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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

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

Credit unions among industries that suffered more DDoS attacks in 2013

A growing number of data center outages are caused by distributed denial of service attacks. On a technical level, DDoS campaigns are much more complicated to address than other leading causes such as human error or IT equipment failure. Accordingly, they often cost hundred of thousands of dollars to resolve. Throughout 2013, credit unions were increasingly targeted by DDoS attacks that overwhelmed their websites with traffic and sometimes created distractions so that other threats could bypass IT security. Going into 2014, mitigating risk from DDoS through software and backup solutions will be the key to reducing the costs and consequences of IT outages. Report finds that DDoS, equipment failure among the leading causes of outages According to one think tank’s research, DDoS attacks accounted for only 2 percent of outages at 67 U.S. data centers in 2010. By 2013, the share had risen to 18 percent. Perpetrators have benefited from ongoing increases in network speeds and the growing complexity of IT infrastructure, both of which have made it much easier to generate massive amounts of fraudulent traffic. The resulting server and equipment failures have footed IT departments with some steep bills. Outages caused by DDoS attacks typically ran $822,000 apiece, far outpacing the $380,000 price tag for incidents attributable to human error. Equipment issues were the most expensive cause, with each event costing slightly under $1 million. While the length of data center outage has gone down over the past few years, related expenses have risen. The average 2013 incident lasted 86 minutes, but cost $690,204, or 37 percent more than in 2010. Credit unions have felt the impact of more frequent DDoS attacks The rise of DDoS attacks has affected IT operations at credit unions, which were targeted by several prominent campaigns in 2013. A $4 billion credit union in Pleasanton, Calif., and a $1.6 billion one in Austin, Texas, had online services knocked out for hours at a time in the wake of DDoS attacks. More specifically, cybercriminals have honed tactics that put financial institution computers through the motions until they become exhausted. For example, a DDoS attack may ask a site for password resets on thousands of spurious accounts, forcing the system to go through each request. Some DDoS incidents may be distractions that facilitate wire theft, but others are politically motivated. Credit unions may need better preparation against DDoS risk, especially since some simply rely on online banking providers or ISPs to protect data. Restore on reboot software can be easily deployed by IT administrators as part of an imaging solution, and it provides fine-tuned management of all office endpoints. Organizations can ensure that kiosks and cash dispensing services remain active even in the event of a crash or attack. Source: http://www.faronics.com/news/blog/credit-unions-among-industries-that-suffered-more-ddos-attacks-in-2013/

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Credit unions among industries that suffered more DDoS attacks in 2013

JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America targets for DDoS attacks

Major US financial firms JP Morgan Chase and the Bank of America have been targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, according to one hacktivist group. The European Cyber Army has claimed it waged the attack that disrupted online services for customers of the companies between 10:30am and 2:30pm on Tuesday (28 January). It is the latest in a long line of DDoS attacks that the group has admitted to, with the federal court system one organisation recently impacted. Reports suggest the group have also been responsible for disruptive online attacks in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Both the Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase has refused to comment on the attack, but customers took to Twitter to complain about the outage to online services. Several executives at organisations that track DDoS activity confirm they saw indications two leading US banks were hit on Tuesday. The news of the DDoS attacks comes as Aleksandr Panin, the Russian programmer who created the SpyEye bank hacking tool, was successfully prosected in the US. Source: http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2014/Jan/30/jp-morgan-chase-and-bank-of-america-targets-for-ddos-attacks.html

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JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America targets for DDoS attacks

Whaleoil down due to DDOS attack

Controversial right wing website, Whaleoil, has been taken offline by a cyber attack and its editor has received death threats after he labelled a West Coast man killed in a car crash “feral”. A denial of service (DOS) attack started last night, temporarily disabling the blog, and continued today, the website left completely unavailable since 8am. “We are pretty certain it is from New Zealand. We are also pretty certain, due to the fact that they are skiting about it on Facebook, that it is these ferals on the West Coast,” Whaleoil’s editor Cameron Slater said. A DOS attack is intended to block a website from its intended users by overloading the site with requests so it cannot be visited by legitimate traffic. Slater has also received numerous death threats in text messages and on Facebook after a blog in which he described Westcoast man Judd Hall who died on Saturday as a “feral” was reportered in the Greymouth Star. “They are pretty hot under the collar. I wrote a post about that munter who died smacking into that house and a Greymouth Star journalist beat it all up and that set them off in their feral ways,” Slater said. He posted one of the text message threats to his Facebook page that said “we are coming for you” and “we know where you live.” There have been around 250 Facebook messages “imploring me to kill myself or that they are going to come round and kill me in lots of different manners,” Slater said. The threats have been reported to police. It was initially believed that the DOS attack was from the sub-continent after another blog on the site revealed India web traffic to the news site Scoop. “Now with the gloating that is going on from the West Coast ferals we are pretty certain it is them that are involved in it,” Slater said. The website should be back online shortly but the DOS attack has left Slater without a large amount of advertising income. “I don’t discuss my revenues. It is basically a day and a half of revenue,” he said. A DOS attack is illegal under the Crimes Act and is punishable with up to seven years in prison. Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/30013080/whaleoil-down-due-to-dos-attack

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Whaleoil down due to DDOS attack

Education sector is fastest growing for DDoS mitigation

The education sector is the fastest growing segment in taking up distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, according to DDoS protection services firm DOSarrest. The firm’s CTO Jag Bains told Computing that many companies -not just e-commerce firms – are deploying DDoS protection. “If their website goes down as a result of an attack, they can lose their SEO ranking or it could have an effect on their brand, there is a lot at stake aside from revenues,” he said. And despite there not being a particular industry that looks at DDoS protection as a must, DOSarrest’s general manager, Mark Teolis claimed that the education sector is one area which has grown significantly. “Our fastest growing segment in the last six months is the education sector believe it or not,” he said. Teolis explained that the firm was getting business from “schools from the UK, the US and international universities” but said he couldn’t identify a specific reason as to why the sector has shown a sudden interest. Bains believes that it may be as a result of educational institutes guarding themselves against their own students. “Students have easy access to DDoS tools, so they may want to try it against their own [school or university]. They could be motivated because they’re failing in something, and there are enough smart kids around to access tools – it is easy to Google them anyway,” he said. But Teolis said that the tools have been available on the internet for a long time, so questioned why there was a sudden surge in interest from educational institutes. Bains suggested that it could be because the school and university websites have become an integral part of the education system. “We’ve been talking about e-commerce and gaming [as being key industries for DDoS protection], but web presence itself is very important and schools and universities need to make their websites accessible. They need a website to give out grades, information and schedules – five years ago they weren’t really using the web page apart from explaining where the school is located,” he said. But while the education sector may be taking a keen interest, Teolis claims that there is not one segment that is “taking up 30 per cent of the market”. He said that “10 or 15 per cent of the market is as good as it gets”. As for a particular industry that has not taken DDoS as seriously as others, Teolis believes many e-commerce firms haven’t contemplated being the victim of a DDoS attack. “There are still the odd e-commerce guys out there [who haven’t taken it as seriously]. Money is rolling in and they’re just focused on that; DDoS for them is somebody else’s problem. A lot of it is ‘my ISP will deal with it’, the fact of the matter is, it is difficult to stop all of the attacks,” he said. Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2325009/education-sector-is-fastest-growing-for-ddos-mitigation-dosarrest

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Education sector is fastest growing for DDoS mitigation

Former hacker Mitchell Frost explains his motivation for launching a DDoS attack

In 2006, Mitchell Frost, then a 19-year-old college student at the University of Akron, used the school’s computer network to control the botnets he had created. Authorities say between August 2006 and March 2007, Frost launched a series of denial of service (DDOS) attacks against several conservative web sites, including Billoreilly.com, Anncoulter.com and Rudy Giuliani’s campaign site, Joinrudy2008.com. He is accused of taking down the O’Reilly site five times, as well as disrupting the University of Akron’s network during a DDOS attack Frost allegedly launched on a gaming server hosted by the university. Frost’s dorm room at the university was raided in March 2007. What followed, according to Frost, was a long, complicated legal battle that ultimately lead to him spending over two years behind bars and owing thousands of dollars in legal and restitution fees for his crimes. Frost was released from prison in 2012 and is now serving probation. Frost took the time to talk to CSO about his experience and delves into the reasons why he did it, his thoughts on the punishment he received and his plans for the future. Tell us about your background. How did you become so knowledgeable about computers and when did hacking become something that interested you? I started on computers around a young age and I have always had a mind that wants to keep exploring and learning. Hacking didn’t start overnight, it all started by networking really. First I wanted to be able to have music without paying for it, so I joined some chat rooms on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). IRC is not used much, it’s typically used only by smaller groups of hackers and gamers. When I was younger I would spend many hours in a row on the computer, and when I woke up or had free time, just continue on with what I was working on. You build skills and make connections with others and keep moving up until you have background in hacking. Let’s just say I built my way up over the years 2000-2007. What inspired you to do the kind of hacking you did in 2006 and 2007 to those conservative web sites? What were you hoping to accomplish by hacking those particular sites? How did you choose your targets and why? In 2006, I was young and, even at that age, I could see there was a lot of corruption and media propaganda going on in newspapers and on television. At that time, I had a rather large and complicated botnet. With the botnet, I was able to use the compromised computers for almost anything; key strokes, DDOS, servers, passwords, pranks. I had several botnets over the years from a few to thousands and didn’t do a whole lot of DDOS on servers because I had no need to. I decided that I had to do something about what I was seeing in the world around me, so I knocked a couple of websites offline at the time thinking it will prevent the hate and conflict and fear mongering from being seen by people. When it became clear you were going to face punishment for the attacks, did you think it would mean jail time? They raided me in March of 2007 right after spring break. They took some computer stuff and took my roommate’s stuff and had three agencies do the raid (FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security) all with guns pointed right at my head. They brought me into a room and said “if you help yourself now it will be easier at sentencing.” I didn’t answer any questions. They released me and didn’t say much. I was scared shitless after that. I didn’t know what to do. I remember now going to a class after the raid to take a math test and was shaking so bad. About one day later, they expelled me from the school, even though I was not charged with anything yet. I moved back home and then contacted the Federal Public Defenders office in Cleveland and was assigned a lawyer. He said cases like mine take time and to stay out of trouble and he would get back to me. I moved back home and got a job working as a carpet-cleaning technician. From 2007 and on, I tried to live a normal life but had that fear that something was coming. I ended up meeting my wife. We fell in love and she got pregnant in December of 2009. Around May of 2010, my lawyer said I randomly received a judge and that it didn’t look good because of her previous sentencing history. I was hoping for maybe a small amount of time or probation, considering I did not get arrested at the time of the raid in March 2007 and had not yet. I was living in fear for almost 4 years, not going to friends or out to parties and all that. The judge ended up giving me 30 months and tried to place me under arrest right at the sentencing hearing. When she did this, it took the prosecutor and my lawyer to walk up to the bench and say I am not a flight risk with a newborn on the way and I knew about these potential charges for three years, so why couldn’t I self-report? She finally agreed to let me self-report so I can tie up some things with my family before my time. There was some debate after your sentencing about whether or not the penalty was too harsh. Do you think it was too extreme? Way too extreme. Who was the victim? Yes, a couple of people had their servers down for a small period of time, but the jacked-up estimates of the damages were over inflated. Example: they said it took $10,000 for them to press one button on one switch to get access back to the network. The reasoning for the sentence has to do with amount of money lost, etc. Bill O’Reilly said he needed to spend $300,000 to upgrade his systems. My lawyer did not fight or really look into their claims of money loss. I think they should of come to some plea with me within a year of the initial raid so I could of dealt with this problem and moved on with my life. Maybe do 3-4 months in some low-security prison and some intensive probation would have been the same. Now it will end up costing me about 10 years of my life — 2006 started it and by the time I’m off probation it will be 2016. All for taking some servers offline. You tell me: is that fair? What has this experience taught you? The experience is not over yet and is far from. I have learned to keep to myself when I see something unjust or unfair or unbalanced all I can do is stay clear of it and talk to people I know or influence and explain my point of view without any damages, physical or monetary. Last year, there was a lot of sadness and discussion around the suicide of Reddit co-founder Aaron Schwartz. As you know, Schwartz was facing a trial after being arrested on allegations of breaching a computer network to download millions of pages of documents kept at MIT. Many feel he was being too harshly prosecuted for the crime and it drove him to suicide. What are your thoughts on that, having faced a sentence yourself? I am very familar with Aaron Schwartz. Did you know he chose to take his case to trial because he was not guilty? He was murdered and it was made to look like a suicide. Who would ignore a plea deal with no jail time, wait for trial and then commit suicide? All he did was download some stuff from the MIT library — most of it was like 30 years old. He was prosecuted because of his ties to a grassroots movement for Internet freedom. What’s next for you? What are you plans for the future? I am rebuilding my life the best I can for having limited resources. I was released Election Day 2012. I was stuck living in a halfway house in the slums of Toledo, Ohio. Then I had to go up the chain of the BOP and the halfway house to get released to home detention. That took about 2.5 months. I started probation on March 8th, 2013. I work at a small store in a town where my wife’s parents let us live in a rental, so we pay them what we can. I pretty much cannot go to school because I owe so much to U of Akron and I have $50,000 in fines and restitution. They take a percentage of my pay each check to give to Bill O’Reilly. I guess when you’re worth $50 million, why not ruin some guy’s life and future and suck every check he makes? I guess my life is not going anywhere until I am off probation. I would like to be a wireless network security consultant, or a real news reporter for the independent media. I will continue to try and make my son and wife’s life the best I can for the position I am in. Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245624/Why_I_did_it_Former_hacker_Mitchell_Frost_explains_his_motivation?source=rss_latest_content

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Former hacker Mitchell Frost explains his motivation for launching a DDoS attack

DDoS attacks get more complex – are networks prepared?

The threat of cyber attacks from both external and internal sources is growing daily. A denial of service, or DoS, attack is one of the most common. DoS have plagued defense, civilian and commercial networks over the years, but the way they are carried out is growing in complexity. If you thought your systems were engineered to defend against a DoS attack, you may want to take another look. Denial of service attack evolution A denial of service attack is a battle for computing resources between legitimate requests that a network and application infrastructure were designed for and illegitimate requests coming in solely to hinder the service provided or shut down the service altogether. The first DoS attacks were primarily aimed at Layer 3 or Layer 4 of the OSI model and were designed to consume all available bandwidth, crash the system being attacked, or consume all of the available memory, connections or processing power. Some examples of these types of attacks are the Ping of Death, Teardrop, SYN flood and ICMP flood. As operating system developers, hardware vendors and network architects began to mitigate these attacks, attackers have had to adapt and discover new methods. This has led to an increase in complexity and diversity in the attacks that have been used. Since DoS attacks require a high volume of traffic — typically more than a single machine can generate — attackers may use a botnet, which is a network of computers that are under the control of the attacker. These devices are likely to have been subverted through malicious means. This type of DoS, called a distributed denial of service (DDoS), is harder to defend against because the traffic likely will be coming from many directions. While the goal of newer DoS attacks is the same as older attacks, the newer attacks are much more likely to be an application layer attack launched against higher level protocols such as HTTP or the Domain Name System. Application layer attacks are a natural progression for several reasons: 1) lower level attacks were well known and system architects knew how to defend against them; 2) few mechanisms, if any, were available to defend against these types of attacks; and 3) data at a higher layer is much more expensive to process, thus utilizing more computing resources. As attacks go up the OSI stack and deeper into the application, they generally become harder to detect. This equates to these attacks being more expensive, in terms of computing resources, to defend against. If the attack is more expensive to defend against, it is more likely to cause a denial of service. More recently, attackers have been combining several DDoS attack types. For instance, an L3/L4 attack, in combination with an application layer attack, is referred to as diverse distributed denial of service or 3DoS. Internet and bandwidth growth impact DoS Back in the mid- to late 1990s, fewer computers existed on the Internet. Connections to the Internet and other networks were smaller and not much existed in the way of security awareness. Attackers generally had less bandwidth to the Internet, but so did organizations. Fast forward to the present and it’s not uncommon for a home connection to have 100 megabits per second of available bandwidth to the Internet. These faster connections give attackers the ability to send more data during an attack from a single device. The Internet has also become more sensitive to privacy and security, which has lead to encryption technologies such as Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security to encrypt data transmitted across a network. While the data can be transported with confidence, the trade-off is that encrypted traffic requires extra processing power, which means a device encrypting traffic typically will be under a greater load and, therefore, will be unable to process as many requests, leaving the device more susceptible to a DoS attack. Protection against DoS attacks As mentioned previously, DoS attacks are not simply a network issue; they are an issue for the entire enterprise. When building or upgrading an infrastructure, architects should consider current traffic and future growth. They should also have resources in place to anticipate having a DoS attack launched against their infrastructure, thereby creating a more resilient infrastructure. A more resilient infrastructure does not always mean buying bigger iron. Resiliency and higher availability can be achieved by spreading the load across multiple devices using dedicated hardware Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). Hardware ADCs evenly distribute the load across all types of devices, thus providing a more resilient infrastructure and also offer many offloading capabilities for technologies such as SSL and compression. When choosing a device, architects should consider whether the device offloads some processing to dedicated hardware. When a typical server is purchased, it has a general purpose processor to handle all computing tasks. More specialized hardware such as firewalls and Active Directory Certificates offer dedicated hardware for protection against SYN floods and SSL offload. This typically allows for such devices to handle exponentially more traffic, which in turn means they are more capable to thwart an attack. Since attacks are spread across multiple levels of the OSI model, tiered protection is needed all the way from the network up to the application design. This typically equates to L3/L4 firewalls being close to the edge that they are protecting against some of the more traditional DoS attacks and more specialized defense mechanism for application layer traffic such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to protect Web applications. WAFs can be a vital ally in protecting a Web infrastructure by defending against various types of malicious attacks, including DoS. As such, WAFs fill in an important void in Web application intelligence left behind by L3/L4 firewalls. As demonstrated, many types of DoS attacks are possible and can be generated from many different angles. DoS attacks will continue to evolve at the same — often uncomfortably fast — rate as our use of technology. Understanding how these two evolutions are tied together will help network and application architects be vigilant and better weigh the options at their disposal to protect their infrastructure. Source: http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2013/12/19/DOS-attacks-complexity.aspx?admgarea=DS&Page=3

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DDoS attacks get more complex – are networks prepared?

Mobile devices increasingly used to launch sophisticated DDoS attacks

DDoS attacks still plague businesses worldwide, and cyber criminals are increasingly using mobile devices to launch attacks The threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against enterprise users from mobile applications is increasing as more users go mobile, according to DDoS security company Prolexic. Cyber criminals are finding mobile devices can make for a powerful attack tool – and surprisingly easy to use. “Mobile devices add another layer of complexity,” said Stuart Scholly, Prolexic President, in a press statement. “Because mobile networks use super proxies, you cannot simply use a hardware appliance to block source IP addresses as it will also block legitimate traffic. Effective DDoS mitigation requires an additional level of fingerprinting and human expertise so specific blocking signatures can be developed on-the-fly and applied in real-time.” DDoS attacks can lead to website and server downtime, interruption in day-to-day business operations, and lead to lost revenue and wasted manpower. Prolexic discovered a 26 percent increase in DDoS attacks from Q4 2012 to Q4 2013, with a significant number of advanced DDoS attack weapons. Source: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34862/mobile-devices-increasingly-used-to-launch-sophisticated-ddos-attacks/index.html