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LulzSec Hacker Ryan Cleary To Be Released

Convicted LulzSec hacker Ryan Cleary, 21, is set to be released “imminently” after appearing Wednesday in a London courtroom for sentencing relating to charges that he made and possessed 172 indecent images of children on his PC. “Some of these images showed children aged as young as six months old in circumstances where they were completely vulnerable,” Judge Deborah Taylor told Cleary, reported The Independent in Britain. “These images were such as would make any right-minded person concerned at you viewing such images.” Cleary, aka Viral, previously pleaded guilty to two charges of making indecent images of children and one charge of possessing indecent images of children. Taylor said Wednesday that although U.K. sentencing guidelines required incarceration for the offenses to which Cleary had plead guilty, “time has been served in any event.” Based on time served, his pleading guilty to all charges filed against him and agreeing to wear an electronic device that will monitor his location, Cleary received a three-year community service order, which requires that he work in the community without pay. He also received a 36-month supervision order, which is akin to probation and requires that Cleary meet weekly with his probation officer. Finally, Cleary was ordered to sign the U.K.’s Violent and Sex Offender Register, which is a database used by police and prison officials to track people convicted of related offenses. Cleary previously appeared in court last month, when he was sentenced to 32 months in prison, followed by a five-year serious crime prevention order that can be used to restrict where he’s allowed to travel and which jobs he’ll be allowed to work. Also sentenced in May were fellow LulzSec participants Jake Davis (Topiary), Mustafa al-Bassam (Tflow) and Ryan Ackroyd (Kayla). Together with Cleary, they pleaded guilty to charges of hacking a number of sites, including the CIA, Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) and National Health Service (NHS), and Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as leaking the credit card data and personal information of hundreds of thousands of people. Cleary also pleaded guilty to launching numerous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks under the banners of Anonymous, Internet Feds and LulzSec. British police said the attacks in which Cleary participated caused an estimated $31 million in damages. British police said that when they arrested Cleary at his home on June 20, 2011, they found him in the middle of launching a DDoS attack against the website of SOCA, which was conducting a joint investigation with the FBI into the activities of LulzSec, Anonymous and AntiSec. Clearly was first arrested in 2011 and released on bail, subject to his refraining from using the Internet. He was re-arrested on bail violation charges on March 5, 2012, for going online in December 2011 to contact LulzSec leader Sabu. The day after Cleary’s arrest, federal officials revealed that in June 2011, Sabu — real name Hector Xavier Monsegur — had been arrested and turned confidential government informant, and was helping the FBI investigate hackers and information security attacks. The news of Cleary’s imminent release after serving less than his full jail sentence has led some members of Anonymous to accuse him of having cut a deal with authorities, although no evidence has been produced to back up that assertion. “Anyone who gets away with child porn charges is obviously collaborating with the feds,” according to a post by “ro0ted” to the pro-Anonymous CyberGuerilla blog. Cleary’s legal troubles might not be over, as he was indicted last year by a Los Angeles federal grand jury on hacking charges. But his attorney, Karen Todner, said last year that U.S. prosecutors had indicated that they wouldn’t be seeking his extradition. Furthermore, if that changed, she said her client would fight any such request. “Cleary suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and is on the autistic spectrum and extradition to the United States is totally undesirable,” she said. Source: http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/lulzsec-hacker-ryan-cleary-to-be-release/240156590?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Government

Are DDoS Attacks Against Banks Over?

Distributed-denial-of-service attacks against U.S. banks have been dormant for nearly four weeks, leading security experts to question when and if a new phase of attacks might emerge. The hacktivist group Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters , which since last September has taken credit for the hits against banks, claimed its attacks were in protest of a YouTube movie trailer deemed offensive to Muslims. But some observers have speculated that Iran was backing the DDoS strikes against banks as payback for cyber-espionage attacks, such as Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu, that have over the last three years affected Iranian computer systems. Rodney Joffe, senior technologist for online security provider Neustar Inc., says the current lull could be a sign that the attacks waged by the hacktivist group are over. “It’s a wild conjecture,” Joffe says. “But we may have seen the end of them.” Joffe says indirect activity linked to the al-Qassam Cyber Fighters’ botnet, known as Brobot, has continued. But there have been no direct attacks. And that lack of activity raises questions about whether al-Qassam will wage any more attacks, Joffe says. “The botnet is no bigger than it was,” he says. “We take [compromised] machines down and then new machines keep getting adding. I still have hope that the government will have some impact or effect, but don’t know one way or the other.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation in April warned that Brobot had been modified, “in an attempt to increase the effectiveness with which the [botnet’s] scripts evade detection.” The FBI said the actors behind Brobot were changing their attack methodology to circumvent mitigation efforts put forth by U.S. banking institutions The FBI also noted that as of April 10, 46 U.S. banking institutions had been targeted by more than 200 separate DDoS attacks of “various degrees of impact” since September. Financial fraud expert Avivah Litan , an analyst at Gartner, says intervention from federal authorities may have spurred al-Qassam to halt its attacks. But, like Joffe, she says there is no way to be sure. “I do know the banks were trying to get the White House to do something politically, and that could be what’s happened.” But other experts, such as Mike Smith of Web security provider Akamai Technologies, don’t think there’s been anything going on behind the scenes to keep the attacks from resuming. Different Attack Actors Other experts anticipate that another group could emerge to resume DDoS attacks against banks if Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters ends its campaigns. “There has been a lull in the al-Qassam-like attacks,” says Scott Hammack , CEO of DDoS-mitigation provider Prolexic. “But I would definitely not misunderstand this lull as being an end to these types of attacks. The attacks will continue; it’s really just a question of when, not if.” The current break comes after a third phase of hacktivist attacks, which kicked off in March. The latest campaign ran eight weeks, the longest-running so far. The break from the third phase of attacks has lasted four weeks so far. By comparison the break between the first campaign , which began Sept. 18, and the second campaign , which kicked off Dec. 10, lasted six weeks. And the break between the second and third campaigns lasted five weeks. Hammack, like Smith, says Brobot, as well as other botnets, continue to grow. In fact, over Memorial Day weekend, Prolexic helped to mitigate a 167-gigabyte DNS-reflection attack, the largest attack recorded to date, Hammack says. “The attack traffic was global and required us to use all four of our cloud-based scrubbing centers,” he says. DNS-reflection was the attack method used in Operation Stophaus , an attack waged in March by The Spamhaus Project, a Geneva-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to fighting Internet spam. And while it’s not an extremely sophisticated type of attack, Hammack says these types of DDoS strikes are only going to become more prevalent. “There are plenty of countries where rogue elements will continue to exist,” he says. “You’re never going to overcome that. I think, if anything, people should be taking advantage of this down time to fortify their infrastructures.” The application-layer attacks al-Qassam Cyber Fighters favored in its last two campaigns have remained inactive, despite that the group appears to continue efforts to grow and strengthen its botnet. “The botnets are out there,” Hanmmack says. “We have between 15,000 and 100,000 compromised web servers out there that we know of. So the artillery is still out there to create these types of attacks. We just haven’t seen any of the web server attacks for the last 30 days.” Why Have Attacks Stopped So why have the hacktivists remained quiet for the last month? On May 6, al-Qassam Cyber Fighters claimed on the open forum Pastebin that its attacks would cease for just a week, out of respect for OperationUSA , a separate hacktivist movement organized by Anonymous that proved unsuccessful Many experts predicted the group’s attacks against banks would resume by May 14. But they didn’t. Some have speculated that international law enforcement could be close to nailing members of the al-Qassam team. But Hammack says drawing conclusions based on the ebbs and flows of DDoS attacks is dangerous because hacktivists attack in waves. “Certain attacks die down after certain periods,” he says. “That doesn’t mean, though, that the attacks are over.” Banking institution leaders say they’ve been advised by groups such as the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center not to lessen their DDoS mitigation efforts. Litan says banks are heeding that advice. “The banks have more vendors involved now,” she says. “I don’t think they’ll ever pull back. They have put a lot of systems in. They really can’t go back now, and they shouldn’t.” Source: http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/are-ddos-attacks-against-banks-over-a-5801/op-1

Possibly related DDoS attacks cause DNS hosting outages

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that could be related have in the past few days slammed the DNS servers of at least three providers of domain name management and DNS hosting services. DNSimple, easyDNS and TPP Wholesale all reported temporary DNS service outages and degradation on Monday, citing DDoS attacks as the reason. In some cases the attacks started a few days ago and are ongoing. TPP Wholesale, a subsidiary of Sydney-based Netregistry, one of Australia’s largest providers of Web hosting, domain management and other online services, alerted its customers through its website on Monday that eight of its DNS servers experienced “unscheduled service interruption.” TPP Wholesale experienced a series of DDoS attacks against its DNS name servers over the past several days, the Netregistry Group Security Team said in a blog post. The company managed to mitigate the DDoS attacks that caused service interruptions throughout Monday by taking “the drastic step” of rate-limiting DNS queries, the team said. Such aggressive filtering is prone to false positives and might result in some customers being denied DNS service. “In the next few days we will continue to whitelist such false positives as we discover them,” the team said. Second wave EasyDNS, a DNS hosting provider based in Toronto, also reported DNS service disruptions caused by a DDoS attack on Monday. “This looks like a larger version of a smaller DDoS yesterday which was possibly a test run,” the company’s CEO Mark Jeftovic said Monday in a blog post. “This DDoS attack is different from our previous ones in that it looks as if the target is us, easyDNS, not one of our clients.” Jeftovic said that it was difficult to differentiate the real traffic from the DDoS traffic, but the company managed to partially mitigate the attack and also published workarounds for affected customers. “This is the ‘nightmare scenario’ for DNS providers, because it is not against a specific domain which we can isolate and mitigate, but it’s against easyDNS itself and it is fairly well constructed,” he said. Third victim Aetrion, based in Malabar, Florida, operates a DNS hosting service called DNSimple, which was also attacked on Monday. According to DNSimple founder Anthony Eden, the DDoS attack is ongoing, but the company managed to mitigate it. “Our authoritative name servers were used as an amplifier for an attack against a third-party network,” Eden said Tuesday via email. “The attacker essentially flooded us with ‘ANY’ queries for a variety of domains managed by our DNS service, with the intention of amplifying these small queries into significantly larger responses aimed at a specific network.” This attack technique is known as DNS reflection or DNS amplification. It involves sending queries with a spoofed source IP (Internet Protocol) address—usually the victim’s address—to DNS servers from a large number of computers in order to trigger long responses to be sent by those servers to victim’s IP address within a short time window. If enough computers and DNS servers are used, the resulting rogue DNS traffic will exhaust the victim’s available Internet bandwidth. The DNS reflection technique has been known for a long time. However, its recent use to launch DDoS attacks of unprecedented scale, like the one in March that targeted a spam-fighting organization called Spamhaus, has likely brought it renewed interest from attackers. The attack experienced by DNSimple on Monday was significantly larger in volume and duration than other attacks that hit the company’s name servers in the past, Eden said. He believes that the attack is related to the ones experienced by easyDNS and TPP Wholesale. “The pattern displayed on TPP Wholesale’s blog is similar to what we see, and we have been communicating with easyDNS and find similarities between the attacks.” EasyDNS and TPP Wholesale did not immediately respond to inquiries seeking more information about the recent attacks against their servers and confirmation that they were using DNS reflection techniques. Attack and abuse reports on the increase It’s possible that DNS servers operated by other companies were also affected by this attack, Eden said. “A DNS provider will have a significantly higher number of customers and thus the attacks get noticed much sooner because it affects a larger group of people,” he said. DNSimple’s authoritative name servers were used to amplify a DDoS attack directed at a server hosting company called Sharktech or one of its customers, Eden said. Sharktech has noticed a surge of abuse reports in the past 24 hours coming from ISPs and hosting companies complaining about DDoS attacks against their DNS servers that appear to originate from Sharktech, said Tim Timrawi, president and CEO of Sharktech, via email. Upon further investigation the company determined that these reports were actually the result of a DNS amplification attack against its own customers that abused the authoritative DNS servers of those companies, he said. Most of the affected DNS servers were secured properly and were being queried for domains they are responsible for, Timrawi said. “Unlike previous DNS Amplification Attacks in which the attacker used open recursive DNS servers, in this one, the attacker is collecting all the DNS servers they can find and sending MX (and other kind of queries) to them for their domain records with a spoofed source of the target host,” he said. The amplified DDoS attack targeting Sharktech customers was larger than 40Gbps, Timrawi said. “We are unaware of the reason behind the attacks,” he said. The abuse of authoritative name servers in DNS reflection attacks is not very common because attackers need to know the exact domain names that each abused server is responsible for, said Carlos Morales, vice president of sales engineering and operations at DDoS mitigation provider Arbor Networks. Obtaining this information is not very hard, but it does require additional work compared to abusing open DNS resolvers, and attackers usually prefer the easiest route to reach their goals, he said. Open DNS resolvers are recursive DNS servers that are configured to accept queries from any computers on the Internet. These act as relays between users and authoritative DNS servers; they receive queries for any domain name, find the authoritative name server responsible for it and relay the information obtained from that server back to the user. Meanwhile, authoritative name servers, like those operated by DNSimple, easyDNS and TPP Wholesale, will only respond to queries concerning the domain names they serve. Well-prepared attackers The extra work required to target such servers suggests that the attackers behind the recent attacks on these DNS hosting providers were well prepared and did their homework in advance, Morales said. One mitigation against this kind of attack is to configure the DNS server software to force all “ANY” queries sent over UDP (User Datagram Protocol) to be resent over TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) instead, Eden said. This can be done by sending a UDP response with the TC bit set and an empty answer section. A legitimate DNS client will retry over TCP, while a bogus client will get no benefit, he said. In the case of open resolvers, the problem can be mitigated by restricting which IP addresses are allowed to query them, said Morales. For example, an ISP operating a DNS resolver for its customers can restrict its use to only IP addresses from its network, he said. However, this kind of mitigation is not applicable to authoritative name servers because they are meant to be queried by anyone on the Internet who wants to get information about the specific domain names served by them, Morales said. The mitigation described by Eden is very good and is actually one that Arbor also uses to protect authoritative name servers, he said. Another mitigation is to enforce a query rate limit for source IP addresses, he said. Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040766/possibly-related-ddos-attacks-cause-dns-hosting-outages.html

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Possibly related DDoS attacks cause DNS hosting outages

Turkish gov’t websites hacked by Anonymous

A group of computer hackers known as Anonymous carried out early on Monday a series of cyberattacks on Turkish government websites in retaliation for violent police response to anti-government protests. Several Anonymous messages in its Twitter blog provide links to the sites, including those of President Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, that have been denied public access. Hackers normally use distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to knock their targets offline. Turkey’s Hürriyet Daily News reported on Monday that some Turkish media websites have also been targeted by Anonymous for “for failing to adequately cover the events.” The planned demolition of Gezi Park in central Istanbul sparked mass rallies in the city on Saturday, prompting police to use tear gas and water cannons to disperse the protesters. Violent clashes between protesters and police continued in Istanbul and the capital, Ankara, on Sunday. The rally in Istanbul triggered more than 230 separate protests in 67 cities across the country, according to Sky News. Turkey’s Interior Minister Muammer Guler said on Sunday that more than 1,700 people had been arrested in the unrest nationwide, adding that 58 civilians and 115 security officers had been injured over several days of protests. The United States and the European Union and have already urged the Turkish government to exercise restraint, while Amnesty International has condemned the use of tear gas by Turkish police as “a breach of international human rights standards.” Anonymous declares Internet attacks in support of Turkish protests Anonymous vows to kick off a worldwide action which will “bring the Turkish government to its knees.” With #opTurkey, the hacktivist collective plans to “attack every Internet and communications asset of the Turkish government.” Anonymous claims to have taken down several websites across Turkey, targeting municipal governments in Mersin and Izmir as well the Gebze Institute of Technology. Source: http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/151067/turkish-gov-39-t-websites-hacked-by-anonymous.html

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Turkish gov’t websites hacked by Anonymous

Preparing for Battle: DDoS Attacks On Business

Lately, DDoS attacks have crept back into the headlines, forcing businesses to reacquaint themselves with the concept. DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service which uses multiple machines to carry out a DoS attack on unsuspecting victims. It is estimated that over 7,000 attacks happen daily with the motives and severity of consequences varying between different attacks but all have the potential to greatly harm a company’s operations. To minimize any possible damage, it is important to prepare a defense against these malicious attacks especially as they are on the rise and could target your business at any moment. How to realize you are in the midst of a DDoS attack At the beginning of a DDoS attack, you may fail to even realize what is occurring. The optimistic side of you wants to believe that your marketing efforts have finally kicked in and created a sudden wave of interested customers to your website. However great that may be, the reality is as the numbers increase and overwhelm your servers, you are more likely to be under attack. When a DDoS attack occurs they are using one of two avenues: a special malware that infects the machines of others in order to carry out the attack from a large number of hosts or utilizing a large number of volunteers to their cause to perform the attack in unison. Regardless of the technique employed, they both use many host computers to access the target’s website and overwhelm their servers which results in long periods of downtime. Why Attackers Target You The reasons behind DDoS attacks can vary depending on the organization performing the attack and who they are attacking. The most common reason behind an attack is extortion where they perform a small attack on your servers first, then contact you demanding a certain amount of money to prevent a larger attack from occurring. The more profitable a company you are, the higher the chance you will be a target for extortion. Also, if your organization is currently in the spotlight for political controversy, there are many “hacktivists,” like the group Anonymous, who carry out DDoS attacks to satisfy their political agenda. Lastly, in sophisticated and large-scale attacks, the hackers could be attempting a security breach in order to obtain confidential information. All of these causes could create a devastating impact upon your company’s image. The Effects of DDoS Attacks 1. Revenue The more heavily you rely on your website as a means for business, the more severe a DDoS attack will affect your company. The average daily revenue loss from attacks for those that depend heavily on the Internet for their business is $2,000,000 or nearly $100,000 per hour. Even if you are a smaller organization with less reliance on the Internet, the average loss is $10,000 per hour when in downtime. These are significant amounts of losses that could be hard to recover from, especially for a small business. 2. Reputation As a DDoS attack is occurring, it becomes nearly impossible for any customer to access your website and results in an unpleasant experience for them. For instance, if you are a banking website, they can’t access their accounts which is very critical and leaves them feeling like their private information is at risk. Even after the attack is over, you will have to spend time and money in public relations efforts to reinstate faith in your service from your customer base. 3. Lawsuits When the attack breaches security and confidential information, a risk for lawsuits from customers and consumer protection groups occurs. Now you are not only looking at revenue loss from the downtime and from a loss of reputation but also, significant legal fees associated with your company failing to protect customer information. If all three occur, the DDoS attack could be enough to send your company into bankruptcy and impending failure. How to Protect Your Company The devastating effects from a DDoS attack is enough to leave you shaking in your boots, however most companies still fail to provide adequate protection against said attacks. As the sophistication of these attacks increase, your company’s firewall and current security measures may not be enough to handle a full-scale attack. In a recent survey, Neustar only found that 3% of the surveyed organizations had an anti-DoS solution. Here are some steps you should take to protect your company in the event of a DDoS attack: Develop a defense strategy immediately so you are prepared to take action when an attack occurs. Identify current security lapses or vulnerabilities within your website. If you have been a victim from an attack, keep information collected about it so you can determine how to properly fight off future attacks Simulate a DDoS attack to ensure your response measures are adequate. Consider purchasing an anti-DoS service from a security provider to narrow the possibility of attack. Combine anti-DoS service with the above steps to provide a comprehensive approach to protection. As DDoS attacks are on the rise, now is the time to prepare your company in the event of attack. Even smaller organizations could become victims, so it is important to be ready to defend your company’s website and servers from hackers. Following the steps for protection can prevent a DDoS attack from causing results that could be extremely difficult to recover from, allowing you to come out victorious in an otherwise disastrous situation. Source: http://technologyadvice.com/preparing-for-battle-ddos-attacks-on-business/

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Preparing for Battle: DDoS Attacks On Business

Threat of the Week: DDoS For Hire on the Rise

Just when you thought you could tune out the fears about DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, listen up: the risks for you suddenly are much graver, and it may be the time when defensive action on your part has become necessary. Yes, the fear-mongering over the May 7th DDoS blitzkrieg – which turned out to be a non-event – has prompted many credit union executives to turn off the DDoS discussion. That’s a mistake, however. “Three years ago I would have called DDoS a nuisance. Now it is a threat to many more businesses,” said Vann Abernethy, an executive with security firm NSFOCUS. A big change that is occurring, sources insist to Credit Union Times , is that for-rent DDoS networks – often costing spare change – are proliferating and they have plenty of firepower to take down most credit unions’ online presences. The scariest part: absolutely no technical skills are required to deploy what is being called DDoS as a service. All that’s needed is digital money – PayPal or BitCoin and there even are some providers that take MasterCard and Visa. Barry Shteiman, senior security strategist at Imperva, named names of sites that he said offer what seems to be DDoS for hire: SSH Booter, Empire Stresser, Quantum Stresser, Asylum Stresser, Titanium Stresser, Illuminati Stresser, Legion Stresser, Agony Stresser. The list is not complete. “There are dozens of companies selling DDoS as a service now,” said Sean Bodmer, chief researcher, Counter-Exploitation Intelligence, for CounterTack. Note: Almost all such sites claim to offer, not rogue DDoS for hire, but “stress testing” so that an organization – a credit union for instance – can check its DDoS defenses. Just one problem: sources insisted that the majority of stress-testing sites they are familiar with do no verification that the person buying the “stress test” has any affiliation whatsoever with the target. What’s fueled the rise in DDoS as a service? For one, the intense publicity for DDoS has just about everybody aware of the attack format. For two, “As email spam has become more and more a solved problem it has forced criminals with botnets to find other uses for them. DDoS lets them monetize their botnets,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a DDoS mitigation company. DDoS as a service prices are also tumbling. Hemant Jain, vice president of engineering for security company Fortinet, said that he has found providers who are selling an hour of DDoS for $5, a 24-hour day of it for $40 and a week for $260. Can’t these DDoS as service provider be shut down by law enforcement? It’s not that easy. Commented Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at mitigation provider Radware, “It’s important to note that ‘DDos for Hire’ websites move around in terms of their technical underpinning. They don’t stay in one area or one location for too long. It’s almost like a game of “Whack-a-Mole” – just when you think you’ve identified the location of the website, it’s already moved.” Added Chris Ensey, COO of security company Dunbar Digital Army, “These (DDoS as a service) sites are being resold like white-labeled products now. Most of the sellers are just affiliates who leverage another botnet or platform” – that is, they have none of their own infrastructure and, poof, they can be here today and back tomorrow under a new flag. That’s the problem: it is very hard to pinpoint the location of a DDoS command and control center and when it’s found, said sources, it generally is in a country with little or no law enforcement reciprocity with the United States. The bottom line for credit unions: “They have to take DDoS seriously. There is no turning this back,” said Shteiman. The good news: the attack throughputs via DDoS for hire are tiny fractions of what al Qassam is throwing at money center banks – 1% or 2% of the volume in many cases. But that is plenty to knock out a credit union that lacks defenses. As for what defenses are needed to thwart for hire DDoS, experts indicated that in most cases low-cost mitigation, within the budget of just about every credit union, ought to suffice. Talk with mitigation companies, also ask Web hosts what protections they have on hand or can line up, Small expenditures ought to bring peace of mind – at least that’s what the experts are saying today Source: http://www.cutimes.com/2013/05/28/threat-of-the-week-ddos-for-hire-on-the-rise?ref=hp

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Threat of the Week: DDoS For Hire on the Rise

DDoS Attacks – Understanding the Dangers

If you’re a small business owner, or if you own Web space for any reason, one of the new threats that have no doubt begun to appear on your horizon is the potential of being attacked online. Fortunately for the hackers, not a lot of people understand what online attacks really are, how they pull them off, or how to effectively protect from it. Most computer repair experts agree it is hard to guarantee 100 percent security, but you can take the necessary precautions to minimize damages if your security is ever compromised. Taking precautions starts by understanding the dangers: One of the most common types of attack that takes place these days is a DDOS, or Distributed Denial of Service attack. This type of attack is particularly effective because it doesn’t require an intimate knowledge of your security to be deployed. It just takes brute force. Prior to the scheduled attack, the hacker will create a swarm of “zombie” computers — computers infected by the hacker’s software. This software allows the hacker to use the processing power of thousands of computers belonging to other people to bring down your server. When the attack commences, the hacker tells the zombie computers to simultaneously and continually load information from your Web server. If the attack is powerful enough, your server will stop serving. It will become unreachable so even legitimate visitors can’t access the site. While this intense strain is taking over your server, the hacker can try to slip into the back door unnoticed. This is where a lot of the actual financial loss associated with DDOS attacks come from. Scared yet? Don’t be…too scared. Most DDOS attacks happen to high-profile sites that make a lot of money online and that have a lot to lose from even a temporary outage. But there’s still a chance it could happen to you for reasons beyond your control. So how do you protect against such a large-scale attack? The easiest way is to talk to your in-house IT Department and have them work through the nine steps that help defend against a DDOS attack. No IT onsite? Then call your trusted IT or computer repair professionals and tell them you want to prepare for a DDOS attack. They can best help you and recommend plans to upgrade your servers or to install special software that can determine legitimate traffic from DDOS attacks. They might also want to talk with you about the current security software you’re using. An off-the-shelf program probably won’t defend very well against this new type of attack, so talk with your IT professional about the options available to you. As always, the best defense is vigilance. As you’re managing your website, be sure to note any suspicious traffic, educate your staff on safe practices and call your computer repair professionals as soon as you note suspicious activity. Most likely it won’t be anything, but it never hurts to ask. For protection against your eCommerce site click here . Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/05/22/ddos-attacks-understanding-the-dangers/

Legitimate online services enable DDoS-attacks-for-hire sites

A recent expose shines a light onto the strange world of “booter” or “stressor” web sites which offer DDoS-attacks-for-hire Is an online payment giant Paypal unwittingly enabling DDoS attacks? That’s the question posed by security researchers who have studied a small, weird corner of the market for distributed denial of service (DDoS) services: so-called “booter” or “stressor” web sites. Speaking at The Security B-Sides Boston security conference on Saturday, independent researchers Allison Nixon and Brandon Levene said that their investigation of booter sites found that many rely on legitimate online services, including Paypal to accept payment on behalf of customers interested in attacking web sites they do not own, and Cloudflare, a DDoS prevention service. The presentation was just the latest to peek into the strange world of “booter” or “stressor” web sites, which offer DDoS attacks for hire, often targeted at online gaming services popular with teenagers. In the past week, the web site krebsonsecurity.com published exposes on two such sites: assylumstressor.net and Ragebooter.net, both booter services for hire. In the process, Krebs revealed the identities of the purported owners of the sites and details of conversations he had with them about their services. In their presentation Saturday, Levene and Nixon, who assisted Krebs in his research, said that the booter sites were common online, but wholly different from the massive, 300Gbps attacks directed at Spamhaus, or the site-crippling DDoS attacks on leading banks and financial services firms like Citi, Chase, Wells Fargo and others in recent months. Rather, the services use mostly simple, reflected DNS and UDP flood attacks to knock small sites and residential home routers offline, the two researchers said. Many of the features of sites like Ragebooter.net are poorly designed or don’t work at all, said Nixon. Most victims are very often small websites hosting online gaming servers. In fact, the most reliable customers of booter sites are often other booter sites, said Nixon. The sites are not hugely profitable, but do generate some income. An analysis of data on the site Asylumstressor.com by Nixon and Levene suggest that site operators made, at most, $23,000 in 2012 – though probably much less. The sites operate more or less in the open. Speaking with Brian Krebs last week, a Tennessee man named Justin Poland, the operator of ragebooter.net, argued that the services were legal. “Since it is a public service on a public connection to other public servers this is not illegal,” Poland told Krebs in a Facebook chat. Poland even claimed to be working on behalf of the local FBI, turning over information gleaned from his service to law enforcement as needed. The Memphis FBI would not confirm or deny that Poland’s claims were true. Legal or not, most booter sites operate more or less in the open and with impunity, Nixon told an audience at B-Sides Boston, which was held at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge. Site operators – many teenagers and 20-somethings with little technical sophistication – make little effort to conceal their identities. Paypal payments are often sent to e-mail accounts that are also associated with public Facebook profiles, making it easy to link booter sites to real world identities like Poland’s, she said. Law enforcement seems unconcerned with small scale attack sites like Ragebooter.net, or those who operate them, meaning that booter site operators continue to operate despite ample evidence about who they are and the illegal nature of their business, Nixon said. Similarly, services like PayPal and Cloudflare enable small-scale DDoS operations to continue, by turning a blind eye to the true nature of their businesses. Nixon said as many as 70 percent of booter sites use Cloudflare, a DDoS protection site. The service mainly protects booter sites from other booter sites, she said. Paypal isn’t the only online payment service, but it is easy and convenient to use and widely respected. Inexperienced booters who had to go through the trouble of setting up an account at a site like LibertyReserve might think twice, Nixon argued. In an e-mail statement to ITworld and other news outlets, Paypal said that it couldn’t discuss the specifics of customer accounts but that it “will review suspicious accounts for malicious activity and work with law enforcement to ensure cyber criminals are reported properly.” “We take security very seriously at PayPal,” the statement continued. “We do not condone the use of our site in the sale or dissemination of tools, which have the sole purpose to attack customers and illegally take down web sites.” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that his company protects millions of web sites – most of them legitimate private and public sector entities. However, his company doesn’t discriminate, and Prince admits that some sites protected by Cloudflare are troubling, including the booter and stressor sites. Cloudflare works closely with law enforcement and always responds promptly to requests for information from the courts or law enforcement offiicals. However, in the absence of any action by law enforcement, Prince said that it isn’t for him or his company to decide who to work with. “I do find it troubling when there are extralegal measures taken to determine what is and is not going on,” he said, in an apparent reference to the investigation by Krebs, Nixon and Levene. “How far do you go with that, if someone assumes XYZ shouldn’t be on the Internet? Should Google remove them from their search index?” he asked. “We believe in due process,” said Prince. Source: http://www.itworld.com/it-management/357306/legitimate-online-services-enabling-ddos-attacks-hire-sites

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Legitimate online services enable DDoS-attacks-for-hire sites

Saudi Web Sites Under DDoS Attack

The Saudi Interior Ministry said Friday that several government Web sites have come under attack in a campaign hackers are calling #OpSaudi. Hackers who identify with the loose hacking collective Anonymous have aimed at several government Web sites, including the Saudi Ministry of Finance, General Intelligence Presidency, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Directorate General of Passports, as well as sites for several major Saudi provinces, including Makkah and Jeddah. Most of the sites are facing distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, in which hackers flood each site with traffic until they collapse under the load. But hackers claimed to have also broken into some sites through a so-called SQL injection, in which attackers exploit a software vulnerability and enter commands that cause a database to produce its contents. In one case, the Twitter account for @AnonySaudi claimed to delete the database of a Saudi Web server. Hackers say their motive is twofold. On Twitter, some claim the #OpSaudi campaign is in retaliation for unconfirmed reports of a rape and murder in Saudi Arabia. Some Tweets include links to YouTube videos which show images of a naked body dumped on the side of a road. The attacks also followed an announcement by Matthew Rosenfield, the well-known security researcher who goes by the hacker handle Moxie Marlinspike, that Mobily, a major Saudi telecommunications company, approached him about assisting in a continuing Saudi surveillance project. In a widely circulated blog post Monday, Mr. Marlinspike said he learned that on behalf of a Saudi “regulator,” Mobily is working to intercept mobile app data for communication tools including Twitter and free mobile messaging apps like Viber, Line and WhatsApp that send messages over the Web. He published his e-mail correspondence with an executive at Mobily, which showed the company is developing the ability to monitor mobile data communication and already has the ability to block it. Mr. Marlinspike told Yasser D. Alruhaily, a Mobily security executive, that he declined the job for privacy reasons. Mr. Alruhaily replied, “I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that’s why I took this and I seek your help,” he wrote. “If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.” Mobily spokesman denied contacting Mr. Marlinspike. ”Mobily or its employees never communicated with the author of this blog,” the company told Reuters. “Mobily communicates with information security companies only based on legal and lawful requirements. We never communicate with hackers. Moreover, it is not our job to spy on customers.” On Friday, the Mobily Web site was among the growing number of Saudi Web sites that #OpSaudi had taken offline. Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/saudi-web-sites-under-attack-following-surveillance-accusations/

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Saudi Web Sites Under DDoS Attack

LulzSec Hackers Get Years Of Prison Time

Four men who took part in a significant number of cyber attacks on the likes of the NHS, Sony and the CIA received stern sentences today, following a lengthy trial into the activities of hacktivist crew LulzSec. News International and the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) were also hit by the hackers, who thought they were “latter-day pirates”, according to prosecutors speaking yesterday. Tough sentences for LulzSec Ryan Cleary, who was affiliated with LulzSec but not believed to be a leader, received the toughest sentence, with 32 months in prison. He let LulzSec members use his botnet to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Cleary is also due to be sentenced over indecent images of children found on his computer at a later date. Ryan Ackroyd received a 30-month sentence for his part in researching and executing many attacks. Jake Davis, the spokesperson of LulzSec, is to serve 24 months in young offenders’ institution, whilst Mustafa Al-Bassamwas, who researched vulnerabilities for the attacks, was handed a 20-month suspended sentence of two years and 300 hours unpaid work. It is believed US law enforcement are keen to have some of the men extradited to face charges on US soil. However, Cleary’s legal team issued the following statement: “We believe the pleas that were entered today do cover all aspects of Mr Cleary’s criminality and therefore we do not anticipate that he will be in receipt of an application for extradition from the United States of America.” The notice, from Karen Todner Solicitors, also noted Cleary suffered from Aspergers Syndrome, but added he “does not seek to excuse his behaviour”. No laughing matter Charlie McMurdie, head of the Police Central e-Crime Unit, which carried out the investigation into the hackers alongside the FBI, said LulzSec had been “running riot, causing significant harm to businesses and people”. “Theirs was an unusual campaign in that it was more about promoting their own criminal behaviour than any form of personal financial profit,” added McMurdie, who is soon to retire from the force. “In essence, they were the worst sort of vandal – acting without care of cost or harm to those they affected, whether that was to cause a company to fold and so costing people their jobs, or to put at threat the thousands of innocent Internet users whose logins and passwords they made public. “They claimed to be doing it for ‘a laugh’ but real people were affected by their actions. Today’s convictions should serve as a deterrent to others who use the Internet to commit cyber attacks.” This might not be the denouement to the LulzSec saga, however, as hackers are threatening to take revenge. According to Sophos’ Graham Cluley, before the sentences were announced today, a group using the Twitter handle @LulzSecWiki said courts “could be in for ‘fun’” depending on their decision. Source: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/lulzsec-hackers-jailed-uk-116507

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LulzSec Hackers Get Years Of Prison Time