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Web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare has disclosed that it autonomously mitigated a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 3.8 terabits per second (Tbps) and lasted 65 seconds. This is the largest publicly recorded thwarted DDoS to date. The assault consisted of a “month-long” barrage in September 2024 of more than 100 hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks flooding the network infrastructure with garbage data.

The previous record-breaking volumetric DDoS attack was reported by Microsoft in November 2021, peaking at 3.47 Tbps with a packet rate of 340 million Pps (Packets per second). The largest attack previously seen by Cloudflare peaked at 2.6 Tbps.

According to Cloudflare, the infected devices were spread across the globe but many of them were located in Russia, Vietnam, the US, Brazil and Spain

A Volumetric DDoS attack aims to overwhelm the target’s network or servers by flooding them with a massive volume of data. The goal is to consume all available bandwidth or system resources, rendering the service inaccessible to legitimate users.

Read more about it here.

American peer-to-peer payments and money transfer company MoneyGram confirmed that a cyberattack caused its services to become unavailable.

On September 21, 2024, the company informed its customers that it was experiencing “a network outage impacting connectivity to a number of our systems.”

The company has taken some of its systems offline since September 20 to contain the attack.

On September 23, MoneyGram confirmed that it “recently identified a cybersecurity issue affecting certain of our systems”.

Online services were fully restored only on September 26.

The company remained largely silent about the cybersecurity incident beyond a handful of updates posted to its X account. However, the length and the severity of the outage points to ransomware. The fact that the company was spending an extended period of time restoring key systems further points to potentially its refusal to pay a ransom demand and recovery from backups.

In 2014, it was the second largest provider of money transfers in the world. MoneyGram operates in more than 200 countries and territories with a global network of about 430,000 agent offices, serving 150 million customer.

Read more about it here.

Cybersecurity giant Fortinet confirmed on September 12, 2024 that it suffered a data breach, after a threat actor claimed to steal 440GB of files from the company’s Microsoft SharePoint server. “An individual gained unauthorized access to a limited number of files stored on Fortinet’s instance of a third-party cloud-based shared file drive, which included limited data related to a small number (less than 0.3%) of Fortinet customers” says its blog post. The company further stated that “Fortinet’s operations, products, and services have not been impacted.”

The threat actor, known as “Fortibitch,” claims to have tried to extort Fortinet into paying a ransom, likely to prevent the publishing of data, but the company refused to pay.

Fortinet did not disclose how many customers are impacted or what kind of data has been compromised but said that it “communicated directly with customers as appropriate.”

Fortinet is one of the largest cybersecurity vendors in the industry, offering firewalls, routers, VPN devices, extended detection and response, SIEM, network management and consulting services. It employs over 13,500 employees.

Read more about it here.

Giant car rental company Avis disclosed that an August 2024 data breach affected 299,006 of its customers.

According to the letter it sent out to those who have been affected, on August 3, 2024, a threat actor gained unauthorized access to its business applications. The data was access until August 6. The data breach was detected on August 14. The company took steps to end the access and launched an investigation with third-party experts, as well as alerted the authorities and notified the Maine Attorney General’s Office.

The stolen data includes personal information such as names, mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, credit card numbers with expiration dates and driver’s license numbers – critical information that can be used for identity theft or fraud.

The car rental did not disclose technical details about the attack

To mitigate possible damage, Avis is providing all affected customers with one year of free credit monitoring through Equifax.

Read more about it here.

Giant oil service company Halliburton confirmed that it was hit by a cyberattack that forced the company to take systems offline.

In a SEC filing, Halliburton said that “On August 21, 2024, Halliburton Company (the “Company”) became aware that an unauthorized third party gained access to certain of its systems.” The filing further says: “When the Company learned of the issue, the Company activated its cybersecurity response plan and launched an investigation internally with the support of external advisors to assess and remediate the unauthorized activity. The Company’s response efforts included proactively taking certain systems offline to help protect them and notifying law enforcement. The Company’s ongoing investigation and response include restoration of its systems and assessment of materiality.”

It isn’t clear at the time of this writing whether the cyberattack is some form of ransomware attack.

The company did not immediately respond to requests for further comment about the impact of the cyberattack.

Houston, Texas-based Halliburton employs 48,000 employees and operates in 70 countries.

Read more about it here.

Jerico Pictures Inc., doing business as National Public Data (“NPD”), exposed in April 2024 the personal information of nearly 2.9 billion individuals as a result of a data breach.

NPD is background check company that allows its customers to search billions of records with instant results.

In early April, 2024, a threat actor that uses the moniker of USDoD gained access to NPD’s network, and was able to exfiltrate unencrypted PII, including full names, Social Secutiy numbers, address history, and family information, of billions of individuals whose data is stored on NPD’s network.

On April 8, 2024, USDoD announced the sale of a “National Public Data” database on a dark web forum called Breached. It offered the 2.9 billion records for $3.5 million.

Researchers from VX-underground requested and received an advance copy of the data, reviewed the massive file – 277.1GB uncompressed, and confirmed that the data present in it is real and accurate. They also noticed that the database doesn’t contain information from individuals who use data opt-out services. People who did not use data opt-out services and resided in the United States were immediately found. The archive also contains data on deceased people.

A proposed class action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, Fort Lauderdale Division, on behalf of Christopher Hofmann, who said he received a notification from his identity theft protection service provider the month before that his data was on the dark web due to a data breach.

Read more about it here.

CrowdStrike is being sued by its shareholders after a faulty update released on July 19, 2024 by CrowdStrike Falcon caused Windows systems to display the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) screen. The flawed release caused widespread global disruptions, impacting critical infrastructure such as airports, hospitals, banks, and government services. It caused 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems globally to crash.

The lawsuit accuses CrowdStrike executives of making “false and misleading” statements that the company’s software updates were adequately tested.

CrowdStrike denies the allegations and has announced it will oppose the proposed class action lawsuit.

“We believe this case lacks merit and we will vigorously defend the company,” a spokesperson said.

Delta Air Lines’ CEO, Ed Bastian, revealed in a recent CNBC interview that the outage caused by Crowdstrike led to $500 million in losses for the airline. Delta is now seeking compensation from CrowdStrike, as well as from Microsoft.

Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft denied any wrongdoing. CrowdStrike pointed out that “no other US airline had cancelled one-tenth as many flights”. Microsoft pointed out that Delta’s IT systems were outdated.

The company’s share price dropped 32% in the 12 days after the incident, causing a loss in market value of $25 billion.

Read more about it here.

A defective update released by CrowdStrike Falcon is causing Windows systems to display the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) screen. The incident is causing widespread global disruptions, impacting critical infrastructure such as banks, airports and hospitals.

The company stated that they have identified the content deployment related to this issue and reverted those changes.

The bad release, containing an invalid Windows driver, was published just after midnight Eastern time on July 19, 2024, and rolled back an hour and a half later, at 1:27 AM Eastern, CrowdStrike said. But by then millions of computers had already automatically downloaded the faulty update. When Windows devices using CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity tools tried to access the flawed file, it caused an “out-of-bounds memory read” that “could not be gracefully handled, resulting in a Windows operating system crash,” CrowdStrike said. The issue affected only Windows devices, not Mac or Linux machines, and only those that were switched on and able to receive updates during those early morning hours.

IT giants Google and Microsoft were also impacted by the incident: Virtual machines using the CrowdStrike agent experienced serious problems.

What’s been described as the largest IT outage in history will cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses, according to one insurer’s analysis.

CrowdStrike Falcon detects and blocks hacking threats. The company confirmed that the incident was not a result of a cyber attack.

Read more about it here.

French cloud computing provider OVHcloud revealed in the beginning of July 2024 that it had mitigated in April 2024 the largest ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in terms of packet rate, amid an overall increase in DDoS attack intensity. This is just above the previous record of 809 million Mpps reported by Akamai as targeting a large European bank in June 2020.

The analysis of the malicious traffic revealed that most of the source IPs are known as Internet-facing MikroTik routers, specifically cloud core routers CCR1036-8G-2S+ and CCR1072-1G-8S+.

99% of the malicious traffic were TCP ACK flood, originating from around 5,000 source IPs. The remaining 1% was a DNS reflection attack that involved about 15,000 DNS servers, to amplify the traffic, which is not really efficient when trying to achieve high packet rate attacks.

The experts at OVHcloud speculate that the use of MikroTik devices in coordinated DDoS attacks might be due to the “Bandwidth test” feature in RouterOS, which allows administrators to test router throughput by crafting packets and performing stress tests. For versions after 6.44beta39, this feature uses all available bandwidth by default, potentially impacting network usability. Most of the offending IPs identified were running RouterOS v6.44 or above.

Read more about it here.

Prudential Financial, a global financial services company, has disclosed that over 2.5 individuals people had their personal information compromised in a February 2024 data breach.

The company did not share details of the cyber attack, however, notorious ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang claimed responsibility for the security breach.

Initially, in March 2024, the company revealed in a filing with the Maine Attorney General’s Office that it notified over 36,000 people whose personal information (including names, driver’s license numbers, and non-driver identification card numbers) was stolen during the breach. The company then stated that “a small percentage of company user accounts associated with employees and contractors” were breached.

However, in the end of June, the company updated the information shared with the Maine Attorney General’s Office regarding the February data breach and said that the incident impacted 2,556,210 individuals.

Prudential is the second largest life insurance company in the US, with 40,000 employees worldwide, revenues of $54 billion in 2023, and managing $1.45 trillion in assets.

Read more about it here.