Jay Clemens
Level 3 Communications has moved to thwart what it believes is a form of cyber attack by blocking data traffic to a network of servers in China, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The company detected a group of malicious computers that Level 3 says is responsible for denial-of-service-attacks on various websites, Drew Fitzgerald reports.
SSHPsychos — the group of attackers — targeted point of sale terminals with a software called Poseidon from network addresses that the company believes were recently flagged as threats, according to the report.
Fitzgerald writes the addresses were linked to Russian and European servers that work to steal data through compromised credit card scanners.
Level 3 severed the Internet protocol addresses of data centers registered in Hong Kong from the Internet, the Journal reports.
“Sometimes you have to cut off a finger to save the body,†Brett Wentworth, Level 3 director of global security, told the Journal.
