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DDoS attacks and Botnets

Attacks on mobile software almost doubled in 2018
Kaspersky Labs has released an interesting report entitled "Mobile malware evolution 2018", available at this address, which takes stock of the spread of malware on mobile devices in the past year, offering a useful tool to try to understand the future trend and react now.
Among the results highlighted by the report, which was conducted on the basis of data collected by devices with installed Kaspersky applications, the most important regards the number of attacks recorded: from 66.4 million in 2017 to 116.5 in 2018; on the other hand, the number of compromised installation packages has decreased (5,321,142 in 2018, almost 500 thousand less than the previous year).
Compromised apps include droppers (drop-down trojans that bypass checks and "drop the actual malicious package), adware (invasive advertising), risktool (apps that can cause physical damage) and spyware, including home banking systems, given their increasingly widespread use.

StealthWorker uses Windows and Linux to puncture sites
Fortiner researchers have identified a botnet that uses StealthWorker, a malware discovered a few weeks earlier by Malwarebytes.
Compared to the first version that focused only on Windows, this version of the malware has as its goal Linux, thus becoming a multi-platform threat; not only: by analyzing the open directories available on the C2 servers (Command & Control) indicated in the Malwarebytes report, evidence has been found that even the Mips and ARM architectures - therefore IoT devices - are involved. In both cases an automatic execution is scheduled to survive the restarts that releases the malware payload. Each infected machine is used to attach CMS installations like Joomla, Magento, Drupal and WordPress with brute force login attempts, and if the attack succeeds, not only are the credentials sent to the C2 server, but the compromised host becomes a zombie, creating a real botnet.

The need of extending wireless networks is a constant when working with network infrastructures. Usually the problem lies in designing and planning an architecture that maximizes the ratio between the number of access points and the surface covered, also given an economical constraint.
However, in some situations radio connections can be helpful, for instance when there are just two points to connect, yet quite distant. In such a situation you can’t trust regular access points (including long-range units), you must choose a point-to-point (PtP) or multi-point (PtMP) solution.
Ubiquiti offers a range of antennae suitable for this need, grouped by power and transmission: NanoBeam and NanoStation for connections up to 5km, LiteBeam, PowerBeam and AirFiber for connections up to 15km, and higher-end products capable of covering a distance of tens of kilometers.


We at GURUadvisor we’ve often talked about FreeNAS as a strong and evaluated open-source platform for the realization of NAS systems (even with non-dedicated hardware). We’ll now analyze an interesting alternative, open-source too, by discovering key features and weaknesses.

Openmediavault -or OMV for the sake of brevity, is a Debian based operating system, optimized and customized for the implementation of Network Attached Storage solutions: its main field of use is in labs, homes and SMBs. The main features include the support to the main network services (SSH, FTP, SMB/CIFS, Rsync and so forth), logic volumes management, S.M.A.R.T. checks on disks, email notifications, link aggregation and plugins to further expand its features.