Monthly Archives: January 2016

HSBC Calls In Cops To Chase DDoS Attackers Who Took Online Banking Down

HSBC said today it was working with local police to find those who disrupted its online banking services with a denial of service attack, as customers complained of not being able to access their accounts. The attack was made even more painful for customers as the last Friday of the month is a traditional payday in the UK, the home of HSBC. Little information was provided by HSBC other than a terse statement over Twitter: “HSBC UK internet banking was attacked this morning. We successfully defended our systems. “We are working hard to restore services, and normal service is now being resumed. We apologise for any inconvenience.” A spokesperson told the BBC a denial of service attack was the cause of the downtime. A subsequent tweet revealed the police had been contacted: “HSBC is working closely with law enforcement authorities to pursue the criminals responsible for today’s attack on our Internet banking.” HSBC was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS), where infected machines fire an overwhelming number of data packets at a server to stop it working, most recently in 2012. That time the Anonymous hacktivist crew was believed to have carried out the hit. DDoS attacks in general have been causing havoc in recent months, as criminals have tried to extort targets, threatening to knock businesses offline unless a ransom was paid. Encrypted email provider ProtonMail was criticised for paying a ransom of $6,000 in Bitcoin at the end of 2015 to a DDoS extortionist crew called the Armada Collective. That group targeted other secure email providers Hushmail, Runbox and VFEMail. Anti-DDoS provider Arbor Networks reported earlier this month that the record for DDoS power hit a new peak in 2015, hitting 500Gbps. Numerous organizations had reported attacks in the 400Gbps-500Gbps range throughout 2015, Arbor noted. With so much power, and such easy money to be made with extortion attacks, no business appears immune from DDoS downtime. Professor Alan Woodward, a security expert from the University of Surrey, said an attack capable of taking down an entity like HSBC would need to be big. “In addition we’re seeing the emergence of techniques that mean that these attacks are circumventing some of the systems put in place to mitigate agains these attacks,” Woodward said. He also warned DDoS has been used as a “smokescreen” for other malicious activity in the past. “They want to tie up the technical departments, of which there is obviously a finite number, so that they might miss some unusual activity that would give away the fact that the hackers are breaches the corporate boundary.” Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/01/29/hsbc-ddos-downtime/2/#4eea0f825126 http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/01/29/hsbc-ddos-downtime/#109a8cc451c2

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HSBC Calls In Cops To Chase DDoS Attackers Who Took Online Banking Down

HSBC online services still offline following ‘attack’ on bank

Oh no – not again! Updated   HSBC customers were once again locked out of online banking this morning, following an apparent DDoS attack on the bank.…

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HSBC online services still offline following ‘attack’ on bank

Two Arrested in DDoS Attacks Linked to Online Gambling Site Extortion

Last month’s arrest in Bosnia and Herzegovena of two individuals connected to the cyber-crime group DD4BC have been definitely linked to a series of DDoS extortion attacks over the past 18 months, many of which were targeted at online-gambling firms.  PokerStars and Betfair are among the various companies to have been targeted by the extortionists, who typically sought modest and largely-anonymous payments made in Bitcoins in exchange for ceasing the attacks. The DD4BC group, an acronym for DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) For BitCoins, is a loosely organized group of online hackers and thieves who have congregated in some of the Internet’s darker, more anonymous holes.  The group’s widespread members share information and online weaponry in their attempts to extract payments from their targets.  Failure to provide payoffs by the group’s targeted victims typically results in intermittent and ongoing DDoS attacks, designed to flood the victim’s servers with meaningless online traffic, making normal business impossible. The arrests of the two unidentified individuals was announced by Europol earlier this month, with one of the two individuals described as being a leader of the informal DD4BC group.  These initial arrests were part of an international operation dubbed Operation Pleaides. According to the Netherlands-based Europol, which is the official intelligence agency of the European Union, “The action was initiated as part of a global law enforcement response against the criminal organisation. Key members of the organised network were identified in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the UK Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit (MPCCU) which provided vital information to the investigation. Police authorities from Australia, France, Japan, Romania, the USA, Switzerland and INTERPOL supported the coordinated activities. “Operation Pleiades resulted in the arrest of a main target and one more suspect detained,” the Europol statement added. “Multiple property searches were carried out and an extensive amount of evidence was seized,” indicating that more arrests of DD4BC members are likely in the coming weeks and months.  The actual “Operation Pleiades” action was initiated in Austria and included Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) and the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce. The operation slowly unwound the ghostly online tracks of the extortionists by examining “blockchain” entries for Bitcoin transactions related to the DDoS threats, plus other data linked to the group’s activities.  Bitcoin-based transactions are anonymous but not perfectly transparent, and can often be traced back to their originators using secondary means. The DD4BC attacks, which appear to have started in early 2014, have targeted several different business and government sectors.  Victims range from online gambling firms to Bitcoin exchanges and mining groups, to online banking and payment processors.  Even some government institutions have been targeted. Online-poker market leader PokerStars was confirmed as one the DD4BC extortion attempts in April 2015, amid information on the DD4BC attacks assembled by Arbor Networks, the security division of NetScout Systems, Inc.  Massachusetts-based NetScout appears to have assisted international authorities in identifying the perpetrators behind the hundreds of DD4BC attacks. In addition to PokerStars, Betfair is almost certainly another of the DD4BC group’s victims.  Betfair was also targeted last April in a DDoS attack strong enough to knock both its betting exchange and fixed-odds sportsbook offline.  The attack on the “unnamed online casino” (likely Betfair) began in earnest on April 10th, following an initial probing attack launched the day before, along with a demand for payment. The information amassed by Arbor Networks also includes many of the threats e-mailed by DD4BC members to their intended victims.  Here’s the e-mail that was sent to the “unnamed” casino company (likely Betfair), immediately following attacks against Stars and online payment processor NETeller: From: DD4BC Team [mailto:dd4bct@gmail.com] Sent: 10 April 2015 02:07 PM To Subject: Re: DDOS ATTACK! Hitting pokerstars.com at the moment. Good luck if you think you can stop what they can’t. But you still have time. On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 3:46 PM, DD4BC Team wrote: Hello, To introduce ourselves first: https://blogs.akamai.com/2014/12/dd4bc-anatomy-of-a-bitcoin-extortion-campaign.html http://bitcoinbountyhunter.com/bitalo.html http://cointelegraph.com/news/113499/notorious-hacker-group-involved-in-excoin-theft-owner-accusesccedk-of-withholding-info Or just google “DD4BC” and you will find more info. Recently, we were DDoS-ing Neteller. You probably know it already. So, it’s your turn! is going under attack unless you pay 20 Bitcoin. Pay to 18NeYaX6GCnibNkwyuGhGLuU2tYzbxvW7z Please note that it will not be easy to mitigate our attack, because our current UDP flood power is 400-500 Gbps, so don’t even bother. Right now we are running small demonstrative attack on your server. Don’t worry, it will stop in 1 hour. It’s just to prove that we are serious. We are aware that you probably don’t have 20 BTC at the moment, so we are giving you 48 hours to  get it and pay us. We do not know your exact location, so it’s hard to recommend any Bitcoin exchanger, so use Google. Current price of 1 BTC is about 250 USD. IMPORTANT: You don’t even have to reply. Just pay 20 BTC to 18NeYaX6GCnibNkwyuGhGLuU2tYzbxvW7z – we will know it’s you and you will never hear from us again. We say it because for big companies it’s usually the problem as they don’t want that there is proof that they cooperated. If you need to contact us, feel free to use some free email service. But if you ignore us, and don’t pay within 48 hours, long term attack will start, price to stop will go to 50 BTC and will keep increasing for every hour of attack. ONE MORE TIME: It’s a one-time payment. Pay and you will not hear from us ever again! Variations on the same extortion letter were sent to several other victims; this sample was distinct with the specific mentions of PokerStars and NETeller.  In addition to those two firms and the likely inclusion of Betfair, several other online-gambling companies are known to be targets of the group.  Those companies include Nitrogen Sports, Malta-based NRR Entertainment Ltd. (including slottyvegas.com and betatcasino.com), Betbtc.com, Redbet.com and others. It is also likely that last July’s DDoS attacks against several New Jersey (U.S.) online sites were the work of DD4BC extortionists.  Though those attacks are not referenced in the ASERT compilation, the July attacks are also outside the date range of most of the earlier attacks included in that report.  When the New Jersey attacks occurred, NJ Division of Gaming Enforcement director David Rebuck stated this about the perpetrator: “He’s a known actor. He’s done this before.” While DD4BC seems likely to be peeled open by international invetigators, DDoS-based extortion attempts aren’t going to go away.  The reason is that the tools needed to launch such attacks are too cheaply and commonly available to would-be cyber-attackers.  As a result, the best defense remain vigilance, rapid response… and robust Internet connectivity. According to Wil van Gemert, Europol’s Deputy Director of Operations, “Law enforcement and its partners have to act now to ensure that the cyberspace affecting nearly every part of our daily life is secure against new threats posed by malicious groups. These groups employ aggressive measures to silence the victims with the threat of public exposure and reputation damage. Without enhanced reporting mechanisms law enforcement is missing vital means to protect companies and users from recurring cyber-attacks. Police actions such as Operation Pleiades highlight the importance of incident reporting and information sharing between law enforcement agencies and the targets of DDoS and extortion attacks.” Source: http://www.flushdraw.net/news/misc/two-arrested-in-ddos-attacks-linked-to-online-gambling-site-extortion/

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Two Arrested in DDoS Attacks Linked to Online Gambling Site Extortion

Israeli academics claim they can predict botnet attacks

Isolated attacks can add up to concerted malbot action , say boffins Ben Gurion University researchers have developed a tool capable of predicting future botnet attacks while also distinguishing between human and automated campaigns.…

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Israeli academics claim they can predict botnet attacks

World’s Largest DDoS Attack Breaks Records, Clocks At Massive 500 Gbps

In its latest Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, Arbor Networks reports on the biggest distributed denial of service attack, which had a whopping load of 500 Gbps. The previous largest DDoS attack was of “only” 300 Gbps. It involved young aspiring hacker Seth Nolan-Mcdonagh, who temporarily took down SpamHaus’ webpage. In some cases, the attacks are carried out by state-funded organizations instead of individuals. Last year, GitHub went down after it suffered a DDoS attack, and the main suspect was China, which has a tumultuous history with the software repository. The programming website was even blocked by the Chinese authorities for a short amount of time. The yearly Arbor survey uses data from hosts, mobile service providers and service providers. The survey, which ran until November 2015, got the results based on the 354 global participants who answered questions on network safety specifically about protocols used for reflection/amplification. “The largest attack reported by a respondent this year was 500Gbps, with other respondents reporting attacks of 450Gbps, 425Gbps, and 337Gbps,” the report states. This marks a worrying trend among top-end size DDoS attacks, which get more ambitious every year. The security firm has the numbers to back this statement up. In the previous report, Arbor discovered that one-fifth of respondents got slammed with attacks that topped 50 Gbps. This year’s survey shows a hefty increase, as a quarter of respondents talk of attacks that go more than 100 Gbps. While only five respondents found evidence of DDoS attacks topping 200 Gbps, there were many reports of attacks between 100 and 200 Gbps. Arbor Networks points out that cloud-based services are increasingly becoming tempting targets, as they now make up 33 percent of attacks. Another staple of last year’s hacking attempts is the exploitation of weaknesses in the network time protocol. Reflection and amplification attacks can easily make use of the soft spots in the security infrastructure, leading to significant damages. As a countermeasure, servers keep receiving updates and security patches that should (in theory) keep them safe from attackers who gain a large response to a small query and use it towards a target of their choosing. “[S]ecurity is a human endeavor and there are skilled adversaries on both sides,” Darren Anstee, chief security technologist at Arbor Networks, says. An interesting shift exists in the DDoS attackers’ motivation: the perpetrators no longer seem to find joy in hacktivism or vandalism. Unlike in previous years, extorting the victims and banking on the vulnerabilities of network systems now seem to be the prevalent reasons. In order to accomplish this, they use multi-vector simultaneous attacks which plow through applications, services and infrastructure. A vast majority of respondents identified application-layer DDoS attacks, which targeted DNS services instead of Web servers. Looking at the larger picture, multi-vector attacks counted for 56 percent of customer outages, up from 42 percent in the previous year. More than 50 percent of the respondents told Arbor that DDoS attacks go after the inline firewalls and bring down the internet connectivity. Arbor explains that these devices are the first to fall in case of a DDoS attack and underlines that being inline can greatly add to network latency. Source: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/128260/20160127/worlds-largest-ddos-attack-breaks-records-clocks-at-massive-500-gbps-worldwide-infrastructure-security-report.htm

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World’s Largest DDoS Attack Breaks Records, Clocks At Massive 500 Gbps

Larger, more complex, financially motivated DDoS attacks on the rise

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly larger, more complex, and perpetrated by cyber extortionist instead of hacktivists and vandals, the results of Arbor Networks' 11th Annual Worldwide Infrastructu…

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Larger, more complex, financially motivated DDoS attacks on the rise

Telephonic DoS tied to Ukraine power grid takedown

More information is being revealed regarding the late December attack on the Ukrainian power grid with reports indicating the attack on the utility was supported by a simultaneous telephonic denial of service (DoS)incident. The Ukrainian DoS attack took out the company’s call center so its customers could not call and let workers know that service was being disrupted, according to a published report. A telephonic DoS attack works in the same manner as one hitting a computer system, but in this case a call center is overwhelmed with calls to shut it down. In addition, with the telephone system down the utility company staffers could not communicate effectively to fix the problem. Telephonic DoS attacks can be used to obfuscate any type of attack to attract an IT department’s attention while the real assault takes place against another segment of the network. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/telephonic-dos-tied-to-ukraine-power-grid-takedown/article/467076/

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Telephonic DoS tied to Ukraine power grid takedown

Irish government websites hit by widening DDoS attacks

First they came for the forums. Then the lottery. Now… A number of Irish government-related and public sector websites were knocked offline by an apparent DDoS attack on Friday morning.…

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Irish government websites hit by widening DDoS attacks

Irish lottery site and ticket machines hit by DDoS attack

Ireland’s National Lottery website and ticket machines were knocked offline after a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Wednesday. Customers trying to buy tickets for the €12m (£9m) draw found themselves unable to do so for nearly two hours. The jackpot was the largest in 18 months. Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI), the operator, has said the incident is under investigation. During a DDoS attack, a website or online service’s capacity to handle internet traffic is overloaded – usually by automated programs set to flood the site with requests. The attack began at 11:21 GMT on Wednesday and lasted for about two hours. Retail systems were brought back online by 12:45 GMT and the website by 13:25 GMT. “They said you couldn’t buy tickets from the ticket machines, which is really interesting, it’s not just the website – it would be quite interesting to understand why that happened,” said John Graham-Cumming at DDoS-protection company Cloudflare. ‘Under investigation’ “This incident is still under investigation,” a spokeswoman said. “However, we can confirm that at no point was the National Lottery gaming system or player data affected.” Given the large jackpot involved, the lottery was experiencing high demand for tickets on Wednesday lunchtime. The impact of the attack may well have been heightened by this, according to Igal Zeifman, senior digital strategist at cybersecurity company Imperva. “As a rule, record-setting prizes and jackpots result in traffic spikes on lottery sites, and it is very common for DDoS attackers to strike during such predictable peak traffic times, especially when going after big targets,” he said. Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35373890

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Irish lottery site and ticket machines hit by DDoS attack