Monthly Archives: February 2014

Largest ever DDoS attack

CloudFlare said that the attack was close to 400Gbps in size, making it bigger than last year’s DDoS attack against anti-spam outfit Spamhaus, which was measured at just over 300Gbps. Confidentiality stopped CloudFlare from revealing the identify of the customer under attack, and there were few details on how many other companies had been affected. The DDoS attack did, however, seem to pose a bigger threat on European networks, with French hosting outfit OVH later reporting that it had fended off a 350Gbps attack. It’s not known if the same attacker was responsible.   Company CEO Matthew Prince responded to the news by saying on Twitter that “someone’s got a big, new cannon” and the attack was the “start of ugly things to come”.   While the size of this attack is likely to draw the headlines, it’s worth noting that hackers carried out the DDoS attack by using NTP reflection and amplification techniques, which are increasing common for overwhelming target servers by sending more data packets than switches can support.   The attack technique has been seen in relatively recent hacks against online gaming services like Steam, League of Legends and Battle and essentially aims to push big traffic to the target’s Network Timing Protocol (NTP) server.   In this instance, attackers used NTP reflection to exploit a weakness in the UDP-based NTP, which connects to the Internet to synchronise clocks on machines. The hackers then spoofed the IP address of the target, and sent DNS queries to open DNS resolvers that will answer requests from anywhere. As a result, overwhelming levels of traffic were sent back to the NTP server. CloudFlare has a detailed blog post on NTP reflection attacks.   Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Akamai Technologies, told SCMagazineUK.com that this method of attack troubles unpatched DNS servers, and said that is attractive to attackers because it can reflect huge traffic back to the target. He added that it’s also favourable to the attacker because UTP is “easily spoofed” and because it’s hard for victims to see who is behind the intrusion.   “The main reason for using NTP as an attack tool is that it increases traffic by 100 or 200 percent. It’s a great reflection index and makes for a very effective tool if you’re an attacker.   “At 400Gbps, it’s conceivable that the attack is being run by a small botnet outputting 20Gbps to 30Gbps of traffic,” he added.   McKeay, and other industry commentators, have advised IT administrators to patch and upgrade their NTP servers in light of this attack, although the Akamai exec admitted that some can assume that NTP servers are safe.   “NTP servers are often stable and so haven’t often been looked at before. [IT departments] are having to now.”   IT administrators are advised, in light of this attack, to patch and upgrade their NTP servers and to check management rights.   Speaking recently to SCMagazineUK.com , Visiting Professor John Walker, of Nottingham Trent University, warned that DDoS attacks will continue to be a big threat in 2014, and added that, since company divisions struggle to get their heads around the issue, the firm itself struggles to establish an effective defence strategy.   “Since they see the issue solely from their perspective, they cannot hope to develop an effective strategy to deal with this security problem,” he said at the time.   A previously unknown division of the UK Government was recently accused of launching DDoS attacks against hactivisim groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec, while a report from the end of last year revealed that most UK companies ignore DDoS threats. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/cloudflare-spots-largest-ever-ddos-attack/article/333480/

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Largest ever DDoS attack

Snapchat bug lets hackers aim DENIAL of SERVICE attacks at YOUR MOBE

Researcher allegedly blocked after he went public A security consultant who works for Telefonica has turned up a bug in how Snapchat handles authentication tokens, which enables a denial-of-service attack against users’ phones.…

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Snapchat bug lets hackers aim DENIAL of SERVICE attacks at YOUR MOBE

Snapchat Vulnerability Could Lead To iPhone DDoS Attacks

A cyber security researcher has discovered a vulnerability within the Snapchat mobile app that makes it possible for hackers to launch a denial-of-service attack that temporarily freezes a user’s iPhone. Jaime Sanchez, who works as a cyber-security consultant for Telefonica, a major telecommunications company in Spain, said he and another researcher found a weakness in Snapchat’s system that allows hackers to send thousands of messages to individual users in a matter of seconds. Sanchez said he and the fellow researcher discovered the glitch on their own time. Flooding one user with so many messages can clog their account to the point that the Snapchat app causes the entire device to freeze and ultimately crash, or require that the user perform a hard reset. Snapchat is a popular mobile app for iPhone and Android devices that allows users to send each other photo and video messages that disappear a few seconds after they are opened by their recipients. Every time a user attempts to send a message through Snapchat, a token, which is a code made up of letters and numbers, is generated to verify their identity. Sanchez, who wrote about his security findings on seguridadofensiva.com (in Spanish), said a flaw within Snapchat’s system allows hackers to reuse old tokens to send new messages. By reusing old tokens, hackers can send massive amounts of messages using powerful computers. This method could be used by spammers to send messages in mass quantities to numerous users, or it could be used to launch a cyber attack on specific individuals, he said. Sanchez demonstrated how this works by launching a Snapchat denial-of-service attack on my account. He sent my account 1,000 messages within five seconds, causing my device to freeze until it finally shut down and restarted itself. (See the video above.) Launching a denial-of-service attack on Android devices doesn’t cause those smartphones to crash, but it does slow their speed. It also makes it impossible to use the app until the attack has finished. Sanchez said he has not contacted Snapchat about the vulnerability because he claims the Los Angeles startup has no respect for the cyber security research community. He says Snapchat earned that reputation by ignoring advice in August and on Christmas Eve from Gibson Security, a security group that predicted a flaw within the app could be used to expose user data. On New Year’s Eve, another group exploited that vulnerability and exposed the user names and phone numbers of nearly 5 million Snapchat users. “They warned Snapchat about issues — about the possible dump of database — and Snapchat didn’t care,” he said. The Times asked Snapchat if it knew of the vulnerability claimed by Sanchez. Snapchat said it was not aware of the problem. “We are interested in learning more and can be contacted at security@snapchat.com,” a Snapchat spokeswoman wrote in an email reply. Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-snapchat-shut-down-iphone-20140207,0,3127301.story#axzz2sixJmHSh

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Snapchat Vulnerability Could Lead To iPhone DDoS Attacks

Snowden documents show British digital spies use viruses and ‘honey traps’

JTRIG active intelligence unit boasts of bugging and burgling At the start of this week, documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden detailed DDOS attacks on chatrooms by a British online intelligence unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). Now he has released a new trove showing that JTRIG is about much more than purely online annoyances.…

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Snowden documents show British digital spies use viruses and ‘honey traps’

Snowden documents show British digital spies using viruses and ‘honey traps’

JTRIG active intelligence unit boasts of bugging and burgling At the start of this week, documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden detailed DDOS attacks on chatrooms by a British online intelligence unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). Now he has released a new trove showing that JTRIG is about much more than purely online annoyances.…

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Snowden documents show British digital spies using viruses and ‘honey traps’

The UK allegedly targeted Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivists via a DDOS attack, documents show

The UK allegedly created a spy unit that, other than mounting attacks on cyber enemies, also targeted hacktivists Anonymous and LulzSec, NBC News reports, citing documents taken from the US National Security Agency by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Government Communications Headquarters Communications (GCHQ) — the UK’s intelligence service — launched a DDOS attack to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous Internet chat rooms, according to the documents. NBC News notes that this makes the British government “the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.” The British reportedly aimed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where criminal hackers were believed to have been concentrated, after authorities were alarmed by a spate of hacking attacks in 2011, when online hackers wreaked havoc across the Internet, bringing down websites on a purported crusade of righteousness. The victims included the UK. A GCHQ spokesperson emphasized in a statement to NBC News that it carried out its work “in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework” and that its activities — which it didn’t elaborate on — were “authorized, necessary and proportionate.” Source: http://thenextweb.com/uk/2014/02/05/uk-allegedly-targeted-anonymous-lulzsec-hacktivists-via-ddos-attack-documents-show/#!uyXtM

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The UK allegedly targeted Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivists via a DDOS attack, documents show

The future of DDoS, and how to stay ahead of attacks

What’s new in the threat of DDoS attacks? This year there are a new kind of tactics, and I think we’ll see a rise in the new kinds of DDoS. The conventional understanding of DDos is one that involves volume and capacity. You’ll see massive waves of attackers coming at you. But what we’re starting to see is that while that’s still in play, there’s a much more sophisticated kind of attack starting to become more common – and that’s application layer attacks. You don’t need as much volume, and it’s very very hard to detect. DDoS attackers are now expending quite a lot of effort to spoof legitimate sessions. They’ll do a fair amount of reconnaissance on their target, identify where the weakness or vulnerabilities are – say, a login page. And they know that if they run 20, or 50 or maybe 100 concurrent sessions that login, it’ll lock up the backend database, rendering the site down. Ultimately that’s what the DDoS attacker wants to do. It’s a very crude intention, and in this way it’s relatively easy to do with a small amount of bandwidth. This method is much more sophisticated, it takes a lot more expertise, but you know how it is: once it becomes commonplace, it’ll be easy to access these tools and botnets, and these kinds of attacks will proliferate. Right now in the mitigation industry, a lot of companies are offering platforms that can deal with the traditional interpretation of DDoS, but I think the industry’s going to be challenged quite a bit to deal with the more sophisticated and more targeted kind of attacks.   Why are some sites more vulnerable than others? Ultimately every website is designed differently. If you talk to designers, you’ll find each of your guys has their own style, which can lead to a number of vulnerabilities, depending on the code, and how the php code has been implemented in the background. If you look at some of the website designs, they start off with the baseline config, they build up over time and don’t change the baseline coding. Then all of a sudden it’s like a Jenga tower. You hit the one holding up the bottom, and it’s all going to fall over. For instance one of the most common problems is when the way you entire data into the database isn’t sanitised well enough, you can throw in a whole series of commands that literally lock up the database. It’s a much smarter way of doing this, and it’s much harder to track. So how are security companies going to deal with that? The strategy right now is less preventing an attack, and more: how quickly can you respond? You need to analyse, parse, and create a quick, customised ruleset that’s very granular and can be applied to specific parts of the website – an element, or a UI for instance.   Are they managing to keep ahead of the threat? Well this is the problem: in any security initiative, be it DDoS, or the guys doing data theft, they have the upper hand. All they need is the one strike, and boom – the rest of the industry has to catch up. I think as a whole, the security industry is pretty good at catching up. But we’ll always be reacting. It’s easy to get into. DDoS is still the easiest way to cause havoc and attack an organisation. You can go and rent a botnet for a hundred bucks an hour or even less, now, and just fill a pipe as a crude way of trying to take a site down. It’s still effective, based on where the solution is hosted. It’s far easier than learning the skills necessary to pull off a data theft or something like that. Source: http://www.itproportal.com/2014/02/04/the-future-of-ddos-and-how-to-stay-ahead-of-attacks/

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The future of DDoS, and how to stay ahead of attacks

DDoS attacks used to influence stock prices

Prolexic Technologies shared an analysis of nearly a dozen global DDoS attacks that indicates cyber attackers are using DDoS attacks in an attempt to influence market values and interfere with exchang…

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DDoS attacks used to influence stock prices