- A sustained DDoS attack disrupted Ubuntu installations, updates, and web infrastructure.
- The outage lasted almost a full day, affecting security APIs and multiple websites.
- An Iraqi hacktivist group claimed responsibility, using a startup service to launch the attack.
Users are reporting that they cannot install or update Ubuntu following a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by Iraqi hacktivists, with Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution, also affected.
“Canonical’s web infrastructure is under sustained cross-border attack and we are working to remediate it. We will provide more information on our official channels as soon as we can,” the company said at the time.
Discussing the attack on the unofficial Ubuntu forums, community members confirmed that the distribution’s security API was affected, as well as several websites. System updates and installations were also not available at the time.
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Islamic Cyber Resistance Team 313 in Iraq
The attack was claimed by a group calling itself Team 313 of the Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq. In a Telegram channel, the group reportedly said it used a DDoS-as-a-Service tool called Beamed to launch the attack.
Beamed is a booter, a tool that allows users to “stress test” their website by paying for a DDoS attack. The service claims to be capable of launching an attack at 3.5 Tbps, half the power needed to launch a record-breaking attack.
DDoS occurs when hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected devices attempt to communicate with a single server, overloading it, forcing it to crash, and thus denying all access to legitimate traffic. To create a DDoS service, malicious actors must take control of these endpoints, which is usually done through malware. Using scripts and automated bots, malicious actors can scan for vulnerabilities or weak login credentials and use this access to deploy different malware variants.
After that, they can operate the instances through a unified dashboard. This access is then sold on the black market for a monthly fee. These fees can range from $10 for cheap services to $500 per month for sustained, high-powered attacks.
Via TechCrunch
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