Insecurity experts have found a new botnet behind the more nasty denial of service attacks.
Dubbed "Darkness," is being controlled by several domains hosted in Russia and its operators are boasting that it can take down large sites with as few as 1,000 bots. The botnet is a successor to the older Black Energy and Illusion botnets and according to the Shadow Server Foundation it is capable of generating large volumes of attack traffic.
The researchers said that the throughput of the attack traffic directed simultaneously at multiple sites was quite impressive. The researchers claim that 'Darkness' is overtaking Black Energy as the DDoS weapon of choice and there also appear to be no shortage of buyers looking to add 'Darkness' to their botnet arsenal."
Shadowserver found that the Darkness botnet has been used to attack more than 100 targets in the last month including e-commerce and financial services sites.
Attacks can be launched for as little as $50 a day.
Beware of the Darkness
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