Tag Archives: ddos

Protest Aims to ‘Take Down’ WhiteHouse.Gov on Inauguration Day

National PR service circulates—then pulls—release highlighting campaign to crash government website BY: Morgan Chalfant January 14, 2017 4:56 am A leading public-relations service blasted and then removed a news release this week highlighting a campaign to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump by crashing WhiteHouse.gov. PR Newswire, a global news-release distribution service, circulated a release on Thursday highlighting a campaign launched by Protester.io, a digital protest organizing platform, to “take down” the White House website next Friday in protest of Trump’s inauguration. “On January 20th, hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to Washington, DC to march in protest of the inauguration of Donald Trump. Millions more around the country will be joining the cause from home. If you can’t make it to Washington DC on inauguration day, you can still participate by occupying whitehouse.gov online,” the release read. “Why is it important to participate? Isn’t this just another election? We haven’t lost our democracy yet, but it is most definitely under threat. The only way we’re going to defend and revive our democracy is by mobilizing.” Protester.io describes itself as a platform that helps individuals “organize protests like a crowdfunding campaign.” A description of the Inauguration Day protest on its website, named “Occupy WhiteHouse.gov,” instructs interested parties to go to the White House website on Jan. 20 and refresh the page as often as possible throughout the day. The page also includes instructions for protesters to “automate” page refresh so that their computers do this automatically. “When enough people occupy www.WhiteHouse.gov the site will go down. Please join us and stand up against this demagogue who is threatening our democracy and our security,” the protest page states. Shortly after blasting the news release, PR Newswire issued a correction, changing the headline of the release from “Protester.io Launches Campaign to Take Down WhiteHouse.gov on Inauguration Day” to “Protester.io Launches Campaign to Voice Your Opinion at WhiteHouse.gov on Inauguration Day.” Later, the news-release service removed the press release entirely. PR Newswire was purchased by Cision, a global public relations software company based in Chicago, for $841 million from British business events organizer UBM in 2015. PR Newswire is based in New York and distributes public relations messages for companies largely located in the United States and Canada, according to the New York Times. When contacted, a spokesman for Cision confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that the original release had been modified and later removed entirely “after further evaluation.” “The issuer modified the original release at our request, but after further evaluation, we ultimately decided to remove the release in its entirety and have requested that the rest of our network remove the content as well,” Stacey Miller, director of communication for Cision, wrote in an email Friday afternoon. An organizer for the protest did not respond to a request for comment. Federal investigators have probed what are called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, which block users from websites by overloading them with traffic. Such attacks brought down Twitter, Spotify, and Amazon last October, prompting investigations by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. It is unclear whether the planned “Occupy WhiteHouse.gov” protest campaign would constitute a DDoS attack. Attempts to reach the FBI on Friday were unsuccessful. Several protests have been organized around Inauguration Day, including the “Women’s March on Washington” that is expected to draw some 200,000 women to the nation’s capital on Jan. 21, the day following Trump’s inauguration. Fox News reported that protesters are also planning to blockade security checkpoints at the inauguration and organize a “dance party” outside the home of Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Source: http://freebeacon.com/culture/protest-aims-take-whitehouse-gov-inauguration-day/

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Protest Aims to ‘Take Down’ WhiteHouse.Gov on Inauguration Day

DDOS attacks intensify in EMEA

Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region witnessed an uptick in the last quarter and are set to intensify in 2017. This is according to a report issued by F5 Networks, which revealed data from its Security Operations Centre (SOC), highlighting the growing scale and intensity of cyber attacks in the region. DDOS attacks have been around since at least 2000. These attacks refer to a situation in which many compromised machines flood a target with requests for information. The target can’t handle the onslaught of requests, so it crashes. Consultancy firm Deloitte also expects cyber attacks to enter the terabit era in 2017, with DDOS attacks becoming larger in scale, harder to mitigate and more frequent. F5 Networks points out that in 2016 to date, it has handled and mitigated 8 536 DDOS instances. The company notes that one of the attacks featured among the largest globally – a 448Gbps user datagram protocol (UDM) and Internet control message protocol (ICMP) fragmentation flood using over 100 000 IP addresses emanating from multiple regions. It explains the incident highlights a growing trend for global co-ordination to achieve maximum impact, with IP attack traffic stemming largely from Vietnam (28%), Russia (22%), China (21%), Brazil (15%) and the US (14%). “The EMEA Security Operations Centre has been experiencing rapid growth since launching in September last year, and it is entirely driven by the explosion of attacks across the region, as well as businesses realising they need to prepare for the worst,” says Martin Walshaw, senior engineer at F5 Networks. In Q1 (October – December), the SOC experienced a 100% increase in DDOS customers, compared to the same period last year. F5 Networks says UDP fragmentations were the most commonly observed type of DDOS attack in Q1 (23% of total), followed by domain name system reflections, UDP floods (both 15%), syn floods (13%) and NTP reflections (8%). “Given the rise and variety of new DDOS techniques, it is often unclear if a business is being targeted,” Walshaw says. “This is why it is more important than ever to ensure traffic is being constantly monitored for irregularities and that organisations have the measures in place to react rapidly. “The best way forward is to deploy a multi-layered DDOS strategy that can defend applications, data and networks. This allows detection of attacks and automatic action, shifting scrubbing duties from on-premises to cloud and back when business disruption from local or external sources is imminent at both the application and network layer.” Source: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=158643

Three ways retailers can safeguard against cybercrime

Chinese New Year is always a shopping boom time in town. People are generous in spending on food, decorations, and fashion during the important cultural festival. While retailers are focused on ensuring that they successfully take advantage of spikes 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 Thanksgiving officially kicks off the biggest shopping period of the year globally. The period through to Chinese New Year may be a sales bonanza, but it’s also a period of high vulnerability that criminals exploit to maximize the threat to a retailer’s business. Along with gaming and finance companies, retailers are popular targets because they store sensitive data that thieves can use for financial gain. Additionally, DDOS attacks are often used to distract organizations so that even more costly web application attacks can take place at the same time. But the truth is no industry is immune and the threat is increasing in its relentlessness. With Chinese New Year sales accounting for a sizeable chunk of most retailers’ 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 a 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, most likely, gearing up for bigger things. Asia is not immune and Hong Kong is a prime target According to a recent report by Nexusguard, DDoS attacks increased 43 percent in Q2 to 34,000 attacks in the Asia-Pacific region and 83 percent worldwide. The largest increase was seen in Hong Kong, where attacks rose an astonishing 57 percent. China, which saw a 50% increase in attacks, is the number one target in the region. According to the report, over the course of a month, a Chinese website was attacked 41 times. The fact is, that every company needs to pay this issue serious attention and put effective plans in place. Prevention is the 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? Organizations have to use a combination of measures to safeguard against even the most determined DDoS attack. This include: 1. 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 2. Choosing an ISP that connects directly to large carriers and other networks, as well as internet exchanges — allowing traffic to pass efficiently 3. 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 organizations want to protect. Chinese New Year is a critical period 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.enterpriseinnovation.net/article/three-ways-retailers-can-safeguard-against-cybercrime-512090779

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Three ways retailers can safeguard against cybercrime

Crims shut off Ukraine power in wide-ranging anniversary hacks

Phishing, denial of service, and remote exploitation part of hacking banquet Hackers of unknown origin cut power supplies in Ukraine for a second time in 12 months as part of wide-ranging attacks that hit the country in December.…

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Crims shut off Ukraine power in wide-ranging anniversary hacks

How the application landscape is impacting IT organizations

Accelerating cloud adoption is creating increased demand for security application services including WAF, DNSSEC, and DDoS protection, according to F5 Networks. As an increase in application services often requires additional resources, respondents also indicated a shift toward DevOps methodologies to gain operational efficiencies through automation and programmability. This need for scalability replaces speed to market as the prime driver of DevOps adoption. “This past year, not a week went by without some hack or vulnerability … More ?

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How the application landscape is impacting IT organizations

Someone is trying to take down the Drudge Report, and it’s a mystery who’s behind it

The Drudge Report, the highly trafficked conservative news website, has been knocked offline for extended periods during the past two weeks, succumbing to large distributed denial of service attacks, according to its founder, Matt Drudge. And it’s a mystery who’s behind it. Drudge wrote on Twitter that a December 30 attack was the “biggest DDoS since site’s inception.” A DDoS attack is executed by using hijacked computers or electronic devices to flood a website with redundant requests, aiming to overload the website’s hosting server and render it unavailable. But, according to cybersecurity experts who spoke with Business Insider, using such a method to take down the Drudge Report would not be easy. The site is already equipped to handle a high volume of visitors and scale out to accommodate spikes in traffic. Moreover, a website that generates so many page views would most likely employ strong defense measures, the cybersecurity experts said. “The Drudge Report has a massive readership,” said Ajay Arora, the CEO and cofounder of the cybersecurity firm Vera. “Generally someone that has that kind of viewership is going to have sophisticated hosting and counter defenses against DDoS attacks.” Since emerging in 1996, the Drudge Report has been a home to conservatives who feel disenfranchised by traditional media. Drudge has marketed his site as a news destination not controlled by corporate interests or politicians. And he’s had great success. SimilarWeb, an analytics firm, continually ranks the Drudge Report as one of the five most-trafficked media publishers in the US. According to analytics posted to the site, the Drudge Report has amassed about 775 million page views in the past 31 days — all with hardly any traffic coming from social-media channels. It’s a high-prized target, one that now sees itself under attack by an unknown culprit. Drudge has pointed the finger at the US government, tweeting that the traffic that downed his website had “VERY suspicious routing [and timing].” “Attacking coming from ‘thousands’ of sources,” he wrote on Twitter. “Of course none of them traceable to Fort Meade…” Drudge seemed to imply that his site was taken down in connection with punishment leveled against Russia for election-related hacking. The first attack on his site came hours after President Barack Obama announced the US would impose sanctions against Moscow, and the Drudge Report had previously been identified in a discredited Washington Post story as responsible for spreading Russian propaganda. “Maybe they think this is a proportional counterattack to Russia,” tweeted Sharyl Attkisson, a former CBS News investigative journalist. “After all they have decided @Drudge is Russian fake news, right?” Neither the White House nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to requests for comment. But cybersecurity experts who spoke with Business Insider discounted Drudge’s claim on grounds that the government attacking a US journalist’s site would be a blatant violation of the Constitution — as well as generally improbable. “If Putin wanted to take down a website, I’m sure he could order it,” said Jared DeMott, a former security engineer for the National Security Agency who is now the chief technology officer of Binary Defense Systems. “If Obama wanted to do something like that, he’d have to go to different people. It would be a hard conversation to have.” “Maybe if there was a military reason to have it,” DeMott added. “But domestically, there is no way.” DeMott, however, posited that another nation-state could be the potential culprit. “It definitely could be a nation-state,” he said. “They do stuff like that on an ongoing basis, whether they are looking for intel or trying to destabilize a political region.” Arora of the firm Vera agreed, saying that only a “small number of groups” in the world had the sophistication necessary to execute an attack to take out the Drudge Report for extended periods. “I would say it would be a group or nation-state that has pretty sophisticated methods and means,” he said. “Given the fact it’s happened a number of times and is persistent for well over a few minutes, and it’s coming from multiple sources, against a site that would have a lot of protection, it would indicate it’s someone pretty sophisticated.” Chris Weber, the cofounder of Casaba Security, agreed that because the Drudge Report was “getting so much traffic already,” a DDoS attack would need to be on a far “greater magnitude” to be effective against it. “It does seem unlikely that the Drudge Report would be easily taken down or slowed significantly by a standard DDoS attack,” he said. He surmised that the attack that took down the site was perhaps more on the scale of the massive cyberattack that temporarily knocked out Dyn, a large DNS company, in October. WikiLeaks said its supporters were behind that attack as a show of support for the group’s founder, Julian Assange. Outside nation-states, it is equally probable that the Drudge Report has come under fire from a “hacktivist” organization, perhaps unhappy with the political views espoused by the site’s founder. Drudge has always been a controversial conservative figure, but in 2016 he went all-in for President-elect Donald Trump, often igniting controversy with inflammatory headlines emblazoned on his site. But hacktivist organizations almost always take credit after a successful attack has been executed, experts said. So far, no one has claimed credit for the attacks on the Drudge Report. And without a group taking credit, it may be impossible to determine the culprit. “Attribution has always been hard in cyber,” DeMott said. “The science is just quite not mature.” Arora said any information Drudge “can provide in terms of motives” to a cybersecurity team would be helpful in identifying the responsible party. “There’s a lot of people that don’t like Matt Drudge,” he said. “He likes to push people’s buttons. Anyone who he specifically has knowledge of, who would be out to get him.” Arora added: “It’s not just a technology question. It’s also a motive question.” Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-ddos-drudge-report-2017-1

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Someone is trying to take down the Drudge Report, and it’s a mystery who’s behind it

Biggest British Hosting Company 123-Reg Suffers Major DDoS Attack

123-Reg, the biggest hosting company in the UK, is targeted a second time in as many years with a chain of major DDoS attacks. The biggest provider of domain registrations in the UK, 123-reg, has once again been the target of a DDoS attack. The result was that users weren’t able to get into their websites or email accounts. Considering this is just the start of 2017, the company has had to deal with another major blow. The company informed of the attacks formally using Twitter, explaining that they believed the attack had just begun and they were working on options to redress the situation and were attempting to work out the impact of the attack. They promised updates would follow. They continued to explain that the company’s network teams kept scrubbing and rerouting bad traffic. Of course, apologies were made for any problems their customers were experiencing. Once again, they reiterated that their team was still rerouting traffic and that they would provide further information soon. The DDoS attack took place on Friday, with the company stating that their IT team had mitigated the DDoS attacks, as evidenced by the resumption of services at around 1 PM. However, some users are still complaining today that they can’t get into their websites. 123-Reg sent out another two tweets in which they attempted to explain that the DDoS attack had just begun and they were attempting to resolve the issue. Later that day, they issued another tweet, stating that the problem had been fixed by 1 PM and that they apologized for any issues. In 2016, 123-Reg was the target of 2 big DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks. One took place in April, while one occurred in August. The firm stated that it was possible they lost a small amount of user information after the attack that occurred in April. Customers were very displeased at the time because, even after doing their best, the firm only succeeded in bringing back online only 39 percent of their Virtual Private Servers after a week. In August, the company was once again hit by a huge 30Gbps DDoS attack, which completely brought their site down. OVH, a French hosting company, was also the target of large DDoS attacks going up to 1Tbps last year. The firm stated that the Mirai botnet malicious code had been used in the attacks against them but 123-Reg did not make any similar statements. Source: https://www.socpedia.com/biggest-british-hosting-company-123-reg-suffers-major-ddos-attack

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Biggest British Hosting Company 123-Reg Suffers Major DDoS Attack

Many businesses are relying on others to fight DDoS attacks

With large scale cyber attacks constantly hitting the headlines, businesses ought to be aware of the need to protect themselves. But a new study by Kaspersky Lab shows that 40 percent of businesses are unclear on how to protect themselves against targeted attacks and DDoS. Many believe that someone else will protect them and therefore don’t take their own security measures. 40 percent think their ISP will provide protection and 30 percent think data center or infrastructure partners will protect them. Moreover, the survey finds that 30 percent fail to take action because they think they are unlikely to be targeted by DDoS attacks. Surprisingly, 12 percent even admit to thinking that a small amount of downtime due to DDoS would not cause a major issue for the company. The reality of course is that any company can be targeted because such attacks are easy for cybercriminals to launch and the potential cost of a single attack can be millions. “As we’ve seen with the recent attacks, DDoS is extremely disruptive, and on the rise,” says Kirill Ilganaev, head of Kaspersky DDoS protection at Kaspersky Lab. “When hackers launch a DDoS attack, the damage can be devastating for the business that’s being targeted because it disables a company’s online presence. As a result business workflow comes to a halt, mission-critical processes cannot be completed and reputations can be ruined. Online services and IT infrastructure are just too important to leave unguarded. That’s why specialized DDoS protection solution should be considered an essential part of any effective protection strategy in business today”. The findings are based on Kaspersky Lab’s annual Corporate IT Security Risks survey conducted in cooperation with B2B International. In 2016, it surveyd more than 4,000 representatives of small, medium (50 to 999 employees) and large businesses (1000+) from 25 countries to find their views on IT security and the real incidents they had to deal with. Source: http://betanews.com/2017/01/05/business-ddos-rely-others/

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Many businesses are relying on others to fight DDoS attacks

3… 2…1… and 123-Reg hit by DDoSers. Again

Happy New Year! Updated Just days into the new year, and poor old 123-Reg is already experiencing problems, this time in the form of a DDoS attack – something it is no stranger to.…

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3… 2…1… and 123-Reg hit by DDoSers. Again

DDoS Attacks on the Rise—Here’s What Companies Need to Do

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been going on for years. But in recent months they seem to have gained much more attention, in part because of high-profile incidents that affected millions of users. For instance, in late October 2016 a massive DDoS assault on Domain Name System (DNS) service provider Dyn temporarily shut down some of the biggest sites on the Internet. The incident affected users in much of the East Coast of the United States as well as data centers in Texas, Washington, and California. Dyn said in statements that tens of millions of IP addresses hit its infrastructure during the attack. Just how much attention DDoS is getting these days is indicated by a recent blog post by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. The post, entitled, “Distributed Denial of Service Attacks: Four Best Practices for Prevention and Response,” became SEI’s most visited of the year after just two days, said a spokesman for the institute. To help defend against such attacks, organizations need to understand that this is not just an IT concern. “While DDoS attack prevention is partly a technical issue, it is also largely a business issue,” said Rachel Kartch, analysis team lead at the CERT Division of SEI, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by CMU, and author of the DDoS post. Fortunately there are steps organizations can take to better protect themselves against DDoS attacks, and Kartch describes these in the post. In general, organizations should begin planning for attacks in advance, because it’s much more difficult to respond after an attack is already under way. “While DDoS attacks can’t be prevented, steps can be taken to make it harder for an attacker to render a network unresponsive,” Kartch noted. To fortify IT resources against a DDoS attack, it’s vital to make the architecture as resilient as possible. Fortifying network architecture is an important step not just in DDoS network defense, Kartch said, but in ensuring business continuity and protecting the organization from any kind of outage. To help disperse organizational assets and avoid presenting a single rich target to an attacker. organizations should locate servers in different data centers; ensure that data centers are located on different networks; ensure that data centers have diverse paths, and ensure that the data centers, or the networks that the data centers are connected to, have no notable bottlenecks or single points of failure. For those organizations that depend on servers and Internet presence, it’s important to make sure resources are geographically dispersed and not located in a single data center, Kartch said. “If resources are already geographically dispersed, it is important to view each data center as having more than one pipe to [the] Internet, and ensure that not all data centers are connected to the same Internet provider,” she said. While these are best practices for general business continuity and disaster recovery, they will also help ensure organizational resiliency in response to a DDoS attack. The post also describes other practices for defending against DDoS. One is to deploy appropriate hardware that can handle known attack types and use the options in the hardware that can protect network resources. While bolstering resources will not prevent a DDoS attack from happening, Kartch said, doing so will lessen the impact of an attack. Certain types of DDoS attacks have existed for a long time, and a lot of network and security hardware is capable of mitigating them. For example, many commercially available network firewalls, web application firewalls, and load balancers can defend against protocol attacks and application-layer attacks, Kartch said. Specialty DDoS mitigation appliances also can protect against these attacks. Another good practice is to scale up network bandwidth. “For volumetric attacks, the solution some organizations have adopted is simply to scale bandwidth up to be able to absorb a large volume of traffic if necessary,” Kartch said. “That said, volumetric attacks are something of an arms race, and many organizations won’t be able or willing to pay for the network bandwidth needed to handle some of the very large attacks we have recently seen. This is primarily an option for very large organizations and service providers.” It’s likely that DDoS attacks will continue to be a major issue for organizations. A 2016 study by content delivery network provider Akamai said these types of incidents are rising in number as well as in severity and duration. The company reported a 125% increase in DDoS attacks year over year and a 35% rise in the average attack duration. Cyber security executives need to make it a top priority to protect their organizations against DDoS. Source: http://www.itbestofbreed.com/sponsors/bitdefender/best-tech/ddos-attacks-rise-here-s-what-companies-need-do

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DDoS Attacks on the Rise—Here’s What Companies Need to Do