Tag Archives: ddos-defense

DDoS attacks have gone from a minor nuisance to a possible new form of global warfare

“In principle, most of the denial-of-service attacks we see have no solution,” a security expert, Peter Neumann of SRI International, told the New York Times at the time. “The generic problem is basically unsolvable.” It still is. Twenty years on, DDoS attacks have increased exponentially in size, and vast swathes of the internet remain vulnerable. Experts say the proliferation of new but vulnerable connected devices, such as thermostats and security cameras, as well as the architecture of the internet itself, mean DDoS attacks will be with us for the foreseeable future. And rather than a mere annoyance that takes your favorite websites offline, they are starting to become a serious threat. According to Arbor Networks, an internet monitoring company that also sells DDoS protection, the volume of global DDoS attacks has grown by more than 30 times between 2011 and 2014. The attacks are also getting more intense. A string of them in September and October, which set records in terms of the volume of traffic (in gigabits per second, or Gbps) in each attack, proved that DDoS can overwhelm the internet’s best defenses. Among those they took down or threatened were a hosting service, a domain-name services provider (whose clients, including Twitter and Spotify, thus became inaccessible across entire regions of the US), a major content-delivery network, and the internet’s best-known blogger on security matters, Brian Krebs. These are the most powerful DDoS attacks each year, by Arbor Networks’ count. The September and October attacks are thought to have been carried out using Mirai, a piece of malware that allows hackers to hijack internet-connected devices such as security cameras. These are often sold with weak default passwords that their users don’t bother (or know how) to change. Mirai tracks them down, takes them over, and incorporates them into a “botnet” that launches DDoS attacks as well as finding and infecting other devices. Botnets aren’t new, but Mirai takes them to a new level, argues a recent paper (pdf) from the Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), a research group. It’s a “development platform” for hackers to customize, the researchers say; the code was made public on a hacker forum, and people are free to innovate and build on it. In the past couple of months it’s thought to have been used to cripple the heating systems of two residential buildings in Finland and the online services of several Russian banks. The researchers speculate that hackers could tailor Mirai to do far bigger damage, such as bringing down a power grid. In September, security expert Bruce Schneier pointed to evidence that a large state actor—China or Russia, most likely—has been testing for weak points in companies that run critical parts of American internet infrastructure. It’s not outlandish to imagine that in the future, DDoS attacks powered by something like Mirai, harnessing the vast quantity of weakly secured internet-connected gadgets, could become part of a new kind of warfare. At the moment, the main defense against a DDoS attack is sheer brute force. This is what hosting companies offer. If a client suffers a DDoS attack, the hosting provider simply assigns more servers to soak up the flood of traffic. But as the latest attacks have shown, the power of botnets is simply growing too fast for even the biggest providers to defend against. There is a fix that would prevent a common type of DDoS attack—a “reflection” attack. This is where a hacker sends messages out to a botnet that seem to come from the target’s IP address (like sending an email with a fake reply-to address), causing the botnet to attack that target. The proposed fix, a security standard known as BCP38, which would make such fake return addressing impossible, has been available for 16 years. If all the ISPs on the internet implemented BCP38 on their routers, the most powerful DDoS attacks would be far more difficult to launch. But the sheer number of networks and ISPs on the internet makes this idea wishful thinking, says Steve Uhlig, of London’s Queen Mary University, who specializes in the internet’s routing protocols.”Remember that the internet is made of more than 50,000 networks,” he says. If the most important and influential networks implement the fix, but the countless smaller operators don’t, DDoS attacks can continue to exploit spoofing. “Larger networks in the [internet core] can and do filter,” he says, “But they reduce the attacks by only a limited amount.” The internet’s decentralized design is what gives it its strength. But it’s also the source of what is rapidly becoming its biggest weakness. Source: http://qz.com/860630/ddos-attacks-have-gone-from-a-minor-nuisance-to-a-possible-new-form-of-global-warfare/

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DDoS attacks have gone from a minor nuisance to a possible new form of global warfare

DDoS attacks: Cops cuff 12 British suspects in pre-Xmas clampdown

Nationwide arrests bring in number of alleged repeat offenders—mostly young men. Twelve people—almost all of whom are men under the age of 30—have been arrested in the past week on suspicion of repeatedly performing direct denial of service attacks, in a crackdown spearheaded by the National Crime Agency. Cops working on Operation Vulcanalia targeted more than 60 individuals believed to have paid as little as £4 to use a DDoS suite called Netspoof, resulting in 12 arrests, 30 cease-and-desist notices, 11 suspects having computer equipment seized, and two cautions. The arrests were mostly among alleged repeat offenders, with the aim being to discourage rather than punish first-timers. Netspoof subscription packages cost between £4 and £380, and some customers had paid more than £8,000 “to launch hundreds of attacks”—the specific sites they attacked, however, weren’t revealed by the NCA. Victims were said to include “gaming providers, government departments, Internet hosting companies, schools, and colleges.” The agency said: “Where cybercrime has largely been seen as being committed by hackers with technical skills, stresser services allow amateurs—sometimes motivated by a grudge—to launch attacks easily and with little or no specialist knowledge.” The operation was run nationwide, with the NCA supported by officers working for Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs). It was part of a wider push by Europol, named Operation Tarpit, during a “week of action” which was also coordinated with law enforcement agencies in the US and Australia. Senior investigating officer Jo Goodall, who works at the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, said the problem posed by DDoS attacks is “truly global” in scale. “These attacks pose a huge economic cost to the economy. It is not a victimless crime,” she said. “It requires worldwide co-operation which we have seen on this job with the focus on arresting those who won’t change their ways, and trying to prevent those who will from future offending.” A survey by cyber security specialists Kaspersky Lab and researchers B2B International—cited by the NCA—which talked to more than 4,000 small and medium firms and 1,000 large businesses, found that an attack can cost more than £1.3 million for large firms and approximately £84,000 for smaller companies. Europol’s Steven Wilson said: “Many IT enthusiasts get involved in seemingly low-level fringe cyber crime activities from a young age, unaware of the consequences that such crimes carry. “One of the key priorities of law enforcement should be to engage with these young people to prevent them from pursuing a criminal path.” Roughly 30 percent of UK businesses reported a DDoS attack last year, the NCA said. Of the agency’s twelve arrests, only one so far has led to an unnamed, 27-year-old male suspect from Hamilton, Scotland being charged under the Computer Misuse Act. Source: http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/12/ddos-attacks-cops-cuff-12-british-suspects-pre-xmas-clampdown/

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DDoS attacks: Cops cuff 12 British suspects in pre-Xmas clampdown

New Botnet is Attacking the US West Coast with Huge DDoS Attacks

The developers of this new botnet are inspired by Mirai success. In a blog post by CloudFlare, it has been revealed that the US West Coast is likely to become the target of yet another huge DDoS attack but this time it will be conducted with a different botnet than Mirai that was using during Dyn DNS attack which forced sites like Twitter, Amazon, PayPal etc to go offline for hours. The content delivery network states in the blog post that the company has been observing the overflow of traffic from about two weeks. It seems to be coming from a single source. Seemingly, someone was firstly testing their abilities with a 9-to-5 attack schedule and then the attack pattern was shifted to 24 hours. This new botnet is either equal or superior to the Mirai botnet. After observing the heavy attack traffic that literally peaked at 172MBPS, which means about a million data packets per second or 400 gigabits per second, CloudFlare concluded that the botnet was being turned on and off by some person who was busy with a 9-to-5 job. In the blog post, CloudFare wrote: “The attack started at 1830 UTC and lasted non-stop for almost exactly 8.5 hours, stopping at 0300 UTC. It felt as if an attacker ‘worked’ a day and then went home.” For about a whole week, the same attacker was observed to be sending data packets in huge proportions every day. Then the schedule was abruptly changed since the attacker was working on a 24-hour basis. This hints at the fact that the attacking mechanism was taken over by another, much-organized group. It is worth noting that the attack traffic wasn’t launched via Mirai botnet; the attackers are using a different kind of software with different methods like “”very large L3/L4 floods aimed at the TCP protocol.” The company also noted that the attacks are now focused on locations that are smaller and fall within the jurisdiction of the US West Coast. The revelation arrived soon after the special cyber-security commission of the White House issued recommendations and delivered the paper to the president. In the recommendations, it was urged that effective actions are required to mitigate and/or eliminate threats involving botnets. The report issued by the White House’s Commission on Enhancing National Cyber-security basically highlights the vulnerable nature of cyber-security nowadays with the emergence of sophisticated DDoS attacks methods like Mirai botnet that has been causing havoc lately. The 100-page long report contained recommendations regarding how the US government should tackle this issue. The bottom line was that the issue was much severe than it seems on paper and there is a lot needed to be done as soon as possible or else the situation will go out of hands. The report has identified six imperatives and there are 16 recommendations along with 53 Action Items aimed at countering the threat. The crux of the report and the commission’s research is that the US government and the private sector must collaborate and work closely to devise ways for handling cyber-security related issues and vulnerabilities along with developing programs for handling such problems in future. Source: https://www.hackread.com/new-mirai-like-botnet-ddos-attack/

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New Botnet is Attacking the US West Coast with Huge DDoS Attacks

Warcraft, Overwatch Down? Blizzard DDoS Attacks Affect Gaming Service

Miscreants have struck Blizzard servers again with multiple waves of DDoS attacks over the last 12 hours. Warcraft and Overwatch, two massively popular games, have been facing latency, login and disconnection issues even while Blizzard has been working on fixing the problem. The company first acknowledged the problem in a tweet Sunday evening. Since then, Blizzard claimed to have regained control over matters at its end, only to announce twice the DDoS attacks had restarted. Its last update, at 11:42 p.m. EST Sunday, came three hours after the last wave of DDoS attacks. On Twitter, a group calling itself Phantom Squad claimed responsibility for the attack Blizzard also provided a link to a support page on its website that may help some users troubleshoot their connection problems. As always, social media was abuzz with users venting their frustration at the gaming servers being affected. This is at least the fifth such instance in the last few months. The company also has a scheduled maintenance coming up Tuesday. Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/warcraft-overwatch-down-blizzard-ddos-attacks-affect-gaming-service-2454782

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Warcraft, Overwatch Down? Blizzard DDoS Attacks Affect Gaming Service

New Mirai Worm Knocks 900K Germans Offline

More than 900,000 customers of German ISP Deutsche Telekom (DT) were knocked offline this week after their Internet routers got infected by a new variant of a computer worm known as Mirai. The malware wriggled inside the routers via a newly discovered vulnerability in a feature that allows ISPs to remotely upgrade the firmware on the devices. But the new Mirai malware turns that feature off once it infests a device, complicating DT’s cleanup and restoration efforts. Security experts say the multi-day outage is a sign of things to come as cyber criminals continue to aggressively scour the Internet of Things (IoT) for vulnerable and poorly-secured routers, Internet-connected cameras and digital video recorders (DVRs). Once enslaved, the IoT devices can be used and rented out for a variety of purposes — from conducting massive denial-of-service attacks capable of knocking large Web sites offline to helping cybercriminals stay anonymous online. This new variant of Mirai builds on malware source code released at the end of September. That leak came a little more a week after a botnet based on Mirai was used in a record-sized attack that caused KrebsOnSecurity to go offline for several days. Since then, dozens of new Mirai botnets have emerged, all competing for a finite pool of vulnerable IoT systems that can be infected. Until this week, all Mirai botnets scanned for the same 60+ factory default usernames and passwords used by millions of IoT devices. But the criminals behind one of the larger Mirai botnets apparently decided to add a new weapon to their arsenal, incorporating exploit code published earlier this month for a security flaw in specific routers made by Zyxel and Speedport. These companies act as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that specialize in building DSL modems that ISPs then ship to customers. The vulnerability exists in communications protocols supported by the devices that ISPs can use to remotely manage all of the customer-premises routers on their network. According to BadCyber.com, which first blogged about the emergence of the new Mirai variant, part of the problem is that Deutsche Telekom does not appear to have followed the best practice of blocking the rest of the world from remotely managing these devices as well. “The malware itself is really friendly as it closes the vulnerability once the router is infected,” BadCyber noted. “It performs [a] command which should make the device ‘secure,’ until next reboot. The first one closes port 7547 and the second one kills the telnet service, making it really hard for the ISP to update the device remotely.” [For the Geek Factor 5 readership out there, the flaw stems from the way these routers parse incoming traffic destined for Port 7547using communications protocols known as TR-069]. DT has been urging customers who are having trouble to briefly disconnect and then reconnect the routers, a process which wipes the malware from the device’s memory. The devices should then be able to receive a new update from DT that plugs the vulnerability. That is, unless the new Mirai strain gets to them first. Johannes Ullrich , dean of security research at The SANS Technology Institute , said this version of Mirai aggressively scans the Internet for new victims, and that SANS’s research has shown vulnerable devices are compromised by the new Mirai variant within five to ten minutes of being plugged into the Internet. Ullrich said the scanning activity conducted by the new Mirai variant is so aggressive that it can create hangups and crashes even for routers that are are not vulnerable to this exploit. “Some of these devices went down because of the sheer number of incoming connections” from the new Mirai variant, Ullrich said. “They were listening on Port 7547 but were not vulnerable to this exploit and were still overloaded with the number of connections to that port.” FEEDING THE CRIME MACHINE Allison Nixon , director of security research at Flashpoint, said this latest Mirai variant appears to be an attempt to feed fresh victims into one of the larger and more established Mirai botnets out there today. Nixon said she suspects this particular botnet is being rented out in discrete chunks to other cybercriminals. Her suspicions are based in part on the fact that the malware phones home to a range of some 256 Internet addresses that for months someone has purchased for the sole purpose of hosting nothing but servers used to control multiple Mirai botnets. “The malware points to some [Internet addresses] that are in ranges which were purchased for the express purpose of running Mirai,” Nixon said. “That range does nothing but run Mirai control servers on it, and they’ve been doing it for a while now. I would say this is probably part of a commercial service because purchasing this much infrastructure is not cheap. And you generally don’t see people doing this for kicks, you see them doing it for money.” Nixon said the criminals behind this new Mirai variant are busy subdividing their botnet — thought to be composed of several hundred thousand hacked IoT devices — among multiple, distinct control servers. This approach, she said, addresses two major concerns among cybercriminals who specialize in building botnets that are resold for use in huge distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The first is that extended DDoS attacks which leverage firepower from more bots than are necessary to take down a target host can cause the crime machine’s overall bot count to dwindle more quickly than the botnet can replenish itself with newly infected IoT devices — greatly diminishing the crime machine’s strength and earning power. “I’ve been watching a lot of chatter in the DDoS community, and one of the topics that frequently comes up is that there are many botnets out there where the people running them don’t know each other, they’ve just purchased time on the botnet and have been assigned specific slots on it,” Nixon said. “Long attacks would end up causing the malware or infected machines to crash, and the attack and would end up killing the botnet if it was overused. Now it looks like someone has architected a response to that concern, knowing that you have to preserve bots as much as you can and not be excessive with the DDoS traffic you’re pushing.” Nixon said dividing the Mirai botnet into smaller sections which each answer to multiple control servers also makes the overall crime machine more resistant to takedown efforts by security firms and researchers. “This is an interesting development because a lot of the response to Mirai lately has been to find a Mirai controller and take it down,” Nixon said. “Right now, the amount of redundant infrastructure these Mirai actors have is pretty significant, and it suggests they’re trying to make their botnets more difficult to take down.” Nixon said she worries that the aggressive Mirai takedown efforts by the security community may soon prompt the crooks to adopt far more sophisticated and resilient methods of keeping their crime machines online. “We have to realize that the takedown option is not going to be there forever with these IoT botnets,” she said. Source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/11/new-mirai-worm-knocks-900k-germans-offline/

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New Mirai Worm Knocks 900K Germans Offline

WikiLeaks website suffers mysterious outage sparking Rule 41 hacking conspiracy

The website was offline for roughly four hours on 1 December. Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks suffered a mysterious outage on the morning of 1 December for roughly four hours, two days after posting its release of a searchable database of 60,000 emails from US government contractor HBGary. The website reportedly went down at around 4:00am (GMT), with some social media users quickly speculating it was the result of yet another distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) assault – a form of cyberattack that sends waves of traffic at a web server in order to force it offline. By 9:00am (GMT) the website had fully resurfaced. “WikiLeaks is offline. Page no longer exists?!” one user wrote. Another said: “@WikiLeaks is down right now. Could be DDoS attack.” Meanwhile, a well-known account linked with Anonymous added: “Rule 41 happens and the first thing that goes down? WikiLeaks, of course, is currently unreachable.” Rule 41 is the newly-passed law in the US that permits the FBI and other agencies to conduct hacking-based investigations on multiple computers with a single warrant. Despite the claims of Anonymous, there is nothing to suggest it was related to any problems with WikiLeaks’ website. IBTimes UK contacted WikiLeaks for comment however had received no response at the time of publication. The outage comes after a slew of politically-charged leaks from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the personal email inbox of John Podesta, a close aide to Hillary Clinton. In October, Julian Assange, the founder of the organisation, claimed that unknown forces within the “DC establishment” had attempted to disrupt WikiLeaks’ operations via cyberattack after it released a collection of emails from the DNC. “The US DC establishment – which believes that Hillary Clinton will be the winner of the election – tried to find different ways to distract from our publications,” he said at the time, adding: “They started attacking our servers with DDoS attacks and attempted hacking attacks.” Later, on the morning of 7 November, after publishing 8,000 more DNC emails, WikiLeaks issued a series of updates to its four million-strong follower base about yet another attack. It said: “ WikiLeaks.org was down briefly. That’s rare. We’re investigating.” Later, it added: “Our email publication servers are under a targeted DoS attack.” Most recently, Assange renewed his effort to be allowed to exit the Ecuadorian embassy in London after a United Nations (UN) panel reinforced an earlier ruling that he was being arbitrarily detained. The decision came down after an appeal by the UK government. “Now that all appeals are exhausted I expect that the UK and Sweden will comply with their international obligations and set me free,” Assange said in a statement. “It is an obvious and grotesque injustice to detain someone for six years who hasn’t even been charged with an offence.” Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-website-suffers-mysterious-outage-sparking-rule-41-hacking-conspiracy-1594392

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WikiLeaks website suffers mysterious outage sparking Rule 41 hacking conspiracy

Suspected DDOS attack on Eir email system might have put 400,000 users at risk

DUBLIN, Ireland – In yet another Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack by hackers reported in Ireland, the country’s biggest telco said that its email system suffered a suspected attack. The attack, suspected to be a DDOS attack, which is a malicious attempt to make a server or a network resource unavailable to users is said to have put 400,000 of Eir users at risk. Customers with @eircom.net addresses reportedly began experiencing problems accessing their mail following the suspected attack. Following the reports, Eir said it noticed the issue and immediately began its mitigation process. A DDOS attack usually is launched by interrupting or suspending the services of a host connected to the internet. Reports quoted an Eir spokesman as saying that a majority of its customers should be able to access their emails accounts again. The spokesperson even said that the firm had received no contact with any hackers or any ransom demand. According to reports, users might still face issues even as the mitigation process continues to scan through IP addresses to sort out the genuine ones from those that might have been part of an attack. Source: http://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/249745895/suspected-ddos-attack-on-eir-email-system-might-have-put-400000-users-at-risk

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Suspected DDOS attack on Eir email system might have put 400,000 users at risk

Three ways to prevent a DDoS disaster this Black Friday

Black Friday will be a big day for retailers — and hopefully for all the right reasons. Some of the biggest shopping days of the year are upon us. But while retailers are focused on ensuring that they cope with huge peaks in online and in-store sales, are they as prepared as they need to be to defend against major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks? Avoiding a cyber-crime catastrophe Black Friday is here (along with the increasingly popular Cyber Monday). As ever, crowds of shoppers will flock to retailers’ stores and websites in search of rock-bottom prices. And this will mean a huge increase in sales for both physical and online stores. Black Friday may be a sales bonanza but it’s also a period of high vulnerability that criminals could exploit to maximise the threat to a retailer’s business. With Christmas sales accounting for a sizeable chunk of most retailers’ annual revenues, from a criminal’s perspective, there could hardly be a better time to launch a cyber attack. What’s more, with systems already creaking under the load of peak volumes, it might not take much of a straw to break the camel’s back. The last thing a retailer wants is for their business to spectacularly and very visibly come to a sudden halt because they can’t defend against and mitigate a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Retailers face a growing threat Talk of cyber attacks are more than mere scaremongering – the threat is very real. For example, in September, the release of the Mirai code — a piece of malware that infects IoT devices enabling them to be used for DDoS attacks — opened a Pandora’s box of opportunities for ruthless cyber entrepreneurs who want to disrupt their target markets and exploit the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of companies who honestly serve their customers. This code gives criminals the ability to orchestrate legions of unsecured Internet of Things (IoT) devices to act as unwitting participants in targeted DDoS attacks. These objects could be anything from domestic hubs and routers, to printers and digital video recorders — as long as they’re connected to the internet. The latest large DDoS attacks have used botnets just like this — proving that the bad guys are multiplying and, perhaps, gearing up for bigger things. Prevention is better than the cure There are no easy answers to the question of how to secure IoT smart devices — especially at the ‘budget conscious’ end of the market. That’s why we expect that these DDoS attacks will continue to proliferate, meaning that targeted DDoS attacks of increasing scale and frequency will almost certainly occur as a result. So how can retailers defend themselves against the threat of an attack on Black Friday? Organisations have to use a combination of measures to safeguard against even the most determined DDoS attack. These include: Limiting the impact of an attack by absorbing DDoS traffic targeted at the application layer, deflecting all DDoS traffic targeted at the network layer and authenticating valid traffic at the network edge. Choosing an ISP that connects directly to large carriers and other networks, as well as internet exchanges — allowing traffic to pass efficiently. Employing the services of a network-based DDoS provider — with a demonstrable track record of mitigating DDoS attacks and sinking significant data floods. This will safeguard specific IP address ranges that organisations want to protect. Black Friday will be a big day for retailers — and hopefully for all the right reasons. But in an increasingly digital world, consideration needs to be given to the IT infrastructure that underpins today’s retail business and the security strategy that protects it. Source: http://www.itproportal.com/features/three-ways-to-prevent-a-ddos-disaster-this-black-friday/

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Three ways to prevent a DDoS disaster this Black Friday

Last month’s botnet DDoS happened because a gamer was mad at PSN

Remember last month, when a Mirai botnet attack brought down half the internet? On October 21, a Distributed Denial of service attack that employed swarms of unsecured “Internet of Things” devices was laser focused on a global DNS provider, making much of the internet unusable for many. Here’s what Dyn, the targeted DNS provider, said of the attack then: “At this point we know this was a sophisticated, highly distributed attack involving 10s of millions of IP addresses. We are conducting a thorough root cause and forensic analysis, and will report what we know in a responsible fashion. The nature and source of the attack is under investigation, but it was a sophisticated attack across multiple attack vectors and internet locations. We can confirm, with the help of analysis from Flashpoint and Akamai, that one source of the traffic for the attacks were devices infected by the Mirai botnet. We observed 10s of millions of discrete IP addresses associated with the Mirai botnet that were part of the attack.” 10 million devices, flooding networks with garbage traffic. Why? According The Wall Street Journal, it’s because one angry gamer was pissed about Sony’s PlayStation Network. Says Dale Drew, CSO of Level 3 Communications: “We believe that in the case of Dyn, the relatively unsophisticated attacker sought to take offline a gaming site with which it had a personal grudge and rented time on the IoT botnet to accomplish this.” While Drew hasn’t said which gaming site, The Wall Street Journal has, saying that the entire outage was brought about because somebody was mad at Sony. According to Forbes, all it took was buying the attack on the deep, dark web for $7500. The attack lasted for less than a full day. Is that worth over R100 000? That’s money that could have been spent on – materialistically – moving to another platform. Source: http://www.lazygamer.net/gaming-news/last-months-botnet-ddos-happened-gamer-mad-psn/

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Last month’s botnet DDoS happened because a gamer was mad at PSN

Could a DDoS wipe out Black Friday online sales?

Don’t miss out on Black Friday sales: why retailers must prepare for DDoS threat to online shopping. The recent spate of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks should be a call to action for online retailers to prepare their defences in the run-up to Black Friday. DDoS attacks flood a target website with redundant traffic and take it offline. This is bad news for any company with an online presence; it can damage the company’s image in the eyes of potential customers if they attempt to access support services, for example, and find that the site is not operational. But with retail, the threat is an existential one and in the case of Black Friday could make the difference between success and bankruptcy. An example of an existential DDoS was seen earlier this month when the website of bookmaker William Hill was attacked and taken offline for around 24 hours. The threat is not new to the betting industry; in 2004, the online betting industry was hit with DDoS attacks during the Cheltenham horse races. The technical team for the website worked tirelessly to restore service, but estimates of the company’s losses are in the millions of pounds. These seem significant, but one can only imagine the losses on a peak day (not to denigrate the importance of the KAA Gent vs Shakhtar Donetsk fixture that took place during the attack). Imagine if attackers had hit the betting site during a major tournament such as the World Cup or the Olympics. Black Friday is perhaps the retail equivalent of the World Cup. In 2015, consumers in the UK spent £3.3 billion during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. According to Rubikloud, a machine intelligence platform for enterprise retailers which analysed Black Friday sales in 2015, retailers acquire 40 percent more customers on Black Friday than the average shopping day. In this context, a DDoS could be lethal to a vendor. As Martin McKeay, Akamai’s Senior Security Advocate, says, “if retailers have a DDoS hit it could mean the difference between making or failing to make their figures for the year.” The Akamai Q3 2016 State of the Internet/Security report found that DDoS capacities are increasing. In the quarter Akamai found a 58 percent year-on-year increase in attacks of over 100 Gbps. Even without a DDoS, the traffic increase to a site will be huge anyway and the chances of a website crashing are there. Analysis by cloud and CDN provider Tibus suggests that websites including those of Boots, Boohoo, John Lewis and Argos suffered service outages during last year’s Black Friday. So what is to be done if retailers are to protect the November cash cow? The first step is to evaluate what a DDoS would do to an organisation, says McKeay. “Understand your exposure and what it will cost you. If you are a merchant you can’t take the chance of being knocked offline.” Visibility is the key foundation for DDoS mitigation. Having a view of the actual volume of traffic hitting your site allows decisions to be made on policy. In terms of the architecture of a DDoS prevention solution, there are three lines of defence: the basic mitigation in network equipment, dedicated customer premises equipment (CPE) devices and finally, cloud integration. A DDoS mitigation provider will be all too happy to talk a customer through the technological aspects of DDoS mitigation, but there are also important management decisions to be made. Crucially, think about the outcome you want. “Is it better for most of the people to have some service or all of them to have none? It’s about keeping the service available, because their goal is to not have it available,” Steve Mulhearn, Fortinet’s Director of Enhanced Technologies UKI & DACH, told CBR in a recent interview. Nowhere is that more true than in retail, where a vast array of factors come into play when a customer is making a transaction. Research, including a study by Baymard in July 2016, continues to show low conversion rates for online shopping: sometimes languishing around the 25 percent mark. Retailers will need to use their own data and experience of their own site to learn how to allocate resources. For example, focus on keeping online the parts of the site enabling the actual transaction rather than auxiliary services. Black Friday should be an opportunity for retailers, not a threat – which is why a DDoS prevention strategy should be on every online vendor’s shopping list. Source: http://www.cbronline.com/news/cybersecurity/breaches/ddos-wipe-black-friday-online-sales/

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Could a DDoS wipe out Black Friday online sales?