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NATO websites hit by DDoS attack

Hackers brought down several public NATO websites over the weekend in what appeared to be the latest escalation in cyberspace over growing tensions over Crimea. A spokesperson for the Western military alliance said the cyber attacks had begun on Saturday evening and continued on Sunday, although most services had now been restored. “It doesn’t impede our ability to command and control our forces. At no time was there any risk to our classified networks,” another NATO official said. NATO’s main public website, which carried a statement by Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen saying that Sunday’s referendum on Crimea’s status would violate international law and lack legitimacy, worked intermittently. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack also hit the site of a NATO-affiliated cyber security centre in Estonia. NATO’s unclassified email network was also affected. A group calling itself “cyber berkut” said the attack had been carried out by patriotic Ukrainians angry over what they saw as NATO interference in their country. The claim, made at www.cyber-berkut.org, could not be independently verified. “Berkut” is a reference to the feared and now disbanded riot squads used by the government of ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. Cyber warfare expert Jeffrey Carr, in a blog on the attacks, described cyber berkut as staunch supporters of Yanukovich and a “pro-Russia hacktivist group working against Ukrainian independence”. Lungescu noted the statement but said due to the complexities involved in attributing the attacks, NATO would not speculate about who was responsible or their motives. “Kicking sand” John Bumgarner, chief technology officer at the non-profit research institute US Cyber Consequences Unit, said initial evidence strongly suggested the attacks were launched by pro-Russian sympathisers. “One could equate these cyber attacks against NATO as kicking sand into one’s face,” he said. Crimeans voted in a referendum on Sunday on whether to break away from Ukraine and join Russia, with Kiev accusing Moscow of rapidly building up its armed forces on the peninsula in “crude violation” of an international treaty. The website for the Crimea referendum said on Sunday it had come under cyber attack overnight, although it appeared to be working on Sunday. Cyber attacks on NATO’s computer systems are common, but a NATO official said the latest one was a serious online assault. Ian West, director of NATO’s cyber defence nerve centre at Mons in southern Belgium, said last year that the alliance’s network intrusion detection systems handled around 147 million “suspicious events” every day and around 2500 confirmed serious attacks on its computers in the previous year. Tensions between Moscow and the West have been rising steadily since Russia intervened following the ouster of Yanukovich. Ukrainian and Russian websites have both been targets for cyber attacks in recent weeks but this appeared the first major attack on a Western website since the crisis began. Suspected Russian hackers used DDoS attacks to cripple websites and services in Estonia in 2007 during a dispute over a war memorial, and against Georgia during its brief 2008 war with Russia. Moscow denied orchestrating such attacks, saying they were simply carried out by independent patriots. Groups calling themselves cyber berkut have attacked several Ukrainian websites in recent weeks, computer security experts say. Source: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/375271,nato-websites-hit-by-ddos-attack.aspx

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NATO websites hit by DDoS attack

NATO websites hit by cyber attacks

A number of NATO websites have been hit by cyber attacks, but they have had no impact on the military alliance’s operations, a NATO spokeswoman said. The attacks, which affected NATO’s main website, came amid rising tensions over Russian forces’ occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region where a referendum is to be held on Sunday. NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said on Twitter that several NATO websites have been the target of a “significant DDoS (denial of service) attack.” She said there had been no operational impact and NATO experts were working to restore normal function. Source: http://www.itv.com/news/update/2014-03-16/several-nato-websites-hit-by-ddoscyber-attacks/

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NATO websites hit by cyber attacks

WordPress USED AS ZOMBIE in DDoS attacks

Tens of thousands of vulnerable WordPress sites have been co-opted into a server-based botnet being used to run DDoS attacks. More than 160,000 legitimate WordPress sites were abused to run a large HTTP-based (layer 7) distributed flood attack against a target, which called in cloud security firm Sucuri for help. Security experts discovered that the attack traffic was coming from WordPress sites with pingbacks enabled on blog posts, which is on by default. Pingbacks allow automatic backlinks to be created when other websites link to a page on a WordPress blog. The problem can be fixed by installing a simple plugin, as explained by Sucuri CTO and OSSEC Founder Daniel Cid in a blog post. “Any WordPress site with Pingback enabled (which is on by default) can be used in DDOS attacks against other sites,” Cid explains. “Note that XML-RPC is used for pingbacks, trackbacks, remote access via mobile devices and many other features you’re likely very fond of. But, it can also be heavily misused.” Sean Power, security operations manager for DOSarrest, a DDoS mitigation technology services firm, said the attack relied on exploiting vulnerabilities in old versions of WordPress. This type of issue has been known about since 2007 and the specific problem abused in the latest run of attacks was fixed more than a year ago in a WordPress core release in January 2013. “Attackers exploited a vulnerability in the core WordPress application and therefore it could be used for malicious purposes in DDoS attacks,” Power explained. “The fix for this feature was actually released in the 3.5.1 version of WordPress in January 2013 and would be picked up by most good vulnerability scanners. “This is a prime example of how users aren’t regularly performing updates to their websites, because if they were, we wouldn’t still be seeing DDoS attacks being carried out by websites taking advantage of this old flaw,” Power added. WordPress is an open source blogging platform and content management system (CMS) that’s used by millions of websites across the interwebs. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/12/wordpress_vuln_creates_botnet_army/

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WordPress USED AS ZOMBIE in DDoS attacks

DDoS Attacks Still a Significant Threat

It’s an attack vector that’s been around ever since the Internet became a valuable business tool. Distributed Denial of Service, of DDoS, attacks are still one of the most prevalent threats facing businesses today. There are reports suggesting that DDoS attacks are on the rise and that the Internet’s DNS infrastructure – critical for the operation of the Internet – remains vulnerable and a significant target. Jag Bains, the CTO at DOSarrest Internet Security, spoke to us about DDoS attacks and what can be done to mitigate their impact. When we spoke with Michael McKinnon from AVG at the Tech Leaders forum in Queensland earlier this year, he said “So much damage is being done, for example, through spoof traffic. If most major network providers were responsible enough to stop traffic from leaving their networks that they knew were coming from IP addresses they weren’t responsible for then we would have spoof traffic on the Internet and cut down networks responsible for this kind of damage”. I asked Bains what could be done to prevent DDoS attacks from being a viable attack vector and whether there was a benefit for network operators to not block the attacks. “They’re not doing it from a revenue opportunity. One guy’s server is compromised for a few days and it flips out a huge bill. But, it’s too much of a headache [for telcos] to make it a revenue stream’” said Bains. “The big guns behind some of these attacks are occurring out of data centres that have compromised servers or hosting networks with compromised servers,” he added. Although it is possible to block spoof packets coming from a network, this would not be as straightforward as it sounds. Bains suggested that there would be significant cost. “It comes at a CPU cost to your routers. You’re dealing with high traffic volumes that might create a different type of bottleneck,” said Bains. I challenged Bains on this, noting that Moore’s Law will take this year’s bottleneck and make it insignificant in a short time. In fact, if we’d taken action like this against DDoS attacks a decade ago there would be little need to suffer these attacks. “Let’s say we did that and it might help to stem these tidal wave attacks. But that doesn’t mean DDoS would have been thwarted. One of the most interesting things in the DDoS arena is the rise of application attacks coming from legitimate sources,” he said. As well as their use to cripple companies and use as a form of ransomware – it’s not unknown for gambling operators in unregulated markets to use DDoS attacks to either cripple or ransom their competition – they can be used to manipulate financial markets. According to Bains the recent Mount Gox attack, that resulted in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin, was at least partly a DDoS attack. “Hammering the exchange affected stability. Prices lowered and couldn’t come back up and they were using it to influence the peaks and troughs,” he said. “It’s a tool that’s crude in its intentions but highly effective”. Bains’ company, DOSarrest claims to have a solution. Their software can shift the traffic from a DDoS attack to a server environment that is specifically designed to deal with the attack. “All users have to do is change their DNS record to point to one of our IPs. We’re able to take the DOS attack out of hosting the network, bring it to a topology or infrastructure that is groomed specifically for that only”. What’s clear is that DDoS attacks are here to stay and that there is no silver bullet that will prevent their occurrence. However, it is possible to mitigate the damage they can do. Source: http://www.cso.com.au/article/540163/ddos_attacks_still_significant_threat/?fp=4&fpid=959105

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DDoS Attacks Still a Significant Threat

Over 160,000 legitimate WordPress sites used for DDoS attack

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aren’t new and 2013 was one of the worst years when it comes to such attacks that too through the use of large botnets and / or specialised DDoS tools; however, use of legitimate WordPress blogs and sites to carry out such attacks is something that isn’t widespread, but is becoming a trend lately. According to Sucuri Research over 162,000 legitimate WordPress blogs and sites were a part of huge DDoS attacks on one of its client’s website. The attacker(s) used WordPress websites as indirect amplification vectors through a simple one line command. “Any WordPress site with XML-RPC enabled (which is on by default) can be used in DDOS attacks against other sites”, notes Sucuri CTO and OSSEC Founder Daniel Cid in a blog post. Cid explained that the DDoS attack was a large layer 7 HTTP-based distributed flood attack through which the perpetrators forced legit WordPress sites to send out thousands of requests per second to the victim’s servers. All the GET requests being sent to victim’s servers had a random value that bypassed their caching mechanism thereby forcing to load the whole page on every request, which killed the server quickly. “One attacker can use thousands of popular and clean WordPress sites to perform their DDOS attack, while being hidden in the shadows, and that all happens with a simple ping back request to the XML-RPC file” revealed Cid. Cid provides a couple of workarounds to ensure that your WordPress site isn’t DDoSing someone else’s site. First is to disable the XML-RPC (pingback) functionality from your site. This can be done by removing the xmlrpc.php or disabling the notifications in your blog’s settings. However, the thing is as soon as you upgrade your WordPress, the file come right back. Another solution is that users use some cloud based security solution or proxy site that will ensure that such misuse is prohibited. “This is a well known issue within WordPress and the core team is aware of it, it’s not something that will be patched though. In many cases this same issue is categorized as a feature, one that many plugins use, so in there lies the dilemma”, concludes Cid. Source: http://www.techienews.co.uk/977737/160000-legitimate-wordpress-sites-used-ddos/

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Over 160,000 legitimate WordPress sites used for DDoS attack

Mt. Gox hit by massive DDoS attacks

Mt. Gox K.K., the collapsed trading platform for the bitcoin digital currency, came under so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at shutting its servers by overloading them with massive volumes of data in early February, it has been learned. Also between February and earlier this month, bitcoin exchanges in Canada and Slovenia were hit by similar attacks, indicating such cyber-attacks have been launched on a global scale. According to sources, the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox was struck by cyber-attacks aimed at stealing bitcoins beginning Feb. 7 by exploiting security shortfalls in its system. Separately, it came under major DDoS attacks, with the system accessed 150,000 times per second. The attacks mostly from servers in the United States and Europe continued for several days. The company suspended bitcoin withdrawals on Feb. 10. DDoS attacks often hijack a large number of computers with viruses. According to the sources, perpetrators often launch such attacks to steal data when a company tries to mend defects in its system. Although the DDoS attacks failed to shut down Mt. Gox’s system, subsequent attacks targeted flaws in its system, stealing a massive amount of bitcoins. In mid-February, a Slovenian bitcoin exchange temporarily suspended trading due to a system glitch caused by cyber-attacks. A Canadian bitcoin exchange announced that it has lost 896 bitcoins, the equivalent of ¥60 million, due to cyber-attacks, while another exchange reported that more than 12 percent of its bitcoin holdings was stolen. “[The attacks] are probably launched by multiple hackers who want to boast they broke into the bitcoin systems,” said Tetsutaro Uehara, a professor of information security at Ritsumeikan University. “DDoS attacks can be done without high-level hacking techniques. It is possible that copycats turned their eyes on other exchanges after weaknesses in Mt. Gox’s system were found.” One week after Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection, the bitcoin community is still puzzled over what exactly caused the company to go under. What are believed to be in-house documents of Mt. Gox, including a draft detailing the purported theft, are circulating on the Internet. Around Feb. 25, before the company suspended business, English documents titled “Crisis Strategy Draft” reporting 744,408 bitcoins had been stolen were posted on the Internet. The damage was almost the same as the figure cited by the company when it collapsed. Earlier this month, a self-proclaimed Russian hacker posted audio recordings of alleged conversations between Mt. Gox Chief Executive Officer Mark Karpeles and a Japanese megabank official, who urged him to close the company’s account in the bank. According to sources, the recordings are believed to be genuine. The “Russian hacker” also posted the design chart of the Mt. Gox computer system. A ‘genuine geek’ Source: http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001103726

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Mt. Gox hit by massive DDoS attacks

26-year-old hacker responsible for massive DDoS-attacks sentenced in Russia

A man was sentenced to probation after being convicted for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks as a result of Group-IB and the The Ministry of the Interior (MVD) collaboration work. Group-IB assisted in the investigation, collection, preservation and identification of digital evidence. The criminal business owner turned out to be a 26-year-old resident of the Sayansk-city, Irkutsk region. The reason for the investigation was an attack on a large financial corporation, which owns several banks. Since the recourse to the Group-IB up to the moment of the attacker arrest there were record-breaking short terms – all of the work was done within a month. The criminal used underground hacking forums to find clients by posting advertisements for DDoS services. Russians, citizens of  the CIS, Britons and many others ordered his services regularly. Group-IB’s evidence said a man used the Dragon botnet to launch the attacks. In autumn 2012, authorities had arrested the suspect in Sayansk, Ziminsk district. During the investigation, the accused pleaded guilty and showed detailed process of launching cyber-attacks. Group-IB computer forensic experts proved the guilt of the arrested in committing a series of cybercrimes.  A Sayansk city court judge rendered a guilty verdict against 26-year-old man for unauthorized access to computer information and was condemned to two years of conditional sentence. The Group-IB experienced experts explained that such attacks are common now as a result of unfair competition between companies. “Commercial organizations should think about DDoS protection,” said Dmitry Volkov, Head of the Group-IB Investigation Department. “However, if the incident has already occurred, the Group-IB is ready to conduct a full and independent investigation and find the attacker using forensic methods and tools.” Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1776830#ixzz2vCwNMKJi

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26-year-old hacker responsible for massive DDoS-attacks sentenced in Russia

Why is Meetup Site Down? Hacker Attempts to Extort $300 From CEO Scott Heiferman

The Meetup site is down after a hacker attempted to extort $300 from the site’s CEO Scott Heiferman. The social networking site was the victim of a DDoS attack that was allegedly paid for by one of Meetup’s competitors. The attack began on Thursday when CEO Scott Heiferman received an email that reads: Date: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 10:26 AM Subject: DDoS attack, warning A competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website. I can stop the attack for $300 USD. Let me know if you are interested in my offer. As soon as Heiferman received the email, the attack began and overwhelmed Meetup’s servers. The site went down and stayed that way for nearly 24 hours. The success of the site being back up was short-lived as Meetup was hit again and again with numerous DDoS attacks over the course of the weekend. Why is Meetup Site Down? Hacker Attempts to Extort $300 From CEO Scott Heiferman – photo from Twitter Stating his reasons for not paying the hacker behind the attack, Heiferman wrote on Meetup’s blog: We chose not to pay because: 1. We made a decision not to negotiate with criminals. 2. The extortion dollar amount suggests this to be the work of amateurs, but the attack is sophisticated. We believe this lowball amount is a trick to see if we are the kind of target who would pay.  We believe if we pay, the criminals would simply demand much more. 3. Payment could make us (and all well-meaning organizations like us) a target for further extortion demands as word spreads in the criminal world. 4. We are confident we can protect Meetup from this aggressive attack, even if it will take time. As of right now, the site is still down as the Meetup team continues to secure its servers. When users attempt to log onto the site, they are met with the following error message: Over the past several days, Meetup has suffered a prolonged denial of service (DDoS) attack, resulting in intermittent service outages for our website and apps. We’re working urgently to bring Meetup back and restore full functionality. We appreciate your patience. Heiferman encourages all Meetup users to stay informed by receiving updates via Twitter, Facebook or the company’s blog. Why is Meetup Site Down? Hacker Attempts to Extort $300 From CEO Scott Heiferman. Source: http://americanlivewire.com/2014-03-03-meetup-site-down/

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Why is Meetup Site Down? Hacker Attempts to Extort $300 From CEO Scott Heiferman

DDoS Attack! Is Regulation The Answer?

Four security experts weigh in on why there’s been little progress in combating DDoS attacks and how companies can start fighting back. The scale, diversity, and magnitude of recent DDoS attacks have knocked enterprises back on their heels. Now they’re attracting attention from regulators. Intended or not, attackers are forcing a sea change. The question at hand is whether self-regulation will improve or if regulatory intervention is inevitable. Cloudflare’s recent analysis of a February 13 denial of service attack explains the most recent variation on a recurring DDoS attack theme, and in doing so illustrates that we’ve made little or no progress in mitigating root causes of DDoS: The attack was distributed , emanating from over four thousand servers and twelve hundred networks. The attack used reflection , a technique where the source IP address of query traffic is “spoofed.” All of the attacking hosts set the source IP address of queries to the IP address of the targeted host so that the responses will overwhelm the victim. The attack also used amplification , a technique where a small query results in a much larger response being transmitted in order to deplete the target’s resources more rapidly. There are also other similarities between this and prior DDoS attacks. The attacks exploit UDP-based services (DNS, chargen, and now NTP). They exploit the absence of anti-spoofing measures by ISPs or private networks, and they exploit the “open” operation of these services, taking advantage of open DNS resolvers, publicly accessible network time servers, and services that should be configured to respond only to clients within specific administrative domains. The takeaway is obvious: Services that run over UDP and are accessible in a public or open manner are targets for reflection or amplification attacks, and the ability to spoof IP addresses exacerbates this threat .    

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DDoS Attack! Is Regulation The Answer?

The rise of UDP-based DDoS attacks

The DDoS war is ramping up with the use of network time protocol (NTP) amplification to paralyse, not just individual organisation’s networks, but potentially large proportions of general internet traffic. The largest ever DDoS attack to date with a DNS amplification hit the anti-spam company, Spamhaus last year. This attack reached 300 Gbps, taking Spamhaus offline and also affecting the DDoS mitigation firm, CloudFare. With the volume of traffic that was going through peering exchanges and transit providers, the attack also slowed down internet traffic for everyone else. However, in the last couple of months these UDP amplification attacks seem to have moved on to NTP, taking advantage of an exploit available in older, unpatched NTP systems. These servers are usually used for time synchronisation and utilise the UDP protocol on port 123. Like DNS, they will respond to commands issued by any client to query certain information, unless they are properly secured. These attack styles are not new, but their historically infrequent usage and the potential for mass disruption means they warrant more attention. Coverage of these attack styles in both industry and mainstream press is to be welcomed in my opinion, because these attacks are relatively defensible and coverage will hopefully get more administrators to secure or patch their NTP servers. What is all the fuss about? DNS amplification attacks ramp up the power of a botnet when targeting a victim. The basic technique of a DNS amplification attack is to spoof the IP address of the intended target and send a request for large DNS zone files to any number of open recursive DNS servers. The DNS server then responds to the request, sending the large DNS zone answer to the attack target rather than the attacker, because the source IP was spoofed. The DNS amplification attack on Spamhaus saw request data (the data the attacker sent to the DNS servers) of roughly 36 bytes in length, while the response data (the data from the DNS server to the attack target) was around 3000 bytes, meaning the attackers increased the bandwidth used by 100x. Not only is that a large increase in attack bandwidth, but these packets from the DNS servers arrive at the target in a fragmented state due to their large size and have to be reassembled, which ties up the routing resources as well. NTP amplification attacks work by spoofing the IP of the attack target and sending a ’monlist’ command request to the NTP servers. This command will return the IP addresses of the last 600 clients that have used the NTP server to synchronise time. By issuing this command a small request packet can trigger much larger UDP response packets containing active IP addresses and other data. The volume of the response data is related to the number of clients that communicate with any particular NTP server. This means that a single request which consists of a single 64-byte UDP packet can be increased to 100 responses each, which contain the last 600 client IP addresses that have synchronised with the server. Each of those 100 responses will be a UDP packet of around 482 bytes which gives the attacker a bandwidth amplification of around 700x [482 bytes x 100 responses = 48200 bytes / 64 bytes = 753.125]. With this level of amplification available and several popular DDoS attack tools already including a module for abusing ’monlist’ we could be on for a new record in DDoS attack size this year unless the vulnerabilities are patched soon. For example, if DNS amplification created a 300 Gbps, then NTP amplification means we could potentially see a 2.1 Tbps (21,000 Gbps) attack. There is no network that could absorb an attack of that size; it would have an enormous knock-on effect on general Internet traffic as the Spamhaus attack did with peering points, transit providers and content delivery networks being overloaded. This isn’t to say that DNS and NTP are the only amplification attack methods. There are other amplification and reflection-style tactics as well and, while not as popular as more tried-and-true DDoS methods, they represent a real threat if you are not prepared for them. Fixing the problem The easiest way to fix this and remove your NTP servers from being an attack vector for a DDoS is to update your NTP servers to version 4.2.7 which removes the ‘monlist’ command. Otherwise you can disable query within your NTP server via a configuration change: nano /etc/ntp.conf [Your configuration file might be located elsewhere] #Restrict general access to this device Restrict default ignore Restrict xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mask 255.255.255.255 nomodify notrap Noquery This change will prevent your NTP server from being used to launch DDoS attacks against other networks, but an update to the latest version is still recommended. Conclusion DDoS attacks have been around in one form or another since the very beginnings of the internet, but the motivations, as well as the scale of these attacks seem to have grown significantly. In the early days it was just extortion; a hacker would ask for payment to stop the attacks. Nowadays, some businesses may pay for competitors to be attacked, as a few hours offline could be worth millions. You also have DDoS being used as a method of political activism by groups such as Anonymous, as well as the potential for a government to use DDoS to disrupt another country’s infrastructure. Systems administrators need to ensure their systems are reviewed regularly for patches and known vulnerabilities. If systems are left unpatched then at best you can be used as a vector to attack another network or organisation, but at worst those vulnerabilities could be exploited to take your systems offline or steal your data. Source: http://blogs.techworld.com/industry-insight/2014/02/the-rise-of-udp-based-ddos-attacks/index.htm

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The rise of UDP-based DDoS attacks