Top 10 Well Known Hacking Groups Of All Time

Like the animals, hackers also hack their prey in groups. Sometimes these groups become famous for perceived good deeds like hacking ISIS websites done by Anonymous but most of the time these hacker groups operate against the law. Some of the hacker groups have since disbanded after being in public eye. The prime example of infamous hackers group is Lizard Squad. They DDoSed the PlayStation and Xbox servers right during the time of Christmas weekend earning them many villains.

Today we are listing top such 10 most notorious hackers of all time.

1. Lizard Squad

The DDoS attack on Facebook that lowered the popular social media network as well the cyber attacks on Malaysia Airlines website that directed visitors to a page which read “404 – plane not found,” were carried out by the Lizard Squad. While Facebook refused to accept being hacked, Malaysia Airlines stated that their domain had been temporarily redirected elsewhere and that they had not been hacked. Lizard Squad has also hacked Microsoft and Sony.

The intentions of Lizard Squad look dark and gloomy due to the diverse history of their work. They are not totally computer hackers as most of the hack they do is comedy. The group is responsible for a high-profile hack of Microsoft Xbox Live and Sony’s Playstation Network. In August 2014, the group posted the ISIS flag on Sony’s servers and made other indirect references to the “cyber caliphate.” The group was arrested by the authorities in the U.S. and England after the Xbox and Playstation hacks.

2. Syrian Electronic Army

The Syrian Electronic Army claims to target political opposition groups and claims to support the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It calls itself “a group of enthusiastic Syrian youths who could not stay passive towards the massive distortion of facts about the recent uprising in Syria”.

It becomes involved in the use of malware, phishing, defacement, spamming, and denial of service (DDoS) attacks with often posting the Syrian flag on a victim’s website. Some have even assumed as a fact that the group is connected with the Syrian state. The group have targeted the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as technology companies and news organizations. Their tone is “serious and political to ironic and humorous.”

3. LulzSec

After the HBGary Federal hack of 2011, LulzSec – Lulz Security abbreviated – formed as an Anonymous spinoff. It’s slogan was “Laughing at your security since 2011.” The group announced itself with a hack against Fox.com, then Sony Pictures in 2011. The group took the CIA website offline.

LulzSec had become well known for ridiculing its victims after an attack, which made the analysts compare them to the hacks to internet pranks. In June 2011, a ‘50 days of Lulz’ statement announced that the group had fallen out. However, on July 18, the News Corporation was hacked by the group, who had posted false news about the death of Rupert Murdoch.

In 2012, the LulzSec members were arrested by the FBI after the group’s leader, Sabu, turned them in. Prosecutor Sandip Patel said the group thought of themselves as “latter-day pirates.”

4. Anonymous

“We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forgive…. Expect us.”

Known most for its hacking and Guy Fawkes masks, Anonymous is a decentralized open online creation group. Reports conceive that Anonymous is made up of thousands of “hacktivists.” The group has compromised religious, corporate and government websites.

The group has declared war on Scientology and hacked the Pentagon. In 2012’s Operation Payback, they also attacked MasterCard, Visa and PayPal for refusing to process payments to WikiLeaks, which in turn led WikiLeaks to choose the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Anonymous supported Occupy Wall Street and hacked the New York Stock Exchange website in 2011.

For being involved in Anonymous, individuals have been arrested in the U.S., UK, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, and Turkey.

5. The Level Seven Crew

Rumored to be encouraged by the seventh level of hell from Dante’s Inferno, ‘the violent’ level, this hacking group hacked 60 high profile computer systems (NASA, The First American National Bank, Sheraton Hotels) in 1999. They also hacked into the US Embassy in China’s website. However, this group broke up and stopped functioning in 2000.

6. Network Crack Program Hacker (NCPH) Group

It was alleged that the NCPH Group was formed in China in 1994, whose leader Tan Dailin was apparently working for the Chinese army. It is believed that the People’s Liberation Army was funded by the NCPH. The group appears to be based out of Zigon in Sichuan Province.

7. Chaos Computer Club (CCC)

The mission of the Chaos Computer Club is to uncover the security flaws, which basically does not only depend upon illegal activities. It was founded in Berlin during the early 1980s and is one of the largest European hacking groups. The group made its point after they used the Bildschirmtext page to steal 134,000 Deutsch Marks from a Hamburg bank, only to send the money back after having completed its mission the next day, which was to expose a security flaw.

Early CCC member Andy Müller-Maguhn in an interview with OWNI stated: “we needed a lot of legal experts to advise us what we could or could not hack, and to help us distinguish between legal activities and grey areas of legality”. The group’s kindly approach has allowed the CCC to become “an accepted and recognized entity because it has worked to educate the public about technology since the 1980s,” Müller-Maguhn added. The group’s most recent focus has been on the mass surveillance complex, in order to fit in a German hacker ring. CCC Member Falk Garbsch stated:

There have to be consequences. The work of intelligence services has to be reviewed – as does their right to exist. If necessary, their aims and methods will have to be redefined. …We have to think about how these [shared]data are processed and where they can be allowed to resurface. And this is not just the challenge for 2015, but for the next 10 years.

The group has strongly objected French nuclear tests, made full use of COMP128 encryption algorithm of a GSM customer card, stole money on live TV via Microsoft’s ActiveX; and examined the German federal government’s own malware. The group’s press release on the topic reads:

“The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.”

The CCC may have characteristics of a Marxist, after being caught selling source code from U.S. corporations and governments to the Soviet Union’s secret police KGB.

8. globalHell

globalHell was founded by street-gang member Patrick Gregory. Data on 115 websites were reportedly destroyed by the group charging millions in damages. In order to get away from street gang life, Gregory had turned to computer. His crew of hackers behaved basically the same as a street gang. “global hell will not die” was reportedly written by the group on the United States Army’s website. Gregory confessed in court to causing $2.5 million in hacking damages.

9. Iran’s Tarh Andishan

Looks like the Tarh Andishan wants to control the world’s web-based systems. Mostly based in Tehran, Iran, the group is approximated to have 20 members. A talented hacker group, Tarh Andishan looks like grew out of a Stuxnet worm virus, which Iran claimed the US and Israel had created.

The Iranian government doubled-down on its cyber warfare. The group uses self-propagating software, backdoors, SQL injection, systems, and other techniques. The group is best known for one of the attacks called “Operation Cleaver.” This hacker group has apparently hacked security systems and airline gates. Most findings were not taken into consideration due to the “grave risk to the physical safety of the world” the group reportedly poses, according to the report.

10. TeaMp0isoN:

A 16-year-old hacker with a pseudonym TriCk started this group in 2010. TeaMp0isoN hacked into Facebook, NATO, the English Defense League, including Tony Blair’s email account. The group broke up and stopped functioning in 2012. However, in 2015, the group rebranded itself as a white-hat computer security research group.

There are several other hacking groups who may be more deadlier than the above. We have listed only those hacker groups who have consistently been able to be in public eye due to their hacking exploits.

source:TechWorm

You can list the hacker groups which you think should have been included in the top 10 list, in the comments below.

The Top Hacker Tools you need to know!!!

Every task requires a good set of tools.This because having right tools in hand one can save much of its energy and time.In the world of Cyber Hacking (“Cyber Security” formally) there are millions of tools which are available on the Internet either as Freewares or as Sharewares.

If you are security researcher, pentester or a system admin, you need to have this on your PCs/laptops to find the vulnerabilities and plug them. Concise Courses conducted an online poll to determine top ten hacking tools out of some of the famous ones. Here is the list which came out the winner on the poll.

1. Nmap:  Network Mapper

Abbreviated as nmap is a versatile tool for Network Security, plus it is free and open source.It  is largely used by network administrators for network discovery and security auditing. System admins use nmap for network inventory, determining open ports, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host(A term used for “a computer on a network”) or service uptime. The tool uses raw IP packets in many creative ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) they offer,which type of protocols are being used for providing the services,what operating systems (and OS versions and possible patches) and what type and version of packet filters/ firewalls are being used by the target.

2. Metasploit:

A tool for exploiting (Utilising network weakness for making a “backdoor”) vulnerabilities (Weak Points) on Network. This tool is neither free nor open source. But when it comes to features offered it deserves the price it claims. The Metasploit Project is a hugely popular pentesting (penetration testing) or hacking tool that is used by cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers. Metasploit is essentially a computer security project that supplies information about known security vulnerabilities and helps to formulate penetration testing and IDS testing.

3. Cain and Abel:

Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool that is mostly used for Microsoft Operating Systems. This popular hacking tool allows the user to seek the recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network(capturing some of the data packets), cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force(Generation of hashes out of words and then comparison of encrypted hash with the generated one,this method takes less time than dictionary attack method) and Cryptanalysis attacks. Cain, as it is often referred to, can also record VoIP(Voice over IP protocol,used for making calls over using internet) conversations, decode hashed scrambled passwords, recover wireless network keys and more.It can crack various types of hashes including NTLM,MD2,MD5,SHA-1,SHA-2 and many more.These functionalities make Cain and Abel one of the best password recovery tool.

4. Angry IP Scanner: 

Angry IP Scanner, also known as ‘ipscan’ is a freely available (open-source and cross-platform) hacking network scanner that is both fast and easy to use. The main purpose of this hacking tool is to scan IP addresses and ports to find open doors and ports. Worth noting that Angry IP Scanner also has a bunch of other uses as well. Common users of this hacking tool include network administrators and system engineers.

5.John The Ripper: 

John the Ripper is a popular password cracking pentesting tool that is most commonly used to perform dictionary attacks. John the Ripper takes text string samples (from a text file, referred to as a wordlist, containing popular and complex words found in a dictionary or real passwords cracked before), encrypting it in the same way as the password being cracked (including both the encryption algorithm and key), and comparing the output to the encrypted string. This tool can also be used to perform a variety of alterations to dictionary attacks.Including Brute Force and Rainbow attacks.

6. THC Hydra:

Although often considered as yet another password cracker, THC Hydra is hugely popular and has a very active and experienced development team. Essentially THC Hydra is a fast and stable Network Login Hacking Tool that will use dictionary or brute-force attacks to try various password and login combinations against an log in page. This hacking tool supports a wide set of protocols including Mail (POP3, IMAP, etc.), Databases, LDAP(Lightweight Directory Access Protocol),SMB, VNC, and SSH(Secure Shell,used by VPN Softwares).

7. Burp Suite:

A pentesting tool,Burp Suite has several features that can help the penetration tester or ethical hacker. Two commonly used applications used within this tool include the ‘Burp Suite Spider’ which can enumerate and map out the various pages and parameters of a web site by examining cookies and initiates connections with these web applications, and the ‘Intruder’ which performs automated attacks on web applications.

8. Nessus Remote Security Scanner

Recently went closed source, but is still essentially free. Works with a client-server framework. Nessus is the worlds Nessus Remote Security Scanner most popular vulnerability scanner used in over 75,000 organizations world-wide. Many of the worlds largest organizations are realizing significant cost savings by using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications. (This tool is not in the Concise list)

9. Ettercap:

Ettercap has a huge following and is widely used by cyber security professionals. Ettercap works by placing the user’s network interface into promiscuous mode and by ARP poisoning(ARP : Address resolution protocol is used to determine a host’s MAC address (address of its Network Interface Card) by knowing its IP address. ARP poisoning is a process where a hacker gives wrong information of either its MAC or IP address to the network.) the target machines, i.e. facilitating a ‘Man In The Middle’ or MITM attack. Once successful Ettercap (and the hacker) can deploy various attacks on the victims. A popular feature about Ettercap is its’ ability to support various plugins.

10. Wapiti:

Wapiti has a very loyal following. As a pentesting tool (or framework) Wapiti is able to scan and detect hundreds of possible vulnerabilities. Essentially this Multi Purpose Hacker Tools can audit the security of web applications by performing “black-box” scans, i.e. it does not study the source code of the application but will scan the HTML pages of the application seeking scripts and forms where it can inject data.

 

source: Techworm,Concise

 

If you have any favorite tool of your own which we have not mentioned in the article, kindly mention it in the comments so that we can include it in our next list.

What is DDOS attack?

Today, every information we shares on the internet, are being saved somewhere in server. It is very important to keep servers alive to access those information. Some information can be share to anyone but some of them are very important for us and we can’t let anyone know. Hackers always try to get private information to do their dirty work.

But, Hacking is not just about stealing the information. When hackers do not get success in stealing , they try to down the whole server. In this case, we may lose all the information on the server if we don’t have backup or a proper defense.

Now a days, we hear about attacks on gaming networks , news websites, bank websites etc. And when i write about those attacks i mention one term that is ‘DDoS’. Many readers may already know about ‘DDoS’ attacks but many of them are still not aware and they always ask me : What is DDoS ?

So in this article, i  am going to explain everything you need to know about DDoS attacks. If you will have any question, you can ask in comment section.

Distributed denial of service (DDos) attack refers to the attempt to make online service unavailable through overwhelming it with traffic from numerous sources. DDoS attack targets a wide range of important resources including news websites, banks, and many more. They pose a challenge to people’s attempts to access or publish important information.A decade ago, DDOS was only a basic attack that trying to overwhelm connection with traffic with the aim of taking a certain web property offline. When leading web experts began fighting DDoS attack in the year 2000, the flood attacks ranged at 400 Mbps but as we speak they exceed 100 Gbps.

The attackers build a network of infected computers called botnet and spread the malicious software through websites, emails and social media. The machines are capable of being controlled remotely once infected without the knowledge of owners. These machines are then used like the army in launching an attack against the target. Some botnet are as strong as millions of machines. The floods are generated in numerous ways including sending more connection requests that exceeds what a server can handle. They can also be generated by having the computers send to the victim huge volume of random data with the intention of using up the target’s bandwidth. Some DDOS attacks are so huge that they can max out the whole country’s international cable capacity.

Specialized online marketers exist who buy and sell individual DDoS attacks or botnet. By using these marketplaces, anyone can pay some fee in order to silence websites that they disagree with or to bring to complete halt online operations of a particular organization. A week-long DDoS attack for instance that is capable of bringing a small firm offline could cost as little as $200.

Beyond the democratization of DDoS attacks are the advanced techniques and targets. Today DDoS involves a series of attacks targeting multiple devices that consist of the organization’s security infrastructure as opposed to targeting connection bandwidth only. They include various applications and firewall or IPS devices that organizations rely on such as DNS, SMTP, VOIP, HTTPS and HTTP. The latest version of DDOS attack is the common multi-vector attack that combines flood, state exhaustion and application attacks against the infrastructure devices in a sustained single attack. These attacks have gained popularity due to their effectiveness and the fact that they are hard to defend against.

Today’s new realities of DDOS attack require new approaches to defense. Network experts have been in the forefront in looking for ways to combat DDOS attack for some years now. The best defensive mechanism against the modern DDOS attack is the layered approach combining cloud based protection and on-premise. With this type of protection, you are guaranteed of 100% security for your organization against the entire spectrum of DDOS attacks. A digital attack map is also ideal for protection against a DDOS attack because it displays global DDOS activities on any particular day. It displays the attacks as dotted lines that are scaled to size and stored in line with their source and the destination countries of attack traffic when they are known.

 

If you have some suggestions of your own please let us know in comments!