It is Sunday 15 December 2019 as this is published and I am working on editing and writing more for my book and hope to have it in a good state to self publsh by by January 2020!
Updates of my book project are available from this page >> Book Updates << and once I have published it, this page will also have updates of new book projects and any giveaways associated with them.
Below is an excerpt of one of the chapters of my book "Unmasking the Hacker, Demystifing cybercrime", this one is about DDoS and Botnets
A way for criminals to cause major disruptions to the networks or websites of businesses for malicious reasons such as hacktivism or financial gain, is a type of cybercrime called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The criminals behind these DDoS incidents may not have created the malware themselves, as they may have purchased from others who have created it to sell as a type of malware as a service (MaaS), and they may not actually perform the DDoS themselves, as they may purchase the services from other criminals as a DDoS for hire.
As many computers are needed to create the network traffic to cause a DDoS, criminals infect the computers of individuals and businesses, via malicious attachments in spam emails for example, to act as their slaves, or bots. These infected computers, which collectively form a botnet, are not just used to deliver DDoS however, as criminals also use them to send spam emails and malware.
An example of a denial of service incident occurred in 2012, when DDoS attacks were launched against the websites of both the United Kingdom Home Office and politician Theresa May. These attacks prevented legitimate visitors to those websites and, the decentralised hacktivist group, Anonymous publicly declared it was in response to a proposed extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden1. In November 2012 a man was arrested in England due to his alleged association2 with these cybercrime incidents.
Another example of hacktivism, in this case allegedly to demonstrate that certain game console companies hadn’t invested enough in cybers security, occurred towards the end of 2015. A hacker group calling themselves the Phantom Squad used the social media platform Twitter to share its alleged motivations to take down the gaming networks of two large companies, in a DDoS attack in a similar manner to another group, the Lizard squad.
1 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/21/anonymous-hits-government-websites-julian-assange
2 https://www.scmagazineuk.com/article/1483374
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| Sample page of book Unmasking the Hacker |