A group called the New World Hackers have taken credit for the largest DDoS attack in United States history, knocking out huge sites like Twitter, GrubHub, Spotify, and many other insanely popular websites. Although it has yet to be confirmed that the New World Hackers are actually responsible for the attack, an article on a pro-Anonymous blog site called AnonIntelGroup.com has an interview with the group that’s live now. The article is called “Twitter down ? It’s not the Russians …It’s The New World.”
Who Are The New World Hackers?
If the name New World Hackers is familiar to you, you might remember the group from last year’s attack on the BBC that took down the website for a short period of time. Obviously today’s attack is something much bigger, but if there’s anything good to take out of it, it’s that we know just how vulnerable our internet infrastructure can be.
You can read the full interview below:
Last year you guys hit BBC as a test of power . What made you guys decide to hit twitter and other services this time?
We have an annual power test each year and this is actually against Russia. Testing power is the key . Like that we see how much bandwidth each attack outputs…
How big is your botnets?
Our botnet is a supercomputer botnet consisting of over 100,000 iot devices.
What motivated this most recent show of force?
It’s for the good.. Russia is pretty much saying they are better than the U.S by hacking into everything attempting to start a war. We will show them a war.
Do you feel that people underestimate you guys?
Overall we feel that everyone underestimates us and doubts our possibility until they see it for themselves.
Do you guys worry about the amount of attention this is bringing?
We do worry about the amount of attention it brings, we don’t want federal agents on our ass. That’s why we are in Russia..
How do you think Russia would respond after performing an attack of this magnitude?
Russia should respond, but fuck them all. Our message to the world is stay educated.
What’s your message to the world?
Stay Educated.
What Happened?
Early Friday morning, the Dyn DNS Company, which essentially holds the key to accessing many important sites and apps on the web, was attacked by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Although many were quick to blame a State Party because of the immense size and success of the attack, the New World Hackers have claimed responsibility for the attack.
According to their own numbers, NWH has a botnet of over 100,000 Internet of Things (IOT) devices that they’re using to spam Dyn DNS.
Honestly an attack of this magnitude would probably have to be accomplished by something a bit bigger than 100K devices, but what do we know? We can say that another theory of who’s responsible is the Mirai-based botnet, a piece of malware that searches for vulnerable IOT devices and infects them, adding them to their botnet. At last estimation, it was believed that almost 500K devices were infected and added to the botnet.
That being said, we’re certainly not discounting the abilities of the New World Hackers. Taking down the BBC is not easy, and they almost certainly have gained in strength and numbers since doing so. We’ll probably find out if they’re for real within the week.