

[slashdotwannabe]

Here's a fact: Congress, and only Congress sets the spending [wikipedia.org] of the country. While the Executive suggests a budget, Congress makes whatever changes they like to it, and is who passes it into law.

Here's another: recessions cause Federal deficits to rise as tax revenues decrease while spending must remain relatively constant so as not to cause a much worse recession. If you're the type to look for someone to blame, blame the guy that started the recession through a complete failure to regulate risky bank acti

Re:

[Archangel Michael]

1) Recession started just after Bush got into office (less than one year) can we blame it on Clinton?
2) Recession has continued for nearly 14 years straight, more or less. Can we blame Obama?
3) The deficit was called Unpatriotic when Obama as criticizing GWB, and was half its current size
4) Obama has ended all the wars, cut military spending, and yet the deficit has more than doubled in size under him
5) While you can blame congress, you can blame the (D) and (R) parties both of whom don't give a rat's ass a

Cloud Computing For The Win.

[zenlessyank]

What is the world record for cloud attacks? Cloud City needs some policing.

Re:

[h33t l4x0r]

This might be the record but just wait until ipv6

Re:

[antdude]

Blame Lando!

Re:

[Jack_the_Tripper]

Agreed, the editors have really been dropping the ball for years. It takes them days to report on recent events.

Well...them IP addresses, they had to count them all. Now they know how many IPs it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Internet of Thieves

[Black Parrot]

Didn't realize what IoT actually stands for.

Re:Internet of Thieves

[DaMattster]

This is why self-driving vehicles are a bad idea! One good penetration could turn a 80,000 lb semi into a lethal weapon.

Re:Internet of Thieves

[spire3661]

"Self driving doesn't have to be connected." For the most part yes it will be forced. Your vehicle will be connected to the road, other cars (V2V) and the internet, possibly on separate links. The vehicle will only operate once authenticated by the road. To be road authenticated you will have to running the most current version of software, which will be updated very frequently. The future of driving is bleak and glorious all at the same time.

I'm surprised this isn't happening more often

[damn_registrars]

My own personal (as in, at home hosted on a cable modem) web server used to get these same kinds of distributed dictionary attacks, botnet attempts to gain access to whatever they can. There were times when I would see this type of thing almost once a month or so; then it started to taper off and I haven't seen it in some time. I figured the botnets were just doing other things (or had decomposed).

And yes, I acknowledge that there is nothing important about my web server. I figured the botnets just occasionally go through every IP address they can find that accepts ssh connections and my number comes up every so often. I've never seen an IP address come up in both my web and ssh logs.

And yes, I know I can do more to prevent this. People offer up plenty of suggestions. Frankly I don't care, and I actually enjoy seeing tons of blocked ssh traffic in my logs from time to time. As you might expect the vast overwhelming majority of traffic is Chinese script kiddies attempting dictionary attacks as root; I don't care about those as I don't allow remote root. I find the distributed, phone book, and distributed phone book attacks much more interesting. They even give me a chance to tune up my cron jobs that parse my server logs :)

Re:I'm surprised this isn't happening more often

[pepsikid]

Yeah, one of the perks of running servers on a residential line is seeing firsthand all of the exploits. I'm fond of decrypting those mime-encrypted javascripts embedded in urls and finding the patebin page or hostname which it tries to fetch more scripts from; getting that shiat reported. If I were evil, i could build quite a library of exploits to use on others. They just send me these things haha!

Re:

[bloodhawk]

why build a library, just download the kits like all the script kiddies are doing that are hitting you. They aren't hand crafting these against you they are just using the readily available exploit scanning kits.

Re:

[DaMattster]

I used to host my own web/email server but since the cost of protected virtual servers has come down significantly, I decided to move my hosting to the cloud. I actually save on my electric bill too. LOL

Re:I'm surprised this isn't happening more often

[pepsikid]

I have my own cloud. I save on electricity by packing multiple servers into one box which is on 24/7 anyway. Having the servers physically located beside me relieves me of further concern that my hardware, website or forum might be seized or MitM'd. Also, the HOA can't sweet-talk some meddling corporation into kindly muzzling "that scofflaw." :)

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

SO lets see. You are not saving energy by keeping a system on 24/7, you are spending more money on power and cooling than you would if you put that computer in a colocated datacenter (I have ran the numbers more than enough times, I'm using typical residental power rates of 9cents/kWhr). Second, having physical access to your servers doesn't increase security. Your 5 pin tumbler lock is no match to an advanced lockpick set compared to the IDing, fingerprinting, and biometric scanning most datacenters put

Re:

[pepsikid]

Rather strong language there, AC stranger. Too bad you're wrong. I said the pc is on 24/7 ANYWAY. Instead of 4 of them on all the time. Also, I have attached a duct which vents its heat right out the window, lol. Physical access to the servers prevents others from seizing control and taking them over to operate as their own. As in the case of an asshole HOA that wants to boot me off my forum and neighborhood site, and run them their way. Which they did once last year. Someone very resourceful might mitm the

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to get tons of ssh break in attempts. Switching port 22 to another completely stopped it. Seems that most script kiddies are doing the hacking.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. After all, the real people just know that people who take the effort to move it to a different port probably take other steps to secure it. An ssh daemon left on the default port has a higher chance of being unsecured and doesn't have best practices in place, such as disabling root access and public key encryption.

3 backdoors?

[Anonymous Coward]

How incompetent do you have to be as a company to have THREE backdoors in your own router, intentional or accidental....

Re:

[MrL0G1C]

And there's the fact that they allowed millions of attacks before shutting off the service (if they had the sense to actually shut it off).

Apparently I longer have the biggest list

[raymorris]

For long time, I had probably the largest database of active bots and open proxies. I haven't counted for a while, but I don't think I have a million. That's one hell of an attack. Typically we see hundreds to a few thousand used in each attack.

Link with leaks

[manu0601]

How documented is the link with MySpace, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and VK.com leaks? It is in Slashdot summary but not in referenced articles at Akamai and Softpedia.

Millions? Why not shut off at three?

[AlanObject]

Most sites that I use that have risk associated with them will shut down an account if more than three attempts are made with bad logins. It sounds like these banks' systems allowed unlimited login attempts. I have a hard time believing that they would have security that lax.