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The next generation of cyber attacks — PDoS, TDoS, and others

2016 was a landmark year in cyber security. The cyber landscape was rocked as Internet of Things (IoT) threats became a reality and unleashed the first 1TB DDoS attacks — the largest in history. Security experts had long warned of the potential of IoT attacks, and a number of other predictions also came true; Advanced Persistent Denial of Service (APDoS) attacks became standard, ransom attacks continued to grow and evolve and data protection agreements dominated privacy debates. So what’s coming in 2017? Well, for years there have been theories about how a cyber attack could cripple society in some way. So what would this look like, and how could it come to fruition in 2017? An attack type that has been largely ignored that could prove to be key in a major cyber attack is the Permanent Denial of Service (PDoS) attack. This attack type is unique as rather than collecting data or providing some on-going nefarious function its only aim is to completely prevent its target’s device from functioning. PDoS, or Phlashing PDoS, also known as “phlashing”, often damages its target to such an extent that replacement or reinstallation of hardware is usually required. Although the attack type itself has been around for some time now, but it’s easy to imagine how much damage they could do it today’s connected world, and therefore it could quickly gain momentum in 2017. For example, one method PDoS leverages to accomplish its damage is remote or physical administration on the management interface of the victim’s hardware, such as routers, printers, or other networking hardware. In the case of firmware attacks, the attacker may use vulnerabilities to replace a device’s basic software with a modified, corrupt, or defective firmware image. This “bricks” the device, rendering it unusable for its original purpose until it can be repaired or replaced. Other attacks include overloading the battery or power systems. We’ve already seen the potential harm that a PDoS attack could cause, when in November last year an attack on residential apartments in Finland targeted the building management system. The attack took the system offline by blocking its Internet connection, causing it to keep rebooting itself in order to reconnect. As a result, the system was unable to supply heating at a time when temperatures were below freezing. Fortunately, the facilities service company were able to relocate residents while the system was brought back online. You only have to consider devices like Samsung’s Note 7 to see the safety hazards that the devices we all carry around with us can potentially harbor. There have been numerous test cases of malware and bots overheating devices, causing them to physically distort or worse. These attacks, bundled into a cyber attack, could have devastating and lasting effects beyond what we commonly think about in the world of the “nuisance” DDoS attack. Another attack type that has flown under the radar is Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS). This attack type will likely rise in sophistication and become a key tool in cyber attackers’ arsenals, particularly those who are more interested in wreaking havoc than having financial gain as a motivator. The rise of the Darknet Just imagine an attacker with the ability to cut off communications during a crisis period. This would hinder first responders, exacerbate suffering and in some situations it could potentially increase loss of life. A physical attack, such as a terror attack, followed by a targeted TDoS attack on communication systems could be devastating. Like PDoS, TDoS has been around for some time but again, as we depend more and more on these connected systems the impact of a targeted attack becomes magnified. One prediction that has come true in the past few years is the rise of the Darknet. However, in 2017 it could go a step further and become a mainstream tool that almost anyone can use to launch attacks or manipulate data. The Darknet offers easy and affordable access to attacks that can terrorize or otherwise alter someone’s personal details for financial or other benefits. The scope of the Darknet is also reaching further than ever thanks to the huge increase in connected devices that the general public has at their disposal. Examples include the ability to rent compromised surveillance systems, access to legal information including lawyers’ emails and the ability to view and manipulate medical or educational records. 2017 could see a frightening scenario develop where the definitive source of who we are and how our details are recorded and accessed is unknown. Just imagine being in a job interview and your CV doesn’t match your online school records. Who will the potential employer trust? This analogy can be extended to numerous scenarios, but the common thread is that your online records require high security and fidelity in order for you to function properly in society. In light of that, one of the single most personalized acts of terror that can occur is a wide-scale loss, alteration or deletion of records — with no reconstitution capability. This should strike fear in us all. Source: https://betanews.com/2017/02/09/the-next-generation-of-cyber-attacks-pdos-tdos-and-others/

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The next generation of cyber attacks — PDoS, TDoS, and others

Everything old is new again: Experts predict a flood of denial-of-service attacks

As IoT goes mainstream Mirai-style denial-of-service botnet attacks are escalating, and hackers are targeting health care companies, financial services, and the government. The hottest trend in cyberattacks is an archaic and simplistic hacker tool. Propelled by the rise of IoT, the popularity of denial-of-service attacks rebounded in late 2016 and early 2017. Accompanying the rapid acceleration of the IoT and connected device market, warn cybersecurity experts, will be a zombie botnet swarm of network-crippling attacks. Denial-of-service attacks are simple but effective weapons that bring down websites and services by flooding networks with junk traffic from commandeered botnets. Digital fallout will often cripple the target and ripple across the web to knock out unaffiliated but connected services and sites. “After an attack [clients] often feel angry and violated,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of denial-of-service mitigation service CloudFlare in an interview with TechRepublic. “A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is not a sophisticated attack. It’s the functional equivalent of a caveman with a club. But a caveman with a club can do a lot of damage.” “DDoS outages are causing companies to completely rethink their cybersecurity strategies,” said cyber-defence strategist Terrence Gareau in a report by threat identification firm Nexusguard. Nexusguard examines network data to identify threat vector trends like duration, source, and variation of denial-of-service attacks.”Hackers’ preferences for botnets over reflection attacks are typical of cyclical behavior, where attackers will switch to methods that have fallen out of popularity to test security teams with unexpected vectors.” Denial-of-service attacks are a broad umbrella used to describe a number of technological sub-tactics. Denial-of-service attacks are common and relatively easy to pull off because these attacks simply crowdsource web IP addresses. The hacker group Anonymous made DDoS attacks famous by championing a tool nicknamed the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” that made denial-of-service accessible and easy. The downside, of course, is that all cyberattacks are illegal, and unsophisticated DDoS attacks are easy for law enforcement to pursue. The Nexusguard report shows that hackers are switching from DDoS to IoT botnet-based attacks like last year’s devastating Mirai hack. “Distributed denial-of-service attacks fell more than 40 percent to 97,700 attacks in the second quarter of the year,” Gareau said. IoT attacks targeted at French data provider OVH broke records for speed and size, the report said, and were so severe that France broke into Nexusguard’s Top 3 [cyberattack] victim countries. “The preferred programming language for the Mirai botnet helped to better handle a massive number of nodes compared to other typical languages for DDoS attacks,” Gareau said. “Researchers attribute the [DDoS] attack dip and these massive attacks to hackers favoring Mirai-style botnets of hijacked connected devices, demonstrating the power IoT has to threaten major organizations.” Hackers are also diversifying attacks against large organizations in financial services, healthcare, and government sectors, Gareau said in the Nexusguard report. “Hackers favored blended attacks, which target four or more vectors, in attempts to overload targeted monitoring, detection, and logging systems.” To fend off attacks, experts like Prince, Gareau, and Cyberbit’s chief technology officer Oren Aspir agree enterprise companies need to develop a response plan. “Attacks on an endpoint device will always leave some sort of trail or evidence to analyze,” Aspir said. “Since the speed of detection is vital, analysts need tools that will allow them to quickly detect behavior at the endpoint, validate the threat, and perform an automated forensic investigation in real time on that endpoint.” Aspir also suggested companies prepare for DDoS and other hacks by reviewing previous attack metrics, conduct vulnerability assessment and penetration testing exercises, and simulate attacks to help evaluate team preparedness. “It’s important for organizations to build a baseline that consists of what ‘good behavior’ should look like on an endpoint. This allows for organizations to take unknown threats and validate them quickly.” Though IoT botnet denial-of-service attacks are relatively new enterprise organizations have learned from previous attacks and already shifted defense tactics. “Researchers predict the attention from recent botnet attacks will cause companies to strengthen their cybersecurity… and ensure business continuity despite supersized attacks,” Gareau said. Source: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/everything-old-is-new-again-experts-predict-a-flood-of-denial-of-service-attacks/

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Everything old is new again: Experts predict a flood of denial-of-service attacks

DDoS Attack Takes Down Austrian Parliament Website

The DDoS attack, one of the most common cyber threats, is being investigated by authorities The Austrian parliament’s website was hit by a suspected cyber attack over the weekend which took the site down for 20 minutes. Hackers are believed to have used a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to flood the website with digital service requests and, although no data was lost, authorities are now investigating the attack. “The hacker attack was most likely a so-called DDoS-attack; a similar attack took place last November targeting the websites of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministries,” the parliament said in a statement. Cyber attack One of the most common cyber threats around, DDoS attacks have been growing in size and prevalence in recent times, with Corero Network Security predicting that such threats will become the top security priority for businesses and the new norm in 2017. “While the Mirai botnet is certainly fearsome in terms of its size, its capacity to wreak havoc is also dictated by the various attack vectors it employs, said Dave Larson, CTO/COO at Corero Network Security. “If a variety of new and complex techniques were added to its arsenal next year, we may see a substantial escalation in the already dangerous DDoS landscape, with the potential for frequent, Terabit-scale DDoS events which significantly disrupt our Internet availability.” In January, a DDoS attack was responsible for an outage at Lloyds Banking Group that left customers unable to access online banking services for three days, after web security firm Imperva had earlier that month issued a warning to businesses after fending off the largest DDoS attack ever recorded on its network. But the most high-profile attack in recent months affected domain name service provider Dyn and resulted in a slew major sites – including Twitter, Spotify and Reddit – being taken offline. Source: http://www.silicon.co.uk/security/ddos-attack-austrian-parliament-website-204381

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DDoS Attack Takes Down Austrian Parliament Website

53% of service providers are seeing over 21 DDoS attacks per month

More than half (53 percent) of service providers indicated they are seeing more than 21 DDoS attacks per month, up from 44 percent last year. New research from Arbor Networks’ 12th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR) focuses on the operational challenges internet operators face daily from network-based threats and the strategies adopted to address and mitigate them. The survey polled 356 respondents that included services providers, hosting, mobile, enterprise and other types of network operators around the world. Since the WISR began in 2005, DDoS attack size has grown 7900 percent. Attacks increased by 60 percent in 2016. Twenty-one percent of data centre respondents saw more than 50 attacks per month, as opposed to only eight percent last year. More than 10 attacks per month were experienced by 45 percent of enterprise, government and education (EGE) respondents. Two-thirds (67 percent) of service providers and 40 percent of EGE respondents reported seeing multi-vector attacks on their networks. Sixty-one percent of data centre operators reported attacks totally saturating data centre bandwidth. A quarter of data centre and cloud providers saw the cost of a major DDoS attack rise above £79,000, and five percent cited costs of over £793,000. Forty-one percent of EGE organisations reported reportedDDoS attacks exceeding their total internet capacity. Nearly 55 percent of EGE respondents now carry out DDoS defence simulations, with about 40 percent carrying them out at least on a quarterly basis. Data centre and cloud provider respondents using firewalls for DDoS defence has fallen from 71 percent to 40 percent. “The survey respondents have grown accustomed to a constantly evolving threat environment with steady increases in attack size and complexity over the past decade. However, IoT botnets are a game changer because of the numbers involved. There are billions of these devices deployed, and they are being easily weaponised to launch massive attacks. Increasing concern over the threat environment is reflected in the survey results, which show significant improvements in the deployment of best practice technologies and response processes,” said Darren Anstee, chief security technologist at Arbor Networks. Source: https://www.scmagazineuk.com/53-of-service-providers-are-seeing-over-21-ddos-attacks-per-month/article/633962/

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53% of service providers are seeing over 21 DDoS attacks per month

Assessing The Massive Security Vulnerability Of The Internet Of Things

The increase in connected devices could make 2017 a banner year for cyber attacks. A report by global professional services company Deloitte said that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks will grow in size and scale in 2017, thanks in part to the growing multiverse of connected things. According to Deloitte’s annual Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictionsreport, DDoS attacks will be more frequent, with an estimated 10 million attacks in total over the next 12 months. DDoS attacks are no new phenomena. The potential impact on an organization from this category of cyber threat should never be underestimated, Deloitte said. The report said that the size of DDoS attacks has increased year-on-year. Between 2013 and 2015, the largest attacks did not exceed 500 gigabits per second. In 2016, there were two attacks that exceeded one terabit per second. Over the next 12 months, the average attack size is forecast to be between 1.25- and 1.5 GBs per second, with at least one per month exceeding 1 TB per second. On a basic level, the success of DDoS attack is focused on making a website or network resource—a server, for example—unusable. This scenario is achieved by creating a flood of Internet traffic from multiple sources that are launched simultaneously. The website or resource is then overwhelmed, resulting in a suspension of service or access. For example, an ecommerce website that is hit by a DDoS attack would be unable to sell its products until the attack was contained. At the same time, any exposed vulnerabilities could produce a knock-on effect and take other organizations or websites down with it. “DDoS attacks are the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of fake customers converging on a traditional shop at the same time,” the report said. “The shop quickly becomes overwhelmed. The genuine customers cannot get in and the shop is unable to trade as it cannot serve them.” Connected Devices Are An Easy Target There are several methods for creating this type of chaos but the most common are botnets and amplification attacks. A DDoS attack generated through a botnet accesses hundreds of thousands of connected devices that have been told to act in disruptive manner via malicious code. An amplification attack also uses malicious code by instructing a server to generate multiple fake IP addresses that are then sent to a website—known as “spoofing”—which then overwhelm that service. Both of these approaches are widely known, although it is the botnet that has become more prevalent. Irrespective of how widespread the impact is on an organization or network, Deloitte said that three concurrent trends will escalate the potential for DDoS attacks in 2017—the Internet of Things, widely available malware and high bandwidth speeds. The prime culprit will be the Internet of Things. Connected devices are notoriously insecure and ripe for being taken over by a third party. The standard way to gain remote access to a device is through a user ID or password, but some people may not be aware that a device’s firmware offers hackers a way in, Deloitte said. Deloitte said: The majority of users are familiar with the need to change user ID and passwords before using a device for the first time, and at regular intervals thereafter. But approximately half a million of the billions of IoT devices worldwide—a small proportion of the total, but a relatively large absolute number—reportedly have hard-coded, unchangeable user IDs and passwords. In other words, they cannot be changed, even if the user wants to. Hard-coded user IDs and passwords are not an issue provided that a third party doesn’t know what they are. The problem is that they can be easy to find. The Internet Of Things Is Always Exploitable Anyone with a degree of programming knowledge can sift through a device’s firmware to discover what these IDs and passwords are, the report said. In addition, a compromised Internet of Things device may not show any signs of being compromised to its owner, especially if there is no obvious deterioration in performance. Theoretically, millions of devices could be affected without their owners having any idea that the device was part of a botnet, Deloitte said. Consumer confidence in the Internet of Things is aligned with how secure a connected device is, confidence that can be shattered if that device can be exploited with little effort. For example, the cyber attack on October 21, 2016, that affected the Dyn network was attributed to a botnet that used Internet-connected devices to take down numerous high-profile services that included Twitter, Amazon.com, Spotify, Comcast, Fox News and PayPal. Thousands of connected devices were used in this attack, which is now accepted as one of the largest of its kind to date. Any company or organization that has a presence on the Internet should be aware that DDoS attacks are not going to stop anytime soon. The report cited several sectors that should be alert to the impact that a successful DDoS attack could have including (but not limited to) retailers with a high proportion of online revenue, video streaming services, financial or professional service companies and online video games providers. “Some organizations may have become a little blasé about DDoS attacks, however these attacks are likely to increase in intensity in 2017 and beyond, and the attackers are likely to become more inventive,” said Deloitte. “Unfortunately, it may never be possible to relax about DDoS attacks. The DDoS genie is out of the bottle, and is unlikely to pop back in.” Source: https://arc.applause.com/2017/01/27/ddos-iot-vulnerability-asssessment/

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Assessing The Massive Security Vulnerability Of The Internet Of Things

Hong Kong securities brokers hit by cyber attacks, may face more: regulator

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Hong Kong’s securities regulator said brokers in the city had suffered cyber attacks and warned of possible further incidents across the industry. Regulators in Hong Kong have been stepping up efforts over the past year to combat the growing menace of cyber attacks on companies. A survey in November showed the average number of such attacks detected by firms in mainland China and Hong Kong grew a whopping 969 percent between 2014 and 2016. [nL4N1DU35T] In a circular to licensed firms late on Thursday, the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) said it had been informed by the Hong Kong police that brokers had encountered so-called “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks targeting their websites and received blackmails from criminals. “The DDoS attacks have caused service disruption to the brokers for a short period. It is possible that similar cyber security incidents would be observed across the securities industry,” the SFC said in the notice. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, among the most common on the Internet, involve cyber criminals using hijacked and virus-infected computers to target websites with data requests, until they are overwhelmed and unable to function. The SFC urged firms in the financial center to implement protective measures, including reviews of the IT systems and DDoS mitigation plans. Source: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hong-kong-securities-brokers-hit-cyber-attacks-may-043353386–sector.html

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Hong Kong securities brokers hit by cyber attacks, may face more: regulator

South Korean authorities worry about DDoS attacks ahead of elections

A new report from a South Korean government agency, the country is at risk of DDoS attacks ahead of the country’s possible election. South Korean authorities are reportedly worried about ramped up attacks from the country’s hostile northern neighbour. A recently released report predicted DDoS attacks, leveraging IoT botnets, would be used to attack government ministries. Authored by the state-run Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), the report warns of DDoS attacks just before the country’s upcoming elections. The attacks, which leverage widely insecure IoT devices, could be launched against government ministry, national infrastructure or social bodies to destabilise South Korea. Jeon Kil-soo, from KISA told South Korean news agency, Yonhap, that “there is the possibility that huge DDoS attacks could occur by using IoT devices from both home and abroad”. Kil-soo added that such attacks could be deployed against presidential candidates. Current president Park Geun-hye is currently faced with an impeachment motion, which, if adopted by Korea’s Constitutional Court, will trigger another election. The decision is expected to be made in the next two months. According to KISA’s report, such an occasion would be ripe for exploitation by, some expect, North Korea. South Korea are not the only country bracing themselves for cyber-interference in upcoming elections. Against a backdrop of accusation of Russian interference in the American election, top government officials from Germany, France and other countries have expressed fears about such threats. North Korea’s cyber-offensive activities have long been suspected. The North Korean government was reported to be behind the attacks on Sony Pictures on the eve of the 2014 release of The Interview, a comedy which satirised the country’s leader Kim Jong Un. In November 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment was breached by a group calling itself the “Guardians of Peace”. The hackers released a slew of emails, personal information and other data from inside the company, prompting sanctions against the country. North Korean agents are also suspected to be behind the heist on the Bangladesh Central Bank. In early 2016, hackers stole US$81 million (£65 million) by impersonating legitimate money orders. The money was then laundered through Sri Lanka and the Philippines into the coffers of, some suspect, the North Korean government. This kind of activity takes on a new light when applied to South Korea. South and North Korea have technically been at war since the middle of the twentieth century. Split in two against the backdrop of the Cold War, the countries fought a war between 1950 and 1953. The war never technically ended and the countries remain separate with a Chinese backed opaque dictatorship under the Kim Jong family in the north and a liberal democratic regime in the south. The two countries exist in a state of formal hostility, and while not effectively at war are believed to regularly meddle in each other’s societies, the cyber-realm included. James Hoare, an associate fellow at Chatham House and the man formerly charged with setting up a British embassy in North Korea, “the report is all very speculative, with nothing much in the way of hard facts.” There are many such claims about North Korean cyber-attacks, “including claims of interference with aircraft landing at Inchon airport – though having watched the behaviour of people on flights into and from Inchon, I would not be surprised if some of the alleged attacks were in reality people on their mobile devices while the planes are taking off and landing.” These kinds of claims are common but “tend to be somewhat unspecific, but on at least one recent occasion, the North Korean released information that indicated that they had been approached to stage some sort of diversion at the time of an election.” Source: https://www.scmagazine.com/south-korean-authorities-worry-about-ddos-attacks-ahead-of-elections/article/633651/

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South Korean authorities worry about DDoS attacks ahead of elections

Global concern over distributed denial-of-service attacks

Arbor Networks has released its 12th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR). The report covers a range of issues from threat detection and incident response to managed services, staffing and budgets. But the main focus is on the operational challenges internet operators face daily from network-based threats and the strategies adopted to address and mitigate them. The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack reported this year was 800 Gbps, a 60% increase over 2015’s largest attack of 500 Gbps. According to Arbor, DDoS attacks are not only getting larger, but they are also becoming more frequent and complex. Darren Anstee, chief security technologist with Arbor Networks, says survey respondents have grown accustomed to a constantly evolving threat environment with steady increases in attack size and complexity over the past decade. “However, IoT botnets are a game changer because of the numbers involved – there are billions of these devices deployed and they are being easily weaponised to launch massive attacks,” he says. “Increasing concern over the threat environment is reflected in the survey results, which show significant improvements in the deployment of best practice technologies and response processes. The report also found that the emergence of botnets that exploit inherent security weaknesses in IoT devices and the release of the Mirai botnet source code have increased attacker ability to launch extremely large attacks. According to the company, the massive growth in attack size has been driven by increased attack activity on all reflection/amplification protocols, and by the weaponisation of IoT devices and the emergence of IoT botnets. Because of this, Arbor say the consequences of DDoD attacks are becoming clear – DDoS attacks they have successfully made many leading web properties unreachable – costing thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars in revenue. However, the company does point out that this year’s survey results indicate a better understanding of the brand damage and operational expense of successful DDoS attacks. Source: https://securitybrief.asia/story/global-concern-over-distributed-denial-service-attacks/

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Global concern over distributed denial-of-service attacks

Can a DDoS attack on Whitehouse.gov be a valid protest?

A software engineer wants to take down the Whitehouse.gov site to oppose Trump’s inauguration When Donald Trump is inaugurated as the U.S. President on Friday, Juan Soberanis intends to protest the event — digitally. His San Francisco-based protest platform is calling on Americans to oppose Trump’s presidency by visiting the Whitehouse.gov site and overloading it with too much traffic. In effect, he’s proposing a distributed denial-of-service attack, an illegal act under federal law. But Soberanis doesn’t see it that way. “It’s the equivalent of someone marching on Washington, D.C,” he said on Monday. “Civil disobedience has been part of the American democratic process.” Soberanis’s call to action is raising eyebrows and highlights the isssue of whether DDoS attacks should be made a legitimate form of protest. Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, sending a command to a protected computer with the intent to cause damage can be judged a criminal offense. But that hasn’t stopped hacktivists and cyber criminals from using DDoS attacks to force websites offline. In 2013, the U.S. charged 13 people affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous for launching DDoS attacks on government entities, trade groups and law firms. Typically, hackers launch such attacks by using several servers, or huge numbers of infected PCs called botnets, to flood their targets with an overwhelming amount of traffic. Soberanis’s protest effort is simpler. He’s hoping that millions of individuals join his protest by visiting Whitehouse.gov and continually refreshing the page. “There’s nothing illegal,” he said. “We are just a large group of people, making a GET request,” he said, referring to the HTTP request method to access a web page. Soberanis, who works as a software engineer, created his Protester.io platform about a month ago to encourage activism. It currently has no funding, but the site managed to gain a bit of buzz last week. The PR Newswire public-relations service circulated a press release from Protestor.io, only to retract it later after realizing the release was calling for a “take down” of Whitehouse.gov. “There’s also been some detractors,” he said. “They support Trump and have a very different viewpoint.” Soberanis isn’t the first to argue that DDoSing can be a form of legitimate protest. Briefly in 2013, a failed online petition was posted on the White House’s website about the same subject. It argued that DDoSing a website was not a form of hacking, but a new way for protesting. “Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website,” the petition said. Some agree and think that DDoS attacks, in certain scenarios, can work as a valid form of protest. Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are “over broad” and “chilling” political speech, said Molly Sauter, author of The Coming Swarm, a book that examines DDoS attacks used in activism. A DDoS attack on Whitehouse.gov — a site designed more for public relations than for operations – also wouldn’t disrupt any major government activities, Sauter said. Taking it down could be seen as “more or less like protesting outside on the street,” she said. “Now, is that going to be successful?” she asked. “Frankly, it’s not likely that the Whitehouse.gov site wouldn’t have DDoS protection.” But others think a DDoS attack on the Whitehouse.gov is still a crime. Making it legal would open a can of worms, they say. “If they can do this to Whitehouse.gov with impunity now, can they also do it to Exxon without worry of legal troubles?” said Mark Sauter (no relation to Molly Sauter), a former U.S. Army officer who consults security and tech companies. He questions why protestors like Soberanis are resorting to DDoS attacks when they can publish their own websites or speech against Trump. Source: http://www.csoonline.com/article/3158826/security/can-a-ddos-attack-on-whitehousegov-be-a-valid-protest.html

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Can a DDoS attack on Whitehouse.gov be a valid protest?

DDoS Attacks: A Threat to Businesses and Consumers

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a growing concern for businesses and consumers alike. These attacks are on the rise along with all forms of cyber-attack. According to Kapersky, “43% of businesses experienced data loss in the past year due to a cyber-security incident.” While DDoS attacks threaten the reputation and the bottom line for businesses, they also threaten consumers. In many cases a DDoS attack is launched as a decoy to hide the real intentions of the hacker – to steal corporate intellectual property and financial data, as well as consumer data. DDoS attacks have been a factor in some of the largest data breaches. Dave Larson of Infosecurity Magazine reports that “in a large proportion of data breaches reported over the last few years, DDoS attacks have been occurring simultaneously, as a component of a wider strategy; meaning hackers are utilizing this technique in a significant way.” At its core a DDoS attack uses hundreds and sometimes thousands of computers to flood the business website with large volume of internet traffic to overwhelm the host server. When this happens the website often stops functioning for a period of time. Sometimes hackers will continue to randomly attack a website until the business pays a ransom – much like ransomware that targets individuals. There are three major types of DDoS attacks available to a hacker. Volumetric: Most common. Sends a large amount of internet traffic to the host server simultaneously. Amplification: Sends a high volume of traffic using large packets of data. Requires fewer “zombie” or compromised computers to accomplish the same task as a volumetric DDoS attack. Resource Depletion: Makes multiple requests through multiple ports or entry points into the targeted server until its capacity is exceeded. To find out more about these types of DDoS attacks, go to Defending Your Network against DDoS Attacks. There are a number of hardware and software tools to help defend against such attacks, but the primary methods of defense are knowledge, detection, and training. Businesses should analyze how their networks and the systems attached to that network interact with the internet to uncover and fix vulnerabilities before they are exploited by hackers. Train IT employees to recognize the hallmarks of a DDoS and other cyber-attacks, so they can react quickly. Train all employees to recognize and immediately report any unusual activity on any system connected to the internet. Train all employees to question unusual emails or texts requesting W-2’s, other personnel data, or corporate financial information. Develop specific rules for employees regarding usage of social media and the types of corporate information that can be shared online. A recent study has shown that social engineering is a precursor to 66% of cyber-attacks. Source: 7 Ways to Make Yourself Hack-Proof. For more information on Decoy DDoS attacks, check out DDoS attacks: a perfect smoke screen for APTs and silent data breaches. To report a scam, go to the BBB Scam Tracker. To find trustworthy businesses, go to bbb.org. Source: http://whnt.com/2017/01/15/ddos-attacks-a-threat-to-businesses-and-consumers/

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DDoS Attacks: A Threat to Businesses and Consumers