Monthly Archives: November 2016

5 major Russian banks repel massive DDoS attack

At least five Russian major banks came under a continuous hacker attack, although online client services were not disrupted. The attack came from a wide-scale botnet involving at least 24,000 computers, located in 30 countries. The attack began Tuesday afternoon, and continued for two days straight, according to a source close to Russia’s Central Bank quoted by RIA Novosti. Sberbank confirmed the DDoS attack on its online services. “The attacks are conducted from botnets, consisting of tens of thousands computers, which are located in tens of countries,”  Sberbank’s press service told RIA. The initial attack was rather massive and its power intensified over the course of the day. “We registered a first attack early in the morning … the next attack in the evening involved several waves, each of them was twice as powerful as the previous one. Bank’s cybersecurity noticed and located the attack in time. There have been no problems in client online services,”  Sberbank representative said. Alfabank has also confirmed the fact of the attack, but called it a  “weak”  one. “There was an attack, but it was relatively weak. It did not affect Alfabank’s business systems in any way,”  the bank told RIA Novosti. According to Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab, more than a half of the botnet devices were situated in the US, India, Taiwan and Israel, while the attack came from 30 countries. Each wave of attack lasted for at least one hour, while the longest one went on for 12 hours straight. The power of the attacks peaked at 660 thousands of requests per second. Some of the banks were attacked repeatedly. “Such attacks are complex, and almost cannot be repelled by standard means used by internet providers,”  the news agency quoted Kaspersky Lab’s statement as saying. According to a source in Central Bank, the botnet behind the attack consists not only of computers, but also of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Computer security experts note, that various devices ranging from CCTV cameras to microwaves, are prone to hacking and pose a significant threat when assembled into a botnet. Owners of such devices underestimate the risks and often do not even bother to change a default password. A massive botnet, able to send more than 1.5Tbps and consisting of almost 150 thousands of CCTV cameras has been reportedly uncovered in September. According to Kaspersky Lab, it was the first massive attack on Russian banks this year. The previous attack of such a scale came in October 2015, when eight major banks were affected. Source: https://www.rt.com/news/366172-russian-banks-ddos-attack/

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5 major Russian banks repel massive DDoS attack

How to avoid DDoSing yourself

Google engineers offer guidance to keep application developers from shooting themselves in the foot. In the wake of the last month’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Dyn, a DNS management service, Google engineers want to remind application developers that self-harm represents a more realistic risk.…

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How to avoid DDoSing yourself

How hackers could wreak havoc on the US election

AS VOTES are counted and polls close across America, security experts have warned that hackers could disrupt the presidential election process. “Anything that unsettles the election process would be a complete disaster,” explained Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at security specialist NSFOCUS. “Misinformation on exit polls, widespread internet and media outages, and delays in reporting could seriously impact people’s desire to vote and even worse — trust the results.” Mr Gates pointed to the mysterious cyber attacks that recently snarled East Coast Web traffic as evidence of hackers’ ability to cause disruption. A number of major sites including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and Reddit were impacted by the October 21 distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), on internet services company Dyn. DDoS attacks, which often occur when a hacker “floods” a network with information, are a popular method for disrupting websites and services. Mr Gates warned that, in addition to large DDoS attacks on internet infrastructure, online news and media outlets, attackers could target voter registration systems by launching smaller attacks on individual polling centres. “Many of these verification systems are likely online and need to access state databases where voter registration and verification is required to cast a vote,” he said. “Attacks against registered voter databases themselves would also be highly likely.” DDoS attacks and bogus election posts could also flood social media sites and spread misinformation, he warned, noting that so-called ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks against polling centres as they report their final numbers to collection centres are also possible. In a man-in-the-middle attack a hacker secretly intercepts, and potentially alters, information as it is sent between two parties.  Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, also sees a potential DDoS threat. “I have considered it a real possibility, not only are the cyber tools available, but the motivation is there as well, from anyone — they could be state actors, they could be malicious hackers.” Hackers, for example, could use the internet of Things, where even household devices are web-enabled, as a launch pad for their attacks, according to Mr Kay. The analyst, however, notes that major DDoS attacks are difficult for hackers to sustain, and also cites the low-tech nature of some US election infrastructure. “If you look at the safety of the democratic structure, there’s all these decentralised activities, many of which are paper[-based].” Nonetheless, a Department of Homeland Security report obtained by FoxNews.com warns that parts of America’s election infrastructure are vulnerable to cyber attack. While the risk to computer-enabled election systems varies from county to county, targeted attacks against individual voter registration databases are possible, it said. One technology being touted as a potential solution to cyber threats and voter fraud is blockchain. Blockchain, which uses a decentralised security protocol, could be used to safely record and transmit votes. Because blockchain messages are distributed and not kept in one central location, they are very difficult to tamper with, say experts. “The technology could be used to prevent voter fraud (e.g., multiple votes by a single person) through use of private keys for each voter and storage of votes on an immutable blockchain ledger,” Joe Guagliardo, chair of the Blockchain Technology Group at law firm Pepper Hamilton, in an email to FoxNews.com. “Once the vote has been cast and verified, it cannot be changed without verification by all of the nodes in the network (potentially millions or more) — fraudulent activity would require computational power to overcome the resources of the collective nodes in the net.” Source: http://www.ntnews.com.au/technology/how-hackers-could-wreak-havoc-on-the-us-election/news-story/4f732c684f8f14eeee46e82641bcd5f8

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How hackers could wreak havoc on the US election

Finns chilling as DDoS knocks out building control system

Hint: next time, buy a firewall before you’re attacked Residents in two apartment buildings in the Finnish town of Lappeenranta had a chill-out lasting more than a week after a DDoS attack battered unprotected building management systems.…

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Finns chilling as DDoS knocks out building control system

Is government regulation the way to blunt DDoS attacks?

Government regulation is a sticky issue in any industry, perhaps even more in cyber security. Every time the government creates a rule or an obligation, goes the argument, it merely opens a hole to be exploited. Exhibit number one is the call for makers of any product with encryption to create a secure back door police and intelligence agencies can use to de-crypt possibly criminal communications. Of course there’s no such thing as an absolutely secure  back door, so it will end up being used by criminals or nation states. I raise this because last week security expert Bruce Schneier again raised the issue of whether governments should step in to help give more protection against distributed denial of service DDoS attacks. It’s easy for attackers to build powerful DDoS botnets that leverage insecure Internet connected devices like consumer webcams, he argues, the most recent of which was the attack last month on U.S. domain name service provider Dyn Inc., which temporarily impaired the ability of a number of online businesses including Twitter. It doesn’t matter, Schneier argues, if DDoS attacks are state-based or not. The fact the software is so easily available to their build a botnot or buy it as a service that can pour 1 TB and more of data at a target is the threat. “The market can’t fix this because neither the buyer nor the seller cares,” he has written. One logical place to block DDoS attacks is on the Internet backbone, he says, but providers have no incentive to do it because “they don’t feel the pain when the attacks occur and they have no way of billing for the service when they provide it.” So when the market can’t provide discipline, Schneier says, government should. He offers two suggestions: –impose security regulations on manufacturers, forcing them to make their devices secure; –impose liabilities on manufacturers of insecure Internet connected devices, allowing victims to sue them. Either one of these would raise the cost of insecurity and give companies incentives to spend money making their devices secure, he argues. I’m not sure. For one thing litigation is a long and expensive process. How do I sue a company headquartered in another country (say, China) that sells devices used by a person in a third country (say, Brazil) which is part of a botnet assembled by a person in another country (say, the U.S.) used to attack me in Canada? There’s also the problem of defining secure. What can a manufacturer do if it forces creation a long password for a device, but users insist on insecure passwords (like “password123456879.”) Still, we need to discuss short-term solutions because, as Schneier points out, with the huge number of insecure Internet connected devices out there the DDoS problem is only going to get worse. Let us know what you think in the comments section below. Source: http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/is-government-regulation-the-way-to-blunt-ddos-attacks/388238

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Is government regulation the way to blunt DDoS attacks?

Apocalypse now: The IoT DDoS threat

One of the things you learn about humanity, if you’re paying attention, is that “gold rushes” bring out the worse in us. When there are no constraints and there is a greed motivator, people will literally trample anyone or anything to get to the goods. Over the ages, literal and financial empires have been forged on this principle, and no matter when or for what particular gain, there has always been serious collateral damage. Despite … More ?

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Apocalypse now: The IoT DDoS threat

Massive DDoS Attacks Disable Internet Access Throughout Liberia

British security researcher Kevin Beaumont recently reported that a series of massive cyber attacks using the Mirai DDoS botnet periodically disabled all Internet access throughout the country of Liberia. “Liberia has one Internet cable, installed in 2011, which provides a single point of failure for Internet access. … The attacks are extremely worrying because they suggest a Mirai operator who has enough capacity to seriously impact systems in a nation state,” Beaumont wrote. An employee at a Liberian mobile service provider told Network Worldthat the attacks were hurting his business. “It’s killing our revenue,” he said. “Our business has been targeted frequently.” Beaumont said it appears that the attacks, which targeted Liberian telecom operators who co-own the single Internet cable, were being used to test denial of service techniques. Given the volume of traffic, more than 500 Gbps, Beaumont said it appears that the botnet is owned by the same actor who hit the managed DNS provider Dyn on October 21, disabling websites across the U.S. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, told VICE News that those actors were probably… kids. “Kids who have the capability and don’t know what to do with it,” he said. Flashpoint director of security research Allison Nixon agreed with that assessment, stating in a blog post, “The technical and social indicators of this attack align more closely with attacks from the Hackforums community than the other type of actors that may be involved, such as higher-tier criminal actors, hacktivisits, nation states, and terrorist groups.” Still, NSFOCUS chief research intelligence analyst Stephen Gates told  eSecurity Planet  by email that attacks like these could have a real impact on tomorrow’s U.S. presidential election. While U.S. polling machines aren’t connected to the Internet, Gates said, some voter identification systems may be. “In some states, the voter ID must be checked before a voter can proceed,” he said. “If those systems are connected to the Internet to gain access to a database of registered voters, and they were taken offline, then would-be voters could not be verified.” “What that would mean to the election process is anyone’s guess,” Gates added. According to Nexusguard’s Q3 2016 DDoS Threat Report, the number of reflection-based DDoS attacks fell more than 40 percent during the third quarter of the year, while IoT-based botnets reached unprecedented speeds. The U.S. saw the most attack events in the third quarter, followed by China, Russia and the United Kingdom. “Few service providers can sustain the level of malicious traffic we saw in Q3 from IoT botnets, so these DDoS outages are causing companies to completely rethink their cybersecurity strategies,” Nexusguard chief scientist Terrence Gareau said in a statement. “Hackers’ preferences for botnets over reflection attacks are typical of cyclical behavior, where attackers will switch to methods that have fallen out of popularity to test security teams with unexpected vectors,” Gareau added. Source: http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/massive-ddos-attacks-disable-internet-access-throughout-liberia.html

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Massive DDoS Attacks Disable Internet Access Throughout Liberia