Riot Rage in Gabon Leads to Internet Shutdown, LinkedIn is Being Scraped by Bots for Over a Year Now And More in This Weeks News

CloudFlare informs of internet shutdown in Gabon

Three people were killed and around 1000 were arrested in Gabon in a second day of rioting after the re-election of Ali Bongo as President. Additionally, CloudFlare witnessed a sudden shutdown of internet access from Gabon to sites that use their services. Along with that information, they've submitted graphs showing the minuscule amount of traffic coming from Gabon supporting their claim.

Profile data from LinkedIn is being scraped for over a year

The bad bot problem is internet-wide, but on LinkedIn, things may have gone out of hand. Scrapers generate data by stealing content from LinkedIn that would otherwise require resources and time to acquire. They've been doing this for a year now, and the legality of these actions is still up to debate.

"During periods of time since December 2015, and to this day, unknown persons and/or entities employing various automated software programs (often referred to as ‘bots’) have extracted and copied data from many LinkedIn pages.”
- Official complaint filed in the Northern California U.S. District Court

AWS scales up their DDoS capabilities

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently published a white paper detailing the best practices against DDoS attacks for enterprises that have public-facing endpoints. There they explain the most crucial part of DDoS mitigation is the implementation of a network architecture that is capable of detecting and filtering excess traffic. Other than this, they offer other services such as elastic load balancing, elastic compute cloud (EC2), Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon API Gateway.

Level 3 unveils new research about malware called BASHLITE

Lizkebab, BASHLITE, Torius or gafgyt, a malware family responsible for botnets that control approximately one million endpoints (96% are IoT devices) has been researched by Level 3 threat intelligence and research arm. Some of the interesting takeaways are that the large percentage of bots are located in Taiwan, Brazil and Colombia, 75 percent of attacks are shorter than 5 minutes and a shortlist of advices to the IoT user that everyone should follow.

Read more: Level 3

CDNetworks hires CCgroup in UK

CDNetworks has appointed a tech PR agency called CCgroup to manage its UK PR communications and also do SEO, PPC and sales for them there.

This is an exciting time for CDNetworks to be marketing more heavily in the UK market, especially as the Chinese market becomes a target for more and more UK businesses. Yet many are unaware of the challenges inherent in such a strategy. We see this engagement as an opportunity to help drive awareness of an important issue for UK businesses, while simultaneously using our creativity and industry insight to deliver tangible commercial impact across multiple marketing channels.”
- Will Gardiner (Head of Business Technology at CCgroup)