attacking | DDoSInfo – Information about DDoS and Denial of Service Attacks

The internet’s new scourge is hugely damaging global attacks that harness armies of routers, cameras, and other connected gadgets—the so-called Internet of Things (IoT)—to direct floods of traffic that can take down swaths of the network. The blame so far has largely fallen on the Chinese manufacturers who churn out devices with shoddy security on the cheap. But all those devices have to be plugged in somewhere for them to used maliciously. And American consumers are increasingly the ones plugging them in. Nearly a quarter of the internet addresses behind these distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks are located in the United States, newresearch from network services firm Akamai has found. Some 180,000 US IP addresses took part in DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2016, it found—more than four times as many as addresses originating in China. Akamai’s findings are particularly notable because the armies of hacked devices that carry out DDoS attacks—such as those controlled by the Mirai malware—don’t bother covering their tracks. That means the IP addresses are far more likely to genuinely correspond to a location within a certain country, the report’s authors write. The findings also end an era of Chinese dominance in DDoS attacks. Over the previous year, China has accounted for the highest proportion of IP addresses taking part in such attacks globally. Now the US is the clear leader, accounting for 24% of such addresses. The UK and Germany are a distant second and third. (To be clear, though, wherever the attacking devices’ IP addresses are, the person controlling them could be located anywhere.) The huge number of devices taking part in DDoS attacks in the US means regulation there, and in Europe, could stem the flood of damaging traffic. Of course, IoT regulation is a thorny issue—essentially, no US federal agency really wants to take the problem on—and there remain technical questions over how to actually go about blocking the attacks. Still, it’s a lot clearer now that simply pointing the finger at China isn’t enough. Source: https://qz.com/912419/akamai-akam-report-a-quarter-of-ddos-ip-addresses-are-now-from-the-us/

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Blame the US, not China, for the recent surge in massive cyberattacks

The 620 Gbps DDoS attack was built on a massive botnet. The security blog KrebsOnSecurity has been hit with one of the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks of all time. The site, which is run by security expert Brian Krebs, was hit by a DDoS attack of around 620 Gbps on 20 September. KrebsOnSecurity managed to stay online during the attack, due to defences from content delivery network provider Akamai. The largest attack of this kind Akamai had previously defended was one of 336 Gbps earlier this year. Previous large-scale DDoS attacks, including the 336 Gbps attack, used well-known methods to amplify a smaller attack such as using unmanaged DNS servers. Apart from being much larger in terms of scale, the attack on KrebsOnSecurity also differed in that it seemed to instead use a very large botnet of hacked devices. This could have involved hundreds of thousands of systems. “Someone has a botnet with capabilities we haven’t seen before,” Martin McKeay, Akamai’s senior security advocate, said to KrebsOnSecurity. “We looked at the traffic coming from the attacking systems, and they weren’t just from one region of the world or from a small subset of networks — they were everywhere.” Brian Krebs said that there were some signs that the attack had used a botnet that had captured a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. During a DDoS attack, the targeted website is flooded with traffic, designed to overwhelm the resources of the site to crash or suspend its services. “It seems likely that we can expect such monster attacks to soon become the new norm,” wrote Krebs. He suggested that the attack on his site might have been in retaliation for a series he had done on the takedown of a DDoS-for-hire service vDOS, a theory supported by text included in the strings of the DDoS attack referencing the vDOS owners. Source: http://www.cbronline.com/news/cybersecurity/business/renowned-blog-krebsonsecurity-hit-with-massive-ddos-attack-5012622

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Renowned blog KrebsOnSecurity hit with massive DDoS attack