Another reason to avoid those DEF CON charging stations. Google has capped a dangerous but somewhat obscure boot mode vulnerability that allowed infected PCs and chargers to put top end Nexus phones into denial of service states.…
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Google caps punch-yourself-in-the-face malicious charger hack
Healthcare, financial, and energy are the top three sectors facing the highest risk of a DDoS attack, a recent ICIT report found. With its high dependency on digital records, network connectivity, accessible information, and real-time communication, healthcare is one of the sectors at greatest risk for a DDoS attack, the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) explained in a recent publication. The financial industry and energy sector are also at high risk for such attacks, ICIT said in “Rise of the Machines: The Dyn Attack Was Just a Practice Run. “Obstructions to even an email server could cause delays in treatment, while widespread attacks that holistically render a critical service unavailable, such as an IoT DDoS attack, would pose a serious risk to patient and staff safety,” wrote ICIT Senior Fellow James Scott and ICIT Researcher Drew Spaniel. Citing research from a previous ICIT brief, the duo explained that healthcare is incorporating, and interacting with connected devices that are often designed without necessary security measures. Previously, this has led to instances such as MRI machines or pacemakers being infected with ransomware. “While there is no indication that healthcare devices have been incorporated into DDoS botnets, it may be only a matter of time before an adversary adapt an IoT malware such as Mirai, to harness the computational resources of medical devices because many lack basic access controls such as multi-factor authentication (or any authentication whatsoever),” the authors maintained. There is also the potential danger of an IoT malware or a worm that would “brick” or kill “infected medical devices in order to cause panic, extort a ransom, or as part of a multi-tiered attack.” Overall, Scott and Spaniel stated that a “perfect storm” is brewing across the nation with regard to private critical infrastructures facing cybersecurity threats. More organizations are utilizing the internet and IoT devices, but device manufacturers will sometimes “negligently avoid incorporating security-by-design into their systems.” This happens because the manufacturers have not been properly incentivized, and instead pass the potential risk onto the end-user. “As the adversarial landscape of nation state and mercenary APTs, hacktivists, cyber-criminal gangs, script kiddies, cyber caliphate actors, and hail-mary threat actors continues to hyperevolve, America’s treasure troves of public and private data, IP, and critical infrastructure continues to be pilfered, annihilated, and disrupted, while an organizational culture of ‘Participation Trophy Winners” managed by tech neophyte executives continue to lose one battle after the next.” A key area of concern is the Mirai malware, which “offers malicious cyber actors an asymmetric quantum leap in capability.” Specifically, Mirai has a strong development platform “that can be optimized and customized according to the desired outcome of a layered attack by an unsophisticated adversary.” While Mirai has forced different industries to review devices that lack security by design and other IoT device vulnerabilities, the authors noted that it “will not forever remain the favorite tool of unsophisticated malicious threat actors.” DDoS attacks on the healthcare industry were addressed earlier this month in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) latest newsletter. OCR reiterated that healthcare often uses IoT in several ways, such as allowing healthcare facilities to monitor medical devices, patients, and personnel. This can open organizations up to certain cybersecurity threats. “An attacker may be able to deter patients or healthcare personnel from accessing critical healthcare assets such as payroll systems, electronic health record databases, and software-based medical equipment (MRI, EKGs, infusion pumps, etc.),” OCR stated, citing data from US-CERT. For preventing such attacks, OCR advised that organizations continuously monitor and scan for vulnerable and comprised IoT devices on their networks. Entities should also adhere to the necessary remediation actions. “Password management policies and procedures for devices and their users should also be implemented and adhered to. All default passwords need to be switched to strong passwords,” OCR said, adding that default usernames and passwords for most devices can be found online. Source: http://healthitsecurity.com/news/icit-finds-healthcare-sector-at-great-risk-for-ddos-attacks
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ICIT Finds Healthcare Sector at Great Risk for DDoS Attacks
Earlier in the year, a huge DDoS attack was launched on Krebs on Security. Analysis showed that the attack pelted servers with 620 Gbps, and there were fears that the release of the Mirai source code used to launch the assault would lead to a rise in large-scale DDoS attacks. Welcome Leet Botnet. In the run-up to Christmas, security firm Imperva managed to fend off a 650 Gbps DDoS attack. But this was nothing to do with Mirai; it is a completely new form of malware, but is described as “just as powerful as the most dangerous one to date”. The concern for 2017 is that “it’s about to get a lot worse”. Clearly proud of the work put into the malware, the creator or creators saw fit to sign it. Analysis of the attack showed that the TCP Options header of the SYN packets used spelled out l33t, hence the Leet Botnet name. The attack itself took place on 21 December, but details of what happened are only just starting to come out. It targeted a number of IP addresses, and Imperva speculates that a single customer was not targeted because of an inability to resolve specific IP addresses due to the company’s proxies. One wave of the attack generated 650 Gbps of traffic — or more than 150 million packets per second. Despite attempting to analyze the attack, Imperva has been unable to determine where it originated from, but the company notes that it used a combination of both small and large payloads to “clog network pipes and bring down network switches”. While the Mirai attacks worked by firing randomly generated strings of characters to generate traffic, in the case of Leet Botnet the malware was accessing local files and using scrambled versions of the compromised content as its payload. Imperva describes the attack as “a mishmash of pulverized system files from thousands upon thousands of compromised devices”. What’s the reason for using this particular method? Besides painting a cool mental image, this attack method serves a practical purpose. Specifically, it makes for an effective obfuscation technique that can be used to produce an unlimited number of extremely randomized payloads. Using these payloads, an offender can circumvent signature-based security systems that mitigate attacks by identifying similarities in the content of network packets. While in this instance Imperva was able to mitigate the attack, the company says that Leet Botnet is “a sign of things to come”. Brace yourself for a messy 2017… Source: http://betanews.com/2016/12/28/leet-botnet-ddos/
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Bigger than Mirai: Leet Botnet delivers 650 Gbps DDoS attack with ‘pulverized system files’
History made How often can we say that an IT blunder might have changed the course of world history? Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server whilst serving as outgoing US President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State became a key element in the US presidential election this year.…
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A year in infosec: Bears, botnets, breaches … and elections
A new hacking group is taking credit for a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that took down Tumblr this week. But so far, little is known about R.I.U. Star Patrol other than its motive of attacking for fun. Tumblr went down for more than two hours Wednesday afternoon and R.I.U. Star Patrol contacted Mashable to explain its reason for attacking: “There is no sinister motive,” the group told Mashable.”It’s all for light hearted fun.” The site was first reported offline shortly after 3:15pm ET. The service said on Twitter that some users were experiencing “latency”. Mashable reported that the site was back up for a few minutes around 3:52pm ET but went back down, returning at around 4:22pm ET. Full service was restored around 5:45pm ET. The Mirai connection Some in the security community believe the group carried out the attack using Mirai, malware tied to a record 620Gpbs attack on the website of noted journalist Brian Krebs and the coordinated assault against DNS hosting provider Dyn last fall. That DDoS crippled such major sites as Twitter, Paypal, Netflix and Reddit and shifted the world’s attention to threats against the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) – everyday devices and appliances connected to the web. What happened to Tumblr was a more typical DDoS, but it demonstrates how easy it has become to launch attacks since the source code for Mirai was openly published. In such attacks, a hacker attempts to overload or shut down a service so that legitimate users can no longer access it. Typical DoS attacks target web servers and aim to make websites unavailable. No data is stolen or compromised, but the interruption to the service can be costly for an organization. The most common type of DoS attack involves sending more traffic to a computer than it can handle. There are a variety of methods for DoS attacks, but the simplest and most common is to have a botnet flood a web server with requests. This is called a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). What we know about R.I.U. Star Patrol so far A scouring of the internet produced few details about this hacking group. From what we can tell, its Twitter account (@StarPatrolling) came online on December 13 and that its self-described leader goes by the Twitter handle @ ANTIPEACESP . Gaming news site 7421Max conducted an interview with @StarPatrolling and published it on Youtube. Those interviewed said they plan to launch coordinated attacks against Xbox on Christmas day. Asked about their motive, the hackers said, “We do it because we can.” They claim they are not motivated by money. “We have not been paid a single dollar for what we do,” one of the hackers said. On December 19, 7421Max reported that the group had taken down League of Legends and Warframe servers, and warned in a follow-up tweet that R.I.U. Star Patrol plans to knock down PSN and Xbox Live for Christmas 2016. The group confirmed this in the Youtube video: The threat is going to sting for users who remember the Christmas 2014 DDoS blockage of PlayStation and Xbox systems. Parents of kids who hope to play their new Christmas presents on Sunday might want to brace themselves for some tears. Source: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/12/23/group-that-attacked-tumblr-threatens-to-ddos-xbox-for-christmas/
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Group that attacked Tumblr threatens to DDoS Xbox for Christmas
The recently released Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report states that cyber-criminals are compromising virtual machines in the cloud as a way to vastly increase the scale of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS). Microsoft has warned of many new cyber risks faced by IT companies in the report. It says that hackers have learned how to use compromised virtual machines running in the cloud to launch massive cyber-attacks. The report says: “In the cloud weaponisation threat scenario, an attacker establishes a foothold within a cloud infrastructure by compromising and taking control of a few virtual machines. The attacker can then use these virtual machines to attack, compromise, and control thousands of virtual machines—some within the same public cloud service provider as the initial attack, and others inside other public cloud service providers.” Attackers can easily issue commands to launch DDoS attacks that cripple online services and websites or flood the internet with spam. Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, has witnessed attempts to exploit the cloud to establish communications with malicious IP addresses and brute force RDP, the Remote Desktop Protocol used by Microsoft to allow users to access their desktops over a network, representing 41% and 25.5% of all outbound attacks, respectively. Spam followed at just over 20% and DDoS attempts made up 7.6% of attacks. The company is also warning IT administrators to be on the lookout for targeted threats aimed at taking control of an email account that has a high probability of containing credentials that can be used to gain access to the public cloud administrator portal. If successful, the threats may open both their on-premises and cloud infrastructures to attack. The attacker, after logging into the administrator portal, can gather information and make changes to gain access to other cloud-based resources, execute ransomware, or even pivot back to the on-premises environment. They are also keeping tabs on GitHub and other public code repositories, hoping that developers will accidentally publish secret keys that can potentially grant access to cloud accounts and services. Microsoft has further warned of “Man in the Cloud” (MitC) attacks wherein victims are tricked into downloading and installing malware, typically with an email containing a malicious link. Once active, the malware searches for a cloud storage folder and replaces the victim’s synchronisation token with that of the attacker’s. After this, whenever a user adds a file to their cloud storage accounts each time, a copy is delivered to the attacker. http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/dec/16/cyber-criminals-compromising-virtual-machines-cloud-increase-scale-ddos/ http://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-report-says-hackers-weaponizing-cloud-virtual-machines.html Source: https://www.ddosattacks.net/wp-admin/post-new.php
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Cyber criminals compromising virtual machines in cloud to increase scale of DDoS
Classified government records are believed to have been accessed by the hackers. Anonymous hackers have reportedly hit Thailand government websites with targeted DDoS attacks in retaliation for the passage of a bill which is feared to impose considerable restrictions on internet freedom. The bill introduced amendments to the country’s computer crime law and was unanimously passed by the military-appointed legislature on 16 December, according to reports. The new law allows Thai authorities to monitor and access private communications as well as censor online content without a court order. The DDoS attack knocked out Thailand’s defence ministry website. At the time of writing, the site remains inaccessible. Anonymous hackers also reportedly targeted the Thai Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Office of the National Security Council. A hacker, claiming to be part of the Anonymous campaign against the Thai government titled “Op Single Gateway”, going by the pseudonym “blackplans”, posted screenshots on Twitter of what he/she claimed were documents stolen from the compromised government sites. The Thai defence ministry said the attack accomplished little. “They couldn’t do anything because we have defence systems in place that are ready for such situations,” said Kongcheep Tantrawanich, a defence ministry spokesman,” ABC News reported. He warned that further attacks could lead to “destroying financial systems, banks, transportation systems, airports and can cause damage toward the population of an entire country”. The Thai government characterised the hackers as “thugs” bent upon “creating chaos” and “overstepping boundaries”. The government has also asked the public to come forward with information about the hackers. Thai cyber controls raise censorship and privacy concerns Privacy groups have raised concerns about Thailand’s new cyber laws, which are believed to infringe on human rights and freedom of expression. The UN Office of Human Rights said in a statement on Monday (19 December): “We are concerned by amendments to Thai legislation that could threaten online freedoms, and call on the government to ensure the country’s cyber laws comply with international human rights standards.” According to local reports, Amnesty International, in collaboration with the Thai Netizen Network, lodged a petition with the Thai National Legislative Assembly. The petition, which has also been endorsed by 300,000 internet users, calls for reconsideration of the amendments to the computer crime act. “The bill is very broad and open to interpretation and we will have to see how the government will implement these laws,” said Arthit Suriyawongkul of the Thai Netizen Network. “It’s not the law itself that is a rights violation, but the authorities’ extensive power when monitoring and censoring online content, which could raise privacy concerns.” Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha defended the amendments to the nation’s cyber laws. “This law is for when anyone posts something that is poisonous to society so that we know where it comes from,” Prayuth said, Reuters reported. “Don’t think this is a rights violation. This isn’t what we call a rights violation … this is what we call a law to be used against those who violate the law,” he said. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/hackers-hit-thai-government-ddos-attacks-protesting-against-restrictive-internet-law-1597339
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Hackers hit Thai government with DDoS attacks protesting against restrictive internet law
T he onslaught of DDoS attacks targeting bitcoin websites around the world isn’t showing any signs of abating as an Indian bitcoin exchange came under attack today. Indian bitcoin exchange Coinsecure saw a spike in traffic this Monday morning local time. The number of connections attempting to reach the website was enough to disrupt exchange activity. Operational delays ensued on its website, mobile application and other API-enabled platforms. In an email to customers, the bitcoin exchange revealed the reason for the delays. We were under a massive DDoS attack this morning that blocked traffic temporarily to our website, API and Android App. You may have experienced delays in withdrawals and deposits as well, this morning. The email, which reached customers afternoon in local time, confirmed that the website was fully operational again, following several hours of disruption. Bitcoin Exchanges. Ripe Targets? Bitcoin exchanges and websites are perhaps the most-obvious targets for DDoS extortionists seeking ransom in bitcoin. Still, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell told CCN in an earlier exchange that bitcoin companies aren’t always the best targets. “Most Bitcoin companies aren’t profitable and we’re therefore not great targets,” said Powell, whose exchange suffered a DDoS attack in November last year. Thai bitcoin exchange Bitcoin Co. Ltd., also suffered a DDoS attack in November 2015, albeit from a different perpetrator. “We have received several DDOS-ransom letters to https://bx.in.th,” Bitcoin Co. Ltd Managing Director David Barnes told CCN . “[The] last was supposedly from Armada Collective requesting 10BTC.” More importantly, he added: Attackers seem to lose interest quickly when you block them or don’t respond to their messages. CCN was also targeted in November 2015, with one extortionist communicating via email to demand 2 bitcoins in ransom. The email was ignored and we duly put up a 5 BTC reward for any information leading to a successful police report. While we came short of finding details, CCN continues to be targeted frequently with DDoS attacks. At the time in 2015, bitcoin was trading near peaks of $500 and has come a considerable way since while avoiding volatility. As the value of the cryptocurrency makes gains with stable footing, bitcoin businesses and websites continue to remain targets. A New Wave of Attacks The latest instances of DDoS disruptions could ostensibly be new wave of attacks targeting bitcoin websites. Last week, European bitcoin and altcoin exchange BTC-e was also targeted, resulting in temporary disruption of exchange activity. CCN was also the target of a DDoS attack last week. The website saw temporary disruption lasting 1-2 hours before the attacks were mitigated. Source: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/indian-bitcoin-exchange-suffers-outage-ddos-attacks-continue/
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Indian Bitcoin Exchange Suffers Outage as DDoS Attacks Continue
The size of DDoS attacks has increased exponentially thanks to hackers and cyber criminals making use of the IoT. A few years ago, just as the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) was starting to form as a concept, some of us in the cyber security community joked that in future our toasters would be able to take down our banks. Within the last few months that joke has started to become a reality. In September 2016, US security researcher Brian Krebs had his website, Krebs on Security, taken offline by the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack yet seen. A short while later OVH, a French internet hosting company, was struck by an even bigger attack. Then, in October, Domain Name Server (DNS) company Dyn – essentially a part of the ‘internet phone book’ which directs users to websites – also fell victim to an attack in which tens of millions of different internet addresses bombarded the company’s servers with excessive data, causing popular sites like Twitter, Spotify and Reddit to go offline. The size of attacks has increased exponentially thanks to hackers and cyber criminals making use of the IoT. These devices – including the likes of webcams Digital Video Recorders, and even fridges, toasters and pressure cookers – are typically designed to be quick and cheap to produce, and inherently have very poor levels of security. The majority run variants of the Linux operating system and many have very simple or default administrator username and password combinations, or use standard encryption tools where the ‘key’ is widely available on the internet. There are some with no security features at all. Worryingly, the end user can do little to prevent their use by cyber criminals and hackers, even if they were to become aware that their device has been compromised. Other than turning it off and disconnecting it from any internet connection – which would pretty much leave the device as ‘dumb’, and remove the features they bought it for – there’s very little scope to prevent it from being recruited by hackers. The risk posed stems from a piece of malware called ‘Mirai’ (Japanese for ‘the future’). Developed by a coder who goes under the pseudonym of ‘Anna-senpai’, Mirai turns computer systems running Linux into remotely controlled ‘bots’ that can be used as part of a ‘botnet’ in large-scale network attacks. Mirai was first unleashed on September 20, 2016, with attacks on the Krebs website reaching up to 620 Gbps. Soon after, OVH was hit with an attack which reached a staggering 1 Tbps. Both these attacks used in the region of 150,000 infected IoT devices, and produced volumes of traffic in DDoS attacks never seen before. It is thought Krebs was targeted as he has exposed an Israeli group called ‘vDOS’ operating on the ‘Dark Web’ that rented out DDoS attacks (known as ‘DDoS-as-a-Service’). Soon after these attacks, the source code for Mirai was released on the Dark Web. This now gave other hackers and cyber criminals the opportunity to undertake massive DDoS attacks,which resulted in the Dyn incident. In a change of tactic, the hackers attempted to take down part of the key infrastructure of the internet rather than just focusing on a single website. This begs the question: Just how will DDoS attacks develop in 2017 and what will the future hold for internet security? Source: http://www.itproportal.com/features/the-new-age-of-ddos-and-we-joked-that-toasters-would-one-day-take-down-our-banks/
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The new age of DDoS – And we ‘joked’ that toasters would one day take down our banks
In coordination with Europol’s European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3), the FBI conducted a series of interviews and arrests Dec. 5-9 aimed at reducing the number of young people acting as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)-for-hire hackers. “DDoS tools are among the many specialized cyber crime services available for hire that may be used by professional criminals and novices alike,” said Steve Kelly, FBI unit chief of the International Cyber Crime Coordination Cell (IC4). “While the FBI is working with our international partners to apprehend and prosecute sophisticated cyber criminals, we also want to deter the young from starting down this path.” Law enforcement agencies participated from Australia, Belgium, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the combined effort led to 34 arrests and 101 suspects interviewed and cautioned. The effort mainly targeted hackers under 20 who were suspected of paying for services that would maliciously flood an online target with so much data that users would be unable to gain access. The operation also marks the kick-start of a campaign in all participating countries to raise awareness of young people getting involved in cyber crime and to point those people toward positive outlets for their hacking skills. “Today’s generation is closer to technology than ever before, with the potential of exacerbating the threat of cyber crime,” said Steven Wilson, Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). “Many IT enthusiasts get involved in seemingly low-level fringe cyber crime activities from a young age, unaware of the consequences that such crimes carry. One of the key priorities of law enforcement should be to engage with these young people to prevent them from pursuing a criminal path, helping them understand how they can use their skills for a more constructive purpose.” Europol also identified that young hackers are most likely to be responsible for crimes in which they hack to take control or information from a computer, create or use malware and viruses, and carry out DDos attacks. “No law enforcement agency or country can defeat cyber crime alone,” an FBI statement said. “This demands a collective global approach.” Source: https://www.meritalk.com/articles/fbi-tries-to-curb-young-ddos-hackers/
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FBI Tries to Curb Young DDoS Hackers