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A massive DDoS attack on key DNS infrastructure happened last Friday. It appears that one of Singapore’s telco – Starhub – was also under attacked on Saturday and Monday. There was no further information whether it is from the same attackers or whether it was a copycat attack.

The company said it analysed network logs of the disruptions and found that it had experienced intentional and likely malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on its domain name servers (DNS).

Source: UPDATE 1-Singapore telco StarHub says hit by cyber attacks | Reuters

Well, it didn’t take long to up the ante.
Major websites were down for a period of time due to DDoS attack. This time featuring tens of millions of IoT devices.

This is not the first incident where large number of IoT devices are being used to launch a DDoS attack. It’s a worrying sign that the number of compromised devices are getting larger and the technique is getting more popular.

The hosting provider OVH continues to face massive DDoS attacks launched by a botnet composed at least of 150000 IoT devices.

Source: 150,000 IoT Devices behind the 1Tbps DDoS attack on OVH

The dark side of the cybersecurity industry has surfaced once again – companies that provide cyberweapons to organizations with deep pockets. In this case, the cyberweapon is a chain of zero-day exploits that requires no more than clicking on a link from an SMS. Good thing the target is discerning enough not to click on it – which means a million dollars (or two, or three) is wasted.

This report describes how a government targeted an internationally recognized human rights defender, Ahmed Mansoor, with the Trident, a chain of zero-day exploits designed to infect his iPhone with sophisticated commercial spyware.

Source: The Million Dollar Dissident: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender – The Citizen Lab