In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.
InfraGard is a national non-profit organization serving as a public-private partnership between U.S. businesses and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The organization is an information sharing and analysis effort serving the interests, and combining the knowledge base of, a wide range of private sector and government members. InfraGard is an association of individuals that facilitates information sharing and intelligence between businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to preventing hostile acts against the United States.
The Internet has a long history of turbulent relations, major maliciously designed disruptions, and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
Operation Payback was a coordinated, decentralized group of attacks on high-profile opponents of Internet piracy by Internet activists using the "Anonymous" moniker. Operation Payback started as retaliation to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on torrent sites; piracy proponents then decided to launch DDoS attacks on piracy opponents. The initial reaction snowballed into a wave of attacks on major pro-copyright and anti-piracy organizations, law firms, and individuals. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Pirate Party UK and United States Pirate Party criticised the attacks.
Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market. It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts." As part of the dark web, Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 Bitcoins.
Anonymous is a decentralised virtual community. They are commonly referred to as an internet-based collective of hacktivists whose goals, like its organization, are decentralized. Anonymous seeks mass awareness and revolution against what the organization perceives as corrupt entities, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Anonymous has had a hacktivist impact. This is a timeline of activities reported to be carried out by the group.
Operation In Our Sites is an ongoing effort by the U.S. government's National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center to detect and hinder intellectual property violations on the Internet. Pursuant to this operation, governmental agencies arrest suspects affiliated with the targeted websites and seize their assets including websites' domain names. Web users intending to access targeted websites are directed to the server operated by the U.S. government, and greeted with a graphic bearing the seals of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (NIPRCC), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Operation Onymous was an international law enforcement operation targeting darknet markets and other hidden services operating on the Tor network.
A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor and I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, stolen credit card details, forged documents, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, steroids, and other illicit goods as well as the sale of legal products. In December 2014, a study by Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth suggested the second most popular sites on Tor were darknet markets.
dark0de, also known as Darkode, is a cybercrime forum and black marketplace described by Europol as "the most prolific English-speaking cybercriminal forum to date". The site, which was launched in 2007, serves as a venue for the sale and trade of hacking services, botnets, malware, stolen personally identifiable information, credit card information, hacked server credentials, and other illicit goods and services.
High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) is an open-source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application designed to attack as many as 256 URLs at the same time. It was designed to replace the Low Orbit Ion Cannon which was developed by Praetox Technologies and later released into the public domain. The security advisory for HOIC was released by Prolexic Technologies in February 2012.
Stresser services provide denial-of-service attack as a service, usually as a criminal enterprise.
Dread is a Reddit-like dark web discussion forum featuring news and discussions around darknet markets. The site's administrators go by the alias of Paris and HugBunter.
Distributed Denial of Secrets, abbreviated DDoSecrets, is a nonprofit whistleblower site founded in 2018 for news leaks. The site is a frequent source for other news outlets and has worked on investigations including Cyprus Confidential with other media organizations. In December 2023, the organization said it had published over 100 million files from 59 countries.
The IT Army of Ukraine is a volunteer cyberwarfare organisation created at the end of February 2022 to fight against digital intrusion of Ukrainian information and cyberspace after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The group also conducts offensive cyberwarfare operations, and Chief of Head of State Special Communications Service of Ukraine Victor Zhora said its enlisted hackers would only attack military targets.
Killnet is a pro-Russia hacker group known for its DoS and DDoS attacks towards government institutions and private companies in several countries during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The group is thought to have been formed sometime around March 2022.
SSNDOB was an online marketplace that sold stolen Social Security numbers, birth dates and other personal information of U.S. citizens starting in 2012 until it was shut down in June 2022 following a U.S. government seizure. It used the domain names ssndob.ws, ssndob.vip, ssndob.club, and blackjob.biz.
BreachForums, sometimes referred to as Breached, is an English-language black hat–hacking crime forum. The website acted as an alternative and successor to RaidForums following its shutdown and seizure in 2022. Like its predecessor, BreachForums allows for the discussion of various hacking topics and distributed data breaches, pornography, hacking tools, and various other services.
Operation Lobos, also known as Operation Wolves, was a Brazilian-centered 12-country multinational operation to target the operations of a TOR onion service known as Baby Heart. Additional objectives and targets of the joint operation were the deanonymization of the TOR host servers, TOR administrators, and TOR users associated with the target website and several other targeted websites/chat-sites that were alleged to contain or be used to traffic illegal images of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) and other categories of legal nude and non-nude images of persons under 18. As of February 2024, the complete list of target websites/chat-sites involved in this operation has not been released by any government; however, the primary targets appeared to be the following: Baby Heart, Hurt-meh, Boyvids 4.0, Anjos Prohibidos (BR)/Forbidden Angels, and Loli Lust. Court documents have indicated that there were at least two other websites/chat-sites that were targeted; however, the names of the websites/chat-sites have not been made public.
