Corero Network Security Share Discussion Threads

[rolo7] 28/1/2016 20:48

big trades at last here today hidden at the close
25.0000 154,384
16:37:08 24.0000 318,952

[affc21] 24/1/2016 18:02

Irish government websites hit by widening DDoS attacks

First they came for the forums. Then the lottery. Now...


22 Jan 2016


A number of Irish government-related and public sector websites were knocked offline by an apparent DDoS attack on Friday morning.

The latest assaults follow apparently similar web attacks on the popular boards.ie discussion boards (bang) and the Irish National Lottery earlier (wallop) this week.

At the time of first of the assaults against boards.ie, an individual using a pseudonym got in touch to suggest follow-up assaults against a wider range of Irish sites would follow, ostensibly motivated by a desire to highlight security weaknesses.

This is the beginning of a national cybersecurity audit. There is a team of security folks testing a lot of Irish websites.
They have indicated that news outlets and financial institutions will be next. Their goal is to highlight poor security practices within Ireland and to raise the bar on a national level.

El Reg has received confirmation through reliable local sources that the “tests” are not part of any official program and are being treated as a criminal matter.

Stephanie Weagle, senior director of Corero Network Security, a company that specialises in mitigating DDoS attacks, commented: "The Irish Government Infrastructure appears to be the target of cyber attack activity, specifically malicious DDoS events, impacting a variety of public sector website properties, rendering then inaccessible.

"Motivations for DDoS attacks are so wide ranging and sometimes random in nature. Regardless of the stimulus, the impact can be wide quite damaging,” she added.

[cottoner] 21/1/2016 20:45

And finally.... for the time being :-)

The Exponential Growth of DDoS Attacks
21 JAN 2016

DDoS attacks are one of the most common forms of cyber-attack happening in the world today.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen some gargantuan DDoS attacks. From Sony to Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Dell, and most recently the BBC. These organizations are some of the largest in the world, and yet they have been unable to handle the capacity generated by attacks as large as 602gbps. Only a couple of months ago did a group of hackers take down one of the internet’s DNS root servers - a datacenter which forms part of the backbone of the internet, using a DDoS attack of unprecedented proportions. I repeat; someone broke the internet.

What we are seeing here is a trend in which the power of DDoS attacks is going in a general upwards direction, which is bad news for, well, everything really. In 2012 the largest DDoS attack was approximately 300gbps, compared to the 600gbps attack on the BBC recently. These attacks are getting bigger, and the largest of organizations are now struggling to cope with the sheer power of these attacks.

Additionally, bandwidth and internet speeds are getting faster and faster. Five years ago the average broadband speed was approximately 9Mbit/s, whilst the average today is approximately 22Mbit/s. We are also looking at much faster home computers these days, with new technologies such as the multi-tiered N3XT chip set to revolutionise home computing with potential performance boosts by a factor of 1000. DDoS attacks typically harness the power of home computers affected by Malware by incorporating these machines into a very large botnet, therefore faster home computers means more powerful DDoS attacks.

All of this can mean only one thing; DDoS will get worse. The question is, how do we stop this?

In my opinion, there are two possibilities:

1 - The internet needs bigger veins. A big upgrade to the backbone of the internet will see most datacenters such as those held by large organizations being able to cope with much larger attacks. This is, of course, far from future-proof. An upgrade now would mean that DDoS attacks will be big news again in a few years once the power of DDoS attacks has caught up, and the vicious cycle would continue. Not only does this fail to address the root cause, but it would be very expensive, datacenters would have to improve their capability in order to handle additional bandwidth, and world leaders would have to attend far too many meetings.

2 - Defence technology needs a bigger brain. Significant improvements in the algorithms that detect DDoS attacks have to be made, and these improvements have to be public so that vendors such as CloudFlare, Cisco and Incapsula can provide the required levels of protection to organizations sustaining these attacks. There are multiple techniques for conducting DDoS attacks, such as Amplification and SYN flooding. More research into these techniques would likely discover more efficient ways to defend against them, enabling vendors to block this kind of malicious traffic rather than overcome the power of these attacks with brute-force.



I believe that option two is the best way forward, however most technology companies with an R&D department wouldn’t release their findings free of charge. Luckily for us, universities, some security companies, and even individuals actively conduct research on similar topics and release their findings without seeking financial incentive.

With more focus on researching ways to defend against DDoS attacks, we could put an end to this terribly disruptive medium, with long-term savings in the billions for corporations as they would no longer have to face the reputational and business-stopping effects caused by these attacks. It is strongly believed that defence will always play catch-up with attack, however I see no reason why strict adherence to the 7 P’s could not begin to level the playing field.

[cottoner] 21/1/2016 20:40

Irish lottery site and ticket machines hit by DDoS attack

On BBC site today


Ireland's National Lottery website and ticket machines were knocked offline after a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Wednesday.
Customers trying to buy tickets for the €12m (£9m) draw found themselves unable to do so for nearly two hours.
The jackpot was the largest in 18 months.
Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI), the operator, has said the incident is under investigation.
During a DDoS attack, a website or online service's capacity to handle internet traffic is overloaded - usually by automated programs set to flood the site with requests.
The attack began at 11:21 GMT on Wednesday and lasted for about two hours.
Retail systems were brought back online by 12:45 GMT and the website by 13:25 GMT.
"They said you couldn't buy tickets from the ticket machines, which is really interesting, it's not just the website - it would be quite interesting to understand why that happened," said John Graham-Cumming at DDoS-protection company Cloudflare.

'Under investigation'

"This incident is still under investigation," a spokeswoman said.
"However, we can confirm that at no point was the National Lottery gaming system or player data affected."
Given the large jackpot involved, the lottery was experiencing high demand for tickets on Wednesday lunchtime.
The impact of the attack may well have been heightened by this, according to Igal Zeifman, senior digital strategist at cybersecurity company Imperva.
"As a rule, record-setting prizes and jackpots result in traffic spikes on lottery sites, and it is very common for DDoS attackers to strike during such predictable peak traffic times, especially when going after big targets," he said.

[rolo7] 21/1/2016 20:28

cns very tightly held. Hopefully we had the pullback, got to ignore the daily movement of share prices long term investment here.... (my mistake is learnt)

[sandbag] 21/1/2016 20:18

I tried to buy 25000 shares several times this afternoon and couldn't get them on line. Obviously not many about. Didn't try them in smaller amounts. Wish I'd gone through the broker now.

[rolo7] 21/1/2016 20:00

No idea how to value cns but wish i had now not sold 50k of shares recently especially some before the rise. DDOS attack on irish lottery today hence pm rise. also insurance cover liability for cyber attacks Now if cns think they have the black box that car insurers put in cars to lower premiums in terms of cyber/ddos attacks..... (value= priceless)

[ff2345] 21/1/2016 16:13

How do you put a value on CNS?

[napoleon 14th] 20/1/2016 16:07

Brahms & Timberchopper - here's your chance at a low entry point if you like falling knives, which is what the market is today!

I'm not surprised:
napoleon 14th 10 Dec'15 - 20:45 - 206 of 275
"A bit like KNOS (I hold) there could be a spike worth cashing in
& buying back lower...
if you're that lucky!"

Humph! I missed that & still hold, & I don't intend selling 'cos IMO CNS could be a big, big win. Ignore the noise if you hold IMO, but share price moves are no surprise!

[cottoner] 17/1/2016 09:40

Look forward not back.

The Jam (Contracts) is being delivered.

[dlku] 17/1/2016 07:52

Interim results for the six month period ended 30 June 2015

Corero Network Security plc (AIM: CNS), the AIM listed network security company, announces its half yearly report for the six month period ended 30 June 2015.

Financial Highlights:

· Revenue $4.0 million (H1 2014: revenue $3.7 million)
· EBITDA loss* $3.5 million (H1 2014: loss $3.9 million)
· Loss before tax $5.6 million (H1 2014: loss $5.2 million)
· Loss per share 4.7 cents (H1 2014: loss per share 5.9 cents)



LOSS LOSS JAM TOMORROW

[affc21] 12/1/2016 14:15

ProactiveInvestors writer of this article (Dated: 10 December 2015), that is of the opinion that Corero have enough cash until break-even. I would have thought that Corero management would have given the all clear with the contents within this write-up for publishing.



Corero strikes 'milestone' deal with tier-one web giant Share
Dated: 10 Dec 2015

The business is now in commercial mode thanks to a £5mln fund-raise announced on July 30 that has equipped the company with the cash required to get Corero to break-even.

www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/120280/corero-strikes-milestone-deal-with-tier-one-web-giant-120280.html

[affc21] 12/1/2016 12:15

FT.com

Cyber security group Corero surges after $1m order wins

Corero Network Security
Shares in Corero Network Security jumped almost 80 per cent this week after the cyber security group announced a pair of big contract wins, writes Nicholas Megaw.

The company protects internet service providers and online businesses from distributed denial of service attacks, a type of hack which disables servers by flooding them with traffic.

Despite their simplicity, DDoS attacks have been used in recent high-profile attacks on targets including TalkTalk, the BBC and a string of Greek banks.

A $700,000 deal announced on Wednesday marked the biggest order to date for Corero’s flagship DDoS defence system. Together with another $400,000 order announced on Tuesday, the two contracts alone are worth more than a quarter of the company’s revenues in its last six-month reporting period.

Shares closed up 6.75 per cent at 27.5p on Friday, their highest level in three years.

[affc21] 11/1/2016 15:22

I mentioned in a previous posting that:
They were trialing their Ddos mitigation technology with 3 of the top 10 American Tier 1 ISP's (below is where I had that information from):



Half Yearly Report

Interim results for the six month period ended 30 June 2015

Operating Highlights:

· SmartWall TDS trials in progress with three of the top 10 US Internet service providers

[raysor] 11/1/2016 13:49

"today announced that InMotion Hosting, a privately held provider of web hosting services worldwide, is using the SmartWall Threat Defense System"

[affc21] 11/1/2016 13:28

In Rolo7's web link (above) it has the date as – January 11, 2016 under the title header.

[raysor] 11/1/2016 13:19

It doesn't say when the contract was finalised, appears to be a while ago rather than a new contract win.

[t0pgrader] 11/1/2016 13:06

interesting to note that IMH didnt previously have a solution in place other than a manual procedure which took the affected server offline

[spike_1] 11/1/2016 12:21

This morning's contract win NRNS is of limited value (to me) without some idea of the financial implications (and contract length). Ho hum.
Best wishes - Mike

[affc21] 11/1/2016 10:45

Well I'm staying invested here,Everything is starting to come good here with the recent North American and European tier 1 ISP orders.These orders are major achiements, with the very real potential of more to follow. They were trialing their Ddos mitigation technology with 3 of the top 10 American Tier 1 ISP's.Possibly one of the above already announced, with another two to follow. ..

[wh1spa] 11/1/2016 08:06

Banked a bit of a profit here as I reckon there is a high chance if a placing

[affc21] 10/1/2016 21:31

Rolo7, that would get my vote...