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185,000+ vulnerable Wi-Fi cameras just waiting to be hijacked

A generic wireless camera manufactured by a Chinese company and sold around the world under different names and brands can be easily hijacked and/or roped into a botnet. The flaw that allows this to happen is found in a custom version of GoAhead, a lightweight embedded web server that has been fitted into the devices. This and other vulnerabilities have been found by security researcher Pierre Kim, who tested one of the branded cameras – … More ?

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185,000+ vulnerable Wi-Fi cameras just waiting to be hijacked

How Homeland Security plans to end the scourge of DDoS attacks

The agency is working on a multimillion dollar effort to protect the country’s most critical systems from distributed denial of service attacks, which are among the simplest digital assaults to carry out and the toughest to fight. MARCH 8, 2017 —In late October, in Surprise, Ariz., more than 100 phone calls bombarded the police department’s emergency dispatch line. Calls also overwhelmed the nearby city of Peoria’s 911 system and departments across California and Texas. But each time a dispatcher picked up, no one was on the line – and there was no emergency. The Arizona district attorney’s office says the calls clogging 911 lines resulted from a digital prank, which triggered a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on critical emergency communication systems. The prosecutor’s office tracked the torrent of calls to 18-year-old hacker Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai. Now, he’s facing four counts of felony computer tampering. While Mr. Desai said he didn’t intend to cause any harm, according to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, he did surface a potentially devastating glitch in smartphone software that could exact damage on any number of sensitive and critical targets. Whenever anyone clicked a certain link on his webpage via a mobile device, their phone automatically dialed 911. While this kind of DDoS targeting 911 systems is unprecedented, it’s exactly the type of attack that national law enforcement officials have been concerned about for years. In fact, the Homeland Security Department (DHS) has been working on technology to protect 911 centers from DDoS and telephone-based, or TDoS, attacks for three years. The Arizona incident proved someone can “cause a large number of phones or a large number of computers or a large number of whatever connected device to start generating these calls,” says Dan Massey, program manager in the cybersecurity division of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate. “It went from how much damage can I do from my phone” to a situation where, with just a handful of people, “if all of our phones started calling some victim, whether that’s 911 or a bank or a hospital, that can get very fast and very big.” DDoS attacks are both among the simplest forms of cyberattacks to carry out and the most difficult to defend against. They are designed to direct an overwhelming amount of digital traffic – whether from robocalls or web traffic – at targets to overwhelm them so they can’t handle legitimate business. Writ large, there has been an exponential increase in the intensity and frequency of DDoS attacks over the past six months and critical infrastructure components are possible future targets, according to DHS. For a sense of the scale of today’s DDoS attacks, compare the 100 megabits per second Internet speed at a typical company to the more than 1 million megabits (1 terabit) per second speed of a DDoS attack against Web hosting company Dyn in October. The attack, which drew power from insecure webcams and other internet-connected devices, knocked out widely used online services like Netflix, Twitter, and Spotify for hours. Such massive web DDoS assaults may also become a problem for 911, as the country moves toward a next generation 911 system that uses mapping services to locate callers and can support voice, text, data, and video communication. “What you’re seeing is a convergence of the traditional internet with the phone system and next generation 911 is a great example of that,” says Massey. “DDoS attacks and/or TDoS attacks kind of blend together a little bit there.” To help combat the problem, the department has given out $14 million in grants for DDoS prevention studies, including phone-based attacks. Some of that funding is piloting initiatives to stop phone-based attacks at 911 centers in Miami/Dade County and the City of Houston, as well as at a large bank that the department wouldn’t identify. So far, DHS efforts have yielded, among other things, a DDoS early warning system to flag organizations that an attack may be coming, and alerting them to adjust internet network settings to defend against an onslaught of traffic. Additionally, DHS-funded research from tech firm SecureLogix produced a prototype that can thwart phony telephone calls sent to a 911 system or other critical phone operation. The model attempts to detect bogus calls by monitoring for clues that indicate an incoming call is fake. “As we have seen, it is simple to flood a 911 center, enterprise contact center, hospital, or other critical voice system with TDoS calls,” says Mark Collier, SecureLogix chief technology officer. “The research is essential to get ahead” because the assailants “are generating more attacks, the attacks are more sophisticated, and the magnitude of the attacks is increasing. “ To be sure, the race to keep digital adversaries out of the country’s 911 system faces obstacles, some of which are outside the jurisdiction of Homeland Security and dispatch centers. The DHS DDoS defense program is “a good start,” but one “challenge in defending certain types of critical infrastructure is the fact that emergency services like 911 must serve anyone – immediately,” per Federal Communications Commission rules, “due to their life saving nature,” said Mordechai Guri, research and development head at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University Cyber-Security Research Center. “The approach of blocking the DDoS originators must be backed by a change in the laws and regulations.” Before the October attacks on the Arizona 911 systems, he and fellow Ben-Gurion researchers warned that DDoS attacks launched from cellphones could pose a significant threat to emergency services. During one experiment, it took fewer than 6,000 hacked phones to clog emergency services in a simulated US state, the academics wrote in a September 2016 paper. Such an attack can potentially last for days. The very nature of the 911 system makes shutting out any callers potentially dangerous, and some alternatives, like requiring a person in distress to authenticate themselves for assistance, are not viable, says Massey of DHS. “We really need to make sure that we’re not missing a critical 911 call,” he says. “So that’s a challenge for the project to make sure that we’re not misclassifying people.” Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2017/0308/How-Homeland-Security-plans-to-end-the-scourge-of-DDoS-attacks

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How Homeland Security plans to end the scourge of DDoS attacks

Businesses blame rivals for DDoS attacks

Industrial sabotage is considered to be the most likely reason behind a distributed denial of service attack, a study has revealed More than 40% of businesses hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack worldwide believe their competitors were behind it, research by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International has revealed. Rival firms are considered more likely culprits than cyber criminals, which were cited as suspects by just 38% of DDoS victims on average. Industrial sabotage is considered to be the most likely reason behind a DDoS attack, coming out higher than political conspiracy and personal vendettas against a business. Typically, DDoS attacks target web servers and aim to make websites unavailable to users. Although no data is stolen, the interruption to the service can be costly in terms of lost business damage to reputation. For example, a massive DDoS attack on Luxembourg’s government servers that started on 27 February 2017 reportedly lasted more than 24 hours, and affected more than a hundred websites. The joint Kaspersky Lab, B2B International study, which polled 4,000 businesses in 25 countries, found that only 20% of DDoS victims overall blamed foreign governments and secret service organisations, with the same proportion suspecting disgruntled former employees. Companies in Asia Pacific are the most suspicious of competitors, with 56% blaming their rivals for DDoS attacks and 28% blaming foreign governments. Personal grudges also carry more suspicion in the region too, with 33% blaming former staff. In Western Europe, only 37% of companies suspect foul play by their competitors, with 17% blaming foreign governments. Looking at attitudes by business size, businesses at the smaller end of the scale are more likely to suspect their rivals of staging an experienced DDoS attack. The study found that 48% of small and medium business representatives believe this to be the case compared with only 36% of enterprises. In contrast, respondents from big companies put more blame on former employees and foreign governments. “DDoS attacks have been a threat for many years, and are one of the most popular weapons in a cyber criminals’ arsenal,” said Russ Madley, head of B2B at Kaspersky Lab UK. “The problem we face is that DDoS attacks can be set up cheaply and easily, from almost anyone, whether that be a competitor, a dismissed employee, socio-political protesters or just a lone wolf with a grudge. “It’s therefore imperative that businesses find an effective way to safeguard themselves from such attacks,” he said. Significant advances in DDoS attacks There were significant advances in DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2016, according to Kaspersky, with the longest DDoS attack in lasting 292 hours or 12.2 days, which set a record for 2016 and was significantly longer than the previous quarter’s maximum of 184 hours. The last quarter of 2016 also saw the first massive DDoS attacks using the Mirai IoT (internet of things) botnet technology, including attacks on Dyn’s Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure and on Deutsche Telekom, which knocked 900K Germans offline in November. There were also similar attacks on internet service providers (ISPs) in Ireland, the UK and Liberia, all using IoT devices controlled by Mirai technology and partly targeting home routers in an attempt to create new botnets. Stakeholders recognise lack of security in IoT devices According to Kaspersky, stakeholders worldwide, in particular in the US and EU, recognise the lack of security inherent in the functional design of IoT devices and the need to set up a common IoT security ecosystem. Kaspersky expects to see the emergence of further Mirai botnet modifications and a general increase in IoT botnet activity in 2017. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab also believe that the DDoS attacks seen so far are just a starting point initiated by various actors to draw up IoT devices into the actors’ own botnets, test drive Mirai technology and develop attack vectors. First, they demonstrate once again that financial services like the bitcoin trading and blockchain platforms CoinSecure of India and BTC-e of Bulgaria, or William Hill, one of Britain’s biggest betting sites, which took days to come back to full service, were at the highest risk in the fourth quarter and are likely to remain so throughout 2017. Second, cyber criminals have learnt to manage and launch very sophisticated, carefully planned, and constantly changing multi-vector DDoS attacks adapted to the mitigation policy and capacity of the attacked organisation. Kaspersky Lab’s analysis shows that the cybercriminals in several cases tracked in 2016 started with a combination of various attack vectors gradually checking out a bank’s network and web services to find a point of service failure. Once DDoS mitigation and other countermeasures were initiated, researchers said the attack vectors changed over a period of several days. DDoS enters its next stage of evolution Overall, they said these attacks show that the DDoS landscape entered the next stage of its evolution in 2016 with new technology, massive attack power, as well as highly skilled and professional cyber criminals. However, the Kaspersky researchers note that unfortunately, this tendency has not yet found its way into the cyber security policies of many organisations that are still not ready or are unclear about the necessary investments in DDoS protection services. Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450414239/Businesses-blame-rivals-for-DDoS-attacks

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Businesses blame rivals for DDoS attacks

Man suspected of DT router DDoS attack arrested in Luton airport

A man has been arrested by agents from the National Crime Agency (NCA) following a European Arrest Warrant put out by Germany’s federal police. Germans are to seek extradition of the suspect under charges of computer sabotage. The British man suspected of carrying out the DDoS attack on 900,000 Deutsche Telekom home broadband reuters in November 2016 has been arrested at Luton airport just outside London. The DDoS attack saw 900,000 routers, and by extension, the service of broadband briefly stopped. As they use the same routers, customers of UK ISP TalkTalk and the UK’s Post Office’s broadband customers were also affected by this. Arrested by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), by request of Germany’s federal police (BKA) under a European Arrest Warrant, Germany is now expected to seek extradition of the 29-year-old to face charges of computer sabotage. In a German-language statement, the BKA said the attack last year was “particularly serious” and was carried out in a bid to enroll the home routers in a botnet. The statement explains that Federal police are involved because the attack was classed as a threat to Germany’s national communication infrastructure. Public prosecutor Dr Daniel Vollmert from Cologne, Germany, told the Press Association, “he is accused of being the mastermind behind the attack.” The routers were believed to have a particular vulnerability, and all found using IoT search engine Shodan. Once detected, it was hijacked using the vulnerability, and then used to mount a DDoS attack. The attack is believed to have been carried out using a variant of the Mirai malware, which caused much havoc in late 2016 as it was used in the attacks on DNS provider Dyn, French web hosting company OVH and the website of security researcher Brian Krebs. Source: https://www.scmagazineuk.com/man-suspected-of-dt-router-ddos-attack-arrested-in-luton-airport/article/640082/

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Man suspected of DT router DDoS attack arrested in Luton airport

74 Percent of Companies that Suffer a Data Breach Don’t Know How It Happened

And just two thirds of IT pros say their current IT security budget is sufficient, a recent survey found. According to the results of a recent survey [PDF] of 250 IT professionals, 34 percent of companies in the U.S. were breached in the past year, and 74 percent of the victims don’t know how it happened. The survey, conducted by iSense Solutions for Bitdefender, also found that two thirds of companies would pay an average of $124,000 to avoid public shaming after a breach, while 14 percent would pay more than $500,000. One third of CIOs say their job has become more important in their company’s hierarchy, and another third say their job has been completely transformed in the past few years. And while nine in 10 IT decision makers see IT security as a top priority for their companies, only two thirds say their IT security budget is suifficient — the remainder say they would need an increase of 34 percent on average to deliver efficient security policies. Cloud security spending increased in the past year at 48 percent of companies, while the budget for other security activities remained the same. On average, respondents say only 64 percent of cyber attacks can be stopped, detected or prevented with their current resources. Separately, a survey of 403 IT security professionals in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Europe found that only three percent of organizations have the technology in place and only 10 percent have the skills in place to address today’s leading attack types. The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Tripwire, also found that just 44 percent of organizations have the skills, and 43 percent have the technology, to address ransomware attacks effectively. “Most organizations can reasonably handle one or two key threats, but the reality is they need to be able to defend against them all,” Tripwire senior director of IT security and risk strategy Tim Erlin said in a statement. “As part of the study, we asked respondents which attack types have the potential to do the greatest amount of damage to their organization. While ransomware was cited as the top threat, all organizations were extremely concerned about phishing, insider threats, vulnerability exploitation and DDoS attacks.” Respondents felt most confident in their skills to handle phishing (68 percent) and DDoS attacks (60 percent), but less confident in their abilities to deal with insider threats (48 percent) and vulnerability exploitations (45 percent). Similarly, respondents felt more confident in the technology they have in place to address phishing (56 percent) and DDoS attacks (63 percent), but less confident in the technology to address insider threats (41 percent) and vulnerabilities (40 percent). A separate survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers by Kaspersky Lab and HackerOne found that 22 percent of respondents are more likely to make a purchase if they know a company hired hackers to help boost security. Knowing what they do about their own company’s cyber security practices, just 36 percent of respondents said they would choose to be a customer of their own employer. Almost two in five U.S. adults don’t expect companies to pay a ransom if hit by ransomware. When asked what types of data they would expect a company to pay a ransom for, 43 percent expect companies to do so for employee Social Security numbers, followed by customer banking details (40 percent) and employee banking details (39 percent). Source: http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/74-percent-of-companies-that-suffer-a-data-breach-dont-know-how-it-happened.html

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74 Percent of Companies that Suffer a Data Breach Don’t Know How It Happened

Battle of the botnets: My zombie horde’s bigger than yours

DDoSing over 100Gbps up 140%. Mirai worst but Spike peaks at 517Gbps DDoS attacks more than doubled in the last quarter of 2016 compared to the same period the year before.…

DDoS attacks increasingly form blended attacks of more vulnerabilities

DDoS attacks increasingly formed blended attacks of four or more vulnerabilities over the course of the fourth quarter of 2016, with an intent to overload targeted monitoring, detection and logging systems, according to Nexusguard. Hybrid attacks were a common attack pattern against financial and government institutions. DDoS botnet activity: Top attacking countries The supersized Mirai attack from Q3 set the stage for Q4 challenges, resulting in a ripple of botnets from connected devices and the … More ?

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DDoS attacks increasingly form blended attacks of more vulnerabilities

Five Taiwan brokerages report cyber attack threats, regulator says

Taiwan is investigating an unprecedented case of threats made to five brokerages by an alleged cyber-group seeking payment to avert an attack that could crash their websites, an investigator and the securities regulator said on Monday. Rick Wang, an official with Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), said each brokerage had received an email setting a deadline for the transfer of funds to avoid a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Such attacks, among the most common kind on the internet, overload a website until it is forced to inhibit access or go offline. They have become common tools for cyber criminals trying to cripple businesses and organizations with significant online activities. “We have never seen this on such a scale – five companies hit at one time with the same threat,” said Wang, adding that the regulator usually sees single instances of cyber-crime. FireEye, a cybersecurity consultancy, said the attacks were similar to a wave of threatened denial of service attacks by a previously unidentified group that first appeared in Europe last month. The Taiwan attacks do not pose a threat to the island’s broader trading and financial system, Wang said, but he added that the regulator had asked all securities firms to step up defensive measures. One threat recipient, Masterlink Securities Corp, said its website had come under attack, but it had recovered and operations were normal. “The emails were sent under the name of the ‘Armada Collective’,” said Chiu Shao-chou, an official of the internet cybercrime division of Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, the government’s top investigation body. The Armada Collective, a hacking extortion group, has been linked to financial blackmail heists elsewhere. But Chiu said the group has been put under watch and Taiwan investigators were still looking into the original source of the emails. The email demanded payment in web-based digital currency bitcoin equivalent to about T$300,000 ($9,731.41), Taiwan media said. None of the securities companies made any payments, Chiu said. Another brokerage firm, Capital Securities Corp, was hit on Monday by a DDoS attack lasting 20 minutes before its system recovered, the regulator said, but it did not link the latest case to the threatening emails. (This version of the story corrects sixth paragraph to show the attacks were similar to, not necessarily part of, a wave of attacks in Europe last month) Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-cyber-idUSKBN15L128

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Five Taiwan brokerages report cyber attack threats, regulator says

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 on Dyn costly for company: claim

A distributed denial of service attack on Dynamic Network Services, otherwise known as Dyn, in October 2016, led to the company losing a considerable amount of business, according to data from the security services company BitSight. A report at the Security Ledger website said while Internet users endured short-term pain because they were cut off from popular websites during the attack, the company, Dyn, lost the business of about 8% of the domains — about 14,500 — it was hosting shortly thereafter. This figure was based on statistics in a talk given on 24 January by Dan Dahlberg, a research scientist at BitSight Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dyn is based in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was recently bought by Oracle Corporation. During the outage, Dyn was targeted by hackers who are said to have used digital video recorders and security cameras which were compromised by malware known as Mirai and used to form a massive botnet. The first attack, on 21 October 2016 US time, began at 7.10am EDT (10.10pm AEDT) and, once this was resolved by Dyn, further waves caused disruptions throughout the day. While major US websites like Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and Paypal were disrupted, the application performance management software company Dynatrace said that Australian websites were affected as well. Among the Australian sites that took a hit, Dynatrace listed AAMI, ANZ, BankWest, Coles, The Daily Telegraph, Dan Murphy’s, ebay, HSBC, The Herald Sun, NAB, 9News, The Age, Ticketmaster, The Australian, Woolworths, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Westpac. BitSight provides security rating services for companies. It analysed 178,000 domains that were hosted on Dyn’s managed DNS infrastructure before and after the attacks; of these 145,000 used Dyn exclusively, while the remaining 33,000 used Dyn and others too. After the attack, according to Dahlberg, 139,000 of the 145,000 domains managed exclusively by Dyn continued to use its services, a loss of 4% or 6000 domains. Among domains that used Dyn and other providers as well, there was a loss of 8000 domains, or 24%. Security Ledger said it had tried to get a comment from Dyn but was refused one. It is not clear whether any of the 14,500 domains that were found not to be using Dyn’s services in the aftermath of the attack returned to the provider. Source: http://www.itwire.com/security/76717-ddos-attack-on-dyn-costly-for-company-claim.html

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DDoS attack on Dyn costly for company: claim