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Articles

Did Facebook and Instagram get hit by DDoS attack?

27 Jan 2015
3 min. read

After the outage of some popular web services including Facebook and Instagram, possibility of a cyber attack is being considered. Labris Networks, which provides cyber security for over 3,500 middle and high level corporations and organizations including military organizations, ministries and privately held companies in more than 20 countries with its product family consisting of HARPP DDoS Mitigator Cyber Warfare Tool, made a statement about the reasons of this latest case and the extent of DDoS threat via company’s CTO Oğuz Yılmaz.

After the outage of some popular web services including Facebook and Instagram, possibility of cyber attack is being considered. Labris Networks, which developed Türkiye’s first national firewall in 2003, Türkiye’s first native UTM product in 2005 and is capable of instant monitoring and control in its Security Operations Center, made a statement about the latest event. “In our research, we found out that this could be due to a DDoS attack. The hacker group Lizard Squad and DEAS also claimed responsibility for the attack. However, before Facebook issues an official statement, we cannot know for sure that the first source of this situation is related with these DDoS attacks. The outage due to a technical problem could be exploited with a DDoS attack to make Facebook experience more problems,” said Labris Networks CTO Oğuz Yılmaz in his statement.

Pointing out that Lizard Squad that claimed the responsibility for the attack made similar attacks in the past, Labris Networks CTO Oğuz Yılmaz said, “We see that Lizard Squad is involved in Playstation Network attacks throughout the year, as well as PSN and Microsoft Xbox gaming network attacks in Christmas. This group gets paid for making DDoS attacks to third parties via its website. We have been monitoring them and in 2014 they started to create an important attack network (botnet) through some major security flaws. This attack network has been created in the last months of year by exploiting certain vulnerabilities in server systems that have high bandwidth and powerful hardware. And this botnet could have been used for the first time in this attack. Even though their website was hacked and subsequently some of their clients were unveiled and some people were arrested on charges of being their member, the cellular structure of these groups make it hard to wipe out all organization at once.”

Labris Networks – which provides cyber security for over 3,500 middle and high level corporations and organizations including military organizations, ministries and privately held companies in more than 20 countries with its product family consisting of HARPP DDoS Mitigator Cyber Warfare Tool – warns organizations that DDoS attacks (which became well known with 2013 Anonymous and 2013 RedHack attacks) can be repeated in 2015 in great capacities with miscellaneous botnets created by Lizard Squad and similar groups. Stating that the attacks will become more intricate, Labris Networks CTO Oğuz Yılmaz said it was only possible to get protection with smarter systems and skilled professionals.

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