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F2Pool Suffers from Series of DDoS Attacks

F2Pool, a Chinese mining pool also referred to as Discus Fish, which holds the largest share of the Bitcoin network’s hashrate at 26%, has been experiencing a series of extreme DDoS attacks. The attacks began to target the F2Pool Bitcoin mining pool almost immediately after the F2Pool team announced their decision to “test” Bitcoin Classic by launching a subpool in which miners can mine Bitcoin Classic blocks. Peter Todd and other Bitcoin experts requested the hackers and the individuals behind the series of DDoS attacks to terminate them immediately, as they are delaying the mining pools and companies to reach a consensus on the block size debate. Whomever is DoS attacking f2pool please stop. You’re only making it harder to come to consensus.https://t.co/GoicJNhcMY — Peter Todd (@petertoddbtc) February 25, 2016 Behind the DDoS attack Some bitcoin enthusiasts and supporters of Bitcoin Classic claim that the attacks have been directed and paid for by Bitcoin Core supporters, and its developers, to forcefully cause Bitcoin Classic nodes to become inoperable. A hacker, or a hacking group, that goes by the online alias botneko-chan stated on a forum that they have been paid to launch professional DDoS attacks on F2Pool’s Bitcoin Classic subpools. “Just paid, I’m professional ddoser lol. Don’t know why someone want to bring it down. Maybe increasing block size will decrease miners profit? I’m using bitcoin a lot but don’t care about it’s politics too much, XT had too fast block size grow rate which looks unrealistic to me. I think BIP100 is okay since it allows voting and also bitcoin unlimited also seems like good idea and looks simpler for me. If classic will fork to 2mb blocksize and it would be not enough then what? Next hard fork? I think protocol should support miner voting by design,” the hacker himself said on Reddit. Jonathan Toomim, the leading developer and founder of Bitcoin Classic, further explained that Chinese miners and mining pools are quite skeptical towards Bitcoin Classic as they prefer not to change pool information on their hardware to adopt the 2 megabyte hard fork. “Actual miners are lazy,” said Toomim. “They don’t like to change pool information on their hardware very often, because that would require logging into each of your machines and copy-pasting in new data to a web form and clicking submit. A typical mining farm will have hundreds to tens of thousands of these machines. The approach that Slush is taking is different. Rather than requiring users to reconfigure each machine, Slush is giving users a way to switch all of their hardware between Classic and Core by clicking on one button on Slush’s website. This should result in much faster changes.” As of now, leading bitcoin mining pools, including Antpool, F2Pool and BitFury, are supporting the roadmap and development of the Bitcoin Core development team. Source: http://cointelegraph.com/news/f2pool-suffers-from-series-of-ddos-attacks

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F2Pool Suffers from Series of DDoS Attacks

You don’t need a website to get hit by DDoS

Just because your business doesn’t have a website, that doesn’t mean it can’t be a victim of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. This sentence might not make much sense at this point, but keep reading. Security firm Kaspersky Lab and researchers B2B International looked at what cyber-crooks go for when attacking businesses and enterprises, and here’s what they came up with: Last year, 16 per cent of companies (globally), were victims of a DDoS attack. Among enterprises, the percentage jumps up to 24. For most, external activities, such as websites, were targeted. Among half, websites had been hit, logins and portals were attacked in 38 per cent of cases, while communications services were attacked 37 per cent of times. Transactional systems had been affected in 25 per cent of cases. But also, in 25 per cent of cases, file servers had been hit, and 15 per cent said their operational systems were targeted. Another 15 per cent said a DDoS attack hit their ISP network connectivity. “It’s important to take a DDoS attack seriously. It’s a relatively easy crime to perpetrate, but the effect on business continuity can be far-reaching. Our study found that alongside the well-publicised impact of an attack, such as website downtime, reputational damage and unhappy customers, DDoS hits can reach deep into a company’s internal systems. It doesn’t matter how small the company is, or whether or not it has a website; if you’re online, you’re a potential target. Unprotected operational systems are just as vulnerable to a DDoS attack as the external website, and any disruption can stop a business in its tracks,” said Evgeny Vigovsky, Head of Kaspersky DDoS Protection, Kaspersky Lab. Source: http://www.itproportal.com/2016/02/29/you-dont-need-a-website-to-get-hit-by-ddos/  

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You don’t need a website to get hit by DDoS

Project Shield: Latest Google product could protect start-up websites from hacker DDoS attacks

On 24 February, Google and its parent company Alphabet opened the doors to Project Shield, a service designed to protect independent news websites with controversial geopolitical messages from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The project, which originates from the Google Ideas branch that was recently extended and rebranded as Jigsaw, has come out of an invite-only beta and is now freely available to any website not owned by a government or political party that passes through the application process. According to a Wired report, sites that have successful applications to the project will then be able to change their site’s domain name configuration which so that it redirects to a Google server. This server effectively creates a “reverse-proxy”, which then filters out malicious traffic. Google claims in an accompanying video (below) that decision to help independent websites from suffering the wrath of hackers is to reduce forced censorship, via online blackouts, for those sites that are delivering sensitive news in regions of political turmoil and/or upheaval. An example given for an early case of Project Shield’s use covers how Yahyanejad, the editor-in-chief of Balatarian.com , managed to take advantage of Google’s system to effectively null a swathe of DDoS digital strikes presumed to be intended to suppress the site’s coverage of the 2009 Iranian presidential election. “Just about anyone who’s published anything interesting has come under an attack at some point,” said Project Shield lead George Conard. “The smaller and more independent voices often don’t have the resources, whether technical or financial, to really put good protections in place…That’s where we come into the picture.” The catch, however, could be a deal breaker for some, despite the obvious positives of the service. While Alphabet executive director Eric Schmidt talks of using Jigsaw-produced schemes as being purpose-built to enable “technology to tackle the toughest geopolitical challenges,” any website making use of Project Shield is required to give Google access to its raw data logs on who is accessing the site itself. While this may cause privacy concerns, the company confirmed to Wired that the data logs will only be kept for a maximum of two weeks. Project Shield product manager CJ Adams said: “We’ve made it very explicit we don’t have the rights to commercialise anything that comes through.” Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/project-shield-latest-google-product-could-protect-start-websites-hacker-ddos-attacks-1546036

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Project Shield: Latest Google product could protect start-up websites from hacker DDoS attacks

How Norway’s biggest news site protects itself from DDoS attacks

Every day hackers attack Norway´s largest news site, VG.  But not without risk. VG has both helped the police put hackers behind bars and alerted mothers about what their adventurous sons are up to. VG.no is one of the most successful news sites in the world. Every week 4 million Norwegians – out of a population of 5 million – visit the site for the latest news. But that also makes VG.no a target for hackers. “Whenever there is a new security hole discovered, someone want to try it on VG,” says Audun Ytterdal, head of IT operations in VG. During the Schibsted Tech Polska Winter Event 2016 he presented “War stories from the ops trenches”, describing how the media house protects itself from a continuous flow of DDoS attacks. Under attack every day VG is well prepared for hacker attacks – and is able to deal with lots of traffic without going down. According to Ytterdal the site can handle up to 30 GB per second. “Usually we see around 10.000 http-hits per second. But during the attacks we can experience up to 100.000 http-hits per second,” he explains. Called the hacker´s mum In the presentation he explains some of the technical measures taken to secure the news site from attack. But he also tells entertaining stories about how the IT staff used their technical skills to identify the hackers. And not always the hackers have everything planned out! Take for instance the young hacker who managed to take over the front page of the business site E24.no with photos of himself in a balaclava taken in his mum´s bathroom. However smart he had been breaking into the site, he had forgotten to remove the location info added to the image file when he took the photo with his mobile phone. “So we could see where he lived – and we called his mum informing her that her son was up to activities she may not approve of,”  laughs Audun Ytterdal. Sent hackers to jail In another case the hackers bragged about their achievement on Twitter. That gave the IT operations department the opportunity to contact them directly.  After a while they also managed to identify two of the hackers. When one of them posted a photo from a town in Southern Norway, VG was able to locate the exact house it had been taken from with use of Google Street View. The information was given to the police – and the two hackers later had to serve time in jail. Entertaining error page For a news room all alarms go off when the main site is down.  And Audun Ytterdal believes it will be very hard to avoid never being shut down. So what to do when it happens? Of course identify and fix the problem. But VG also decided to give people a good laugh by designing an entertaining error page. The error page is a fun version of the normal front page of the site. “The last time we used this we had people tweeting that they would rather see the error page of VG than any other news site,” smiles Ytterdal. Source: http://www.schibsted.pl/2016/02/how-norways-biggest-news-site-protects-itself-from-ddos-attacks/

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How Norway’s biggest news site protects itself from DDoS attacks

Serbian President’s website comes under DDoS attack

The Serbian president’s website faced a large-scale “hacking” attack on Monday, which brought it down for several hours, his press office said. A statement carried by Tanjug explained that the distributed denial-of-service attack (SYN flood) targeted www.predsednik.rs, and that the president’s website is “subject to daily hacking attacks.” In a SYN flood attack, the server is overwhelmed by a large number of legitimate and false connections requests which consume its resources and render it unresponsive or difficult to access. “The hosting and security of the president’s website falls within the competence of the Defense Ministry. In cooperation with Telekom Srbija, the ministry blocked and prevented further attacks and possible damage to the computer equipment and services,” the statement said. Source:http://www.b92.net/eng/news/crimes.php?yyyy=2016&mm=02&dd=23&nav_id=97147

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Serbian President’s website comes under DDoS attack

US Department of Homeland SecuUS Department of Homeland Security Vows To Tackle DDoS Attacksrity Vows To Tackle DDoS Attacks

The contract between Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Galois was signed in January. However, HackRead had a chance to discuss the contract with Galois. Galois and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) have formalized a contract to develop technology for preventing and combating extensive, sophisticated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks . In fact, an official announcement was made by Galois in which the company informed media about signing up a $1.7million contract with the DHS S&T Cyber Security Division. The contract is part of the larger Distributed Denial of Service Defenses (DDoSD) program initiated by the DHS S&T Cyber Security Division. The problem with DDoS attacks is that these can cripple even the most established and largest organizations. These happen to be devastating for small and/or medium-sized businesses. The generated amount of traffic is adequate to drench their internet connections multiple times and it becomes challenging to get the ISP (internet service provider) to take the matter seriously and respond quickly. DHS Developing Technology to Thwart DDoS attacks Quicker than Ever Before The project that DHS is planning with Galois is dubbed as DDoS Defense for a Community of Peers (3DCoP) and it involves peer-to-peer collaboration mechanism with which the organizations detect and combat DDoS attacks by working in cooperation. According to Adam Wick, Galois’ Research Lead, Mobile & Security Systems Software: “Current DDoS defense systems are proving ineffective because they operate in isolation, which introduces delays in the detection, reporting, and response to a DDoS attack. This delay is critical. It provides positive feedback to the attacker, who will continue to send more and more traffic to the target network. Our solution advances the state of DDoS defense by providing new tools that allow multiple defenders to coordinate their response, resulting in earlier detection and faster DDoS mitigation.” It is not a hidden fact that DDoS attacks are a great threat for all kinds of industries and sectors alike such as news entities, financial institutions, critical infrastructure organizations and government agencies, etc. Under the contract with DHS, Galois aims to curb rising DDoS attack threats via the following measures: 1: Minimizing mitigation response duration by at least 50% and 75 to 90 percent reduction in peak traffic 2: 25% reduction in the duration between the launching of DDoS attack and its detection Resultantly, organizations and institutional entities will be able to thwart DDoS attacks prior to its completion. HackRead had a chance to have a conversation with Adam Wick and here’s what we asked and what he replied: Q: How would you like to explain the difference between your services and services provided by other companies? Answer:  “Currently, DDoS defense systems fail to address large DDoS attacks that fully “clog” the internet connection. In those cases, locally responding to an attack is no longer possible. In general, most solutions work in isolation, which introduces delays in the detection, reporting, and response to a DDoS attack. To effectively mitigate a large attack, an organization must involve organizations “higher up”, like ISPs, that can stop the flow of malicious traffic. We’re developing a unique collaborative model, where multiple organizations automatically work together to detect DDoS attacks through automatic traffic analysis. They then generate traffic blocking rules for the malicious traffic and send that to ISPs further up the chain. The ISPs can, in turn, block the necessary traffic and mitigate the attacks. One can see the basis of this in the way people react to DDoS attacks now, but many of these steps are manual and require complicated conversations over the telephone. In many cases, the process is further complicated because the parties involved have never spoken before, and have to build trust. After all, the actions that one takes to mitigate a DDoS can also be used to perpetrate an attack, so upstream ISPs need to convince themselves that they’re talking to the right person. What we’re looking to do is speed up this process, dramatically, by automating the detection, analysis, and mitigation steps. At the moment, this mitigation can be automatic, or it can be manual. That way, even if an organization’s ISP isn’t hooked up to our system, network admins will be able to detect the problem early and trust our solution to have all the information (and all the evidence!) they need to convince their ISP to take early and effective action.” Q: How will your firm will defend its client against DDoS attack leading to ransom such as the ProtonMail DDoS attack? Answer: “Ransom in DDoS cases is one of those clear indicators that our current approaches to DDoS defense are failing. Attackers can only ask for ransom when an organization has no way to defend themselves. Ransom cases can be mitigated by having effective DDoS defense that doesn’t allow an attack to become a problem in first place. The most effective defenses in the coming years will take into account the bigger picture by connecting everyone involved, for a more timely response. If we can minimize the effect of large DDoS attacks, we effectively reduce cases where attackers demand ransom.” Galois is a renowned firm in the computer science research and development sector. It has been operating since 1999 and boasts of a world class team of computer science experts, mathematicians, programmers, and engineers. The firm has positioned itself as the world’s most reliable company and is ready to take on even the most challenging computer science related task of the world. It has also partnered with defense and intelligence agencies to develop cutting edge technologies to protect their systems and networks. Very often tech firms consult Galois to create reliable, safe and secure systems for their products and services’ security. Source: https://www.hackread.com/us-homeland-security-vows-to-tackle-ddos-attacks/

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US Department of Homeland SecuUS Department of Homeland Security Vows To Tackle DDoS Attacksrity Vows To Tackle DDoS Attacks

Anonymous: Hackers plan DDoS campaign against Israeli military to protest Mohammed Al-Qeeq detention

Hacktivists with the Anonymous hacking collective have announced plans to launch widespread DDoS strikes against the Israeli military to protest the ongoing detention of Mohammed Al-Qeeq, a Palestinian journalist who has been on hunger strike since November 2015. Al-Qeeq is a reporter for a Saudi news outlet and was arrested at his Ramallah home on 21 November by Israeli police amid claims was linked to Hamas. According to the Independent, he has been in ‘administrative detention’ ever since, which is permitted under Israeli law to detain someone without referring to a judge on the basis they are a threat to the national security. In the week after his detention he went on hunger strike and after roughly 80 days had lost most of his sight, voice and hearing abilities. “We are calling on all citizens of the world to join us in this fight to free an illegally detained man. We are organising many ongoing operations in relation to this issue,” said the hacktivists in a statement posted to PasteBin, who have branded the so-called ‘emergency operation’ as #OpAlQeeq, #OpSaveGaza and #FreeAlQeeq. The statement requested those taking part in the operation to carry out a range of tasks including calling local Israeli embassys, taking to the streets in protest and raising awareness on social media. However, the note also called for major hacking activity against ‘Israeli military forces’ and posted a slew of IP addresses relating to a range of websites including the defence ministry and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). “Since it was the Israeli military forces that arrested and detained Mohammed Al Qeeq, then Israel military forces, his blood is on your hands,” the statement said. “We are calling on all ‘anons’ and hacktivists across the world to focus fire on Israeli military forces. Included [are] all websites associated with the Israeli military. Dump them, load them with viruses, DDoS them, break them, whatever you can do or see fit. Security analysis is already underway on all targets. Targets are listed by priority level. If this man dies in the custody of the Israeli military, Israel you can expect hell.” Anonymous has a long history with hacking Israeli targets. Last year, in a video posted online, the group vowed an ‘electronic holocaust’ against the nation in apparent statement in support of Palestine. “As we did many times, we will take down your servers, government websites, Israeli military websites, and Israeli institutions,” said a masked anonymous individual. “We will erase you from cyberspace in our electronic holocaust.” Meanwhile, in a separate attack in 2012, hackers attacks and shut down a number of websites including the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange after they were threatened by a Saudi hacker. A spokeswoman for the stock exchange confirmed at the time that the site had come under attack, but claimed that trading systems were not affected. Even most recently, following the hack at the Department of Justice that resulted in the loss of thousands of federal credentials, the hacker using the @DotGovs twitter profile who was thought to be behind the incident frequently signed off with the now-familiar phrase: #FreePalestine. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-hackers-plan-ddos-campaign-against-israeli-military-protest-mohammed-al-qeeq-detention-1544723

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Anonymous: Hackers plan DDoS campaign against Israeli military to protest Mohammed Al-Qeeq detention

Valentine’s Day Inspires DDoS Attacks Against Online Florists

Security vendor Imperva says it has observed a sharp increase in automated bot traffic directed at florist sites. Cyber criminals have shown a consistent tendency to exploit major news and seasonal events to slip phishing and other malicious attacks past unwary victims. And so it is with this Valentine’s Day as well. Florists apparently have been receiving a lot of attention, of the unwanted variety, from online criminals, security vendor Imperva reported this week. All 34 of the company’s florist customers have experienced a sharp spike in traffic to their sites over the last few days. While some of the traffic is to be expected, considering the rush to order flowers for Valentine’s Day — a lot of it is not. According to Imperva, more than nine in 10 of the florist sites witnessed a sudden surge in bot traffic between February 5 and February 11. In about 23% of the cases, the spike in bot traffic was dramatic enough to cause problems. Contrary to what some might expect, the attack traffic did not appear to be opportunistic in nature. Rather, it looked as if the florists were being individually targeted in denial-of-service campaigns apparently designed to extort money from them. Sponsor video, mouseover for sound One of Imperva’s florist customers reported receiving a ransom note, while another experienced an application-layer denial of service attack, Imperva said. In the case of the latter victim, the company’s Content Distribution Network (CDN) provider interpreted the botnet traffic as regular user sessions, resulting in the site exceeding its contracted cache capacity. This in turn caused the CDN to route the attack traffic through its own origin servers, resulting in their site going down under DDoS traffic. A screenshot published on Imperva’s blog shows that some of the Web application attacks had originated in the United Kingdom, though one appeared to be from Latvia. Somewhat surprisingly, attackers were still going after old vulnerabilities such as Shellshock in an attempt to breach systems belonging to their targets, according to Imperva. Florists can mitigate the threat by monitoring their traffic for unexpected behavior, like heavier than normal traffic spikes, or visits from unfamiliar IP addresses. “Any unusual activity could be ‘dry runs’ by attackers foreshadowing an imminent full-blown attack,” Imperva said. The company also urged florists to monitor Twitter and sites such as Pastebin.com for chatter hinting at a potential attack on their sites. The sudden spike in malicious traffic directed at online florists reflects a common tendency among cyber crooks to escalate malware campaigns and attacks around seasonal events and major news happenings. Earlier this year, mobile network protection vendor Adaptive Mobile reported on a series of picture message spam campaigns on the Kik messenger service that were timed to coincide with seasonal events. The spam messages involved the use of images belonging to well-known brands to try and get recipients to follow links to malicious websites. What was noteworthy was the fact that each campaign was tied to a specific event. For instance, one of the Kik spam campaigns was launched around Halloween, and featured an image message purportedly from Amazon. Another campaign around Thanksgiving involved spam featuring spoofed McDonalds images, while one in the days preceding Cyber Monday featured BestBuy-related spam. While the campaign was not technically very sophisticated, the effort put into creating individual picture messages purporting to be from major brands, suggested a specialist campaign, Adaptive Mobile had noted. Source: http://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/valentines-day-inspires-ddos-attacks-against-online-florists-/d/d-id/1324312

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Valentine’s Day Inspires DDoS Attacks Against Online Florists

How CDSL’s CIO is way ahead in the fight against DDoS attack

As the threat of DDoS attack looms large on the enterprise, CDSL’s CIO, Joydeep Dutta, countered it ahead of time with his in-house DDoS protection. For the past few years, India Inc. and its IT teams have been in a constant state of war with malware, hackers, insidious employees and everything that is a threat to their information security. The only strategy applied—and it wasn’t an effective one—was to deal with the after effects of the attack. But one CIO believed in the age old adage: Prevention is better than cure, and secured the most critical applications of the company from DDOS attacks. “Today, not many companies have implemented in-house DDoS protection though it is the ideal way of preventing denial of service attacks. If done only at the network service provider through clean pipes, it doesn’t give full protection,” says Joydeep Dutta, group CTO, Central Depository Services Limited. According to a recent report released by Akamai, India stands in the fourth position for being the origin of non-spoofed DDoS attacks. Of all the attacks, 7.43 percent originated from the country. The project was therefore a high priority for Dutta as the company’s core depository application, electronic voting for company resolution and other critical applications were Web-based. Not wasting any more time, as the threat loomed large, Dutta implemented an in-house DDoS protection and Web Application Firewall for additional security above the capability of traditional network firewalls. “By implementing Web application firewall (WAF), the internet-facing applications which are part of the core applications for most organizations were additionally protected,” he says. Further explaining the project, Dutta says that the in-premises DDOS equipment is the first layer of defense in the on-premise infrastructure. All the other equipment such as ISP routers, firewalls etc; at customer premise, are underneath this. “A set of security modules including Denial-of-service (DoS) protection, Network Behavioral Analysis (NBA), Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Reputation Engine and Web Application Firewall (WAF), fully safeguard networks, servers, and applications against known and emerging network security threats,” Dutta says. Another novel thing about the project was the built-in security event information management system which collects and analyzes events from all modules to provide enterprise-wide views. CDSL reaped huge benefits from the on-premise DDoS implementation. “It was easy to proactively monitor the security features of these devices to decide necessary actions to be taken,” he says. It was now easy to black-list the vulnerable IP list received regularly from NCIIPC. It was also possible to stop repeated attacks with the help of the device. Thus, Dutta set an example for his peers to follow by securing the organization against the looming security threats. You too get going. Source: http://www.cio.in/case-study/how-cdsl%E2%80%99s-cio-way-ahead-fight-against-ddos-attack

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How CDSL’s CIO is way ahead in the fight against DDoS attack

Denying the deniers: how to effectively tackle DDoS attacks

DDoS as an attack vector is on the rise: here’s how to stop it from stopping your business. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks maybe as old as the hills but they continue to be a popular, and highly effective, attack vector for hackers. In the past couple of months alone we have seen a persistent  DDoS attack  on the UK academic computer network JANET, which was swiftly followed by one against cloud hosting company Linode, leading to service interruptions at DNS infrastructure and data centers across the U.S. and the U.K. Indeed, recent research released by Arbor Networks in its  Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report  stated that DDoS attacks are on the rise, with half of the 354 global respondents’ data centers suffering DDoS attacks – a 33% increase from 2014. DDoS attacks have increased in frequency for some time – giving hackers a relatively uncomplicated method to bring a website down or disrupt a web service. Although DDoS attacks do not involve the stealing of data, they can be highly damaging in other ways, not least by affecting the trust and reputation that a company has among its customers. This can lead to financial damage through lost customers and lost business. Moreover, DDoS attacks can be used as a diversionary smokescreen for more aggressive attacks, as was the case with the recent  TalkTalk breach. So what can organisations do to help protect themselves against the threat of DDoS and mitigate the effects of such attacks? The first step is being able to quickly detect that you are under attack, and having a procedure in place to deal with it. Illegitimate traffic can be hard to distinguish from legitimate traffic, but the typical signs of a DDoS attack are a sharp increase in traffic to your website followed by a slowing down of performance (there are services that can continuously monitor your website’s responsiveness from an external point of view, such as Dynatrace and SolarWinds.) Once a DDoS attack is underway, you have a number of options in terms of dealing with the bombardment: ISP blocking and scrubbing – It is advisable to deal with the attack in an environment that’s removed from your network, to prevent it from affecting other areas of network performance. If you suffer a DDoS attack contact your internet service provider, as many offer DDoS protection services such as blocking the originating IP addresses or ‘scrubbing’ malicious packets. They will also probably have greater bandwidth than you and are therefore likely to be able to deal with the attack more efficiently and effectively. Blackholing – A common response to a DDoS attack is to simply route all website traffic into a black hole, thus taking the website offline until the attack ceases. The problem with this approach is that it blocks all traffic, both good and bad, which basically means that the hacker has achieved their objective. Routers and firewalls – You can set up routers and firewalls policies to filter non-critical protocols, block invalid IP addresses and shut off access to specific high-risk segments of your network in the event of an attack. However, be aware that these techniques are somewhat ineffective against more sophisticated attacks that use spoofing or valid IP addresses. Content delivery network – Using a content delivery network to create replicas of your website for customers in different locations can help reduce the impact of the DDoS attack as well as make the extra DDoS related traffic easier to combat. Anti-DDoS technology – Many of the leading firewall appliance vendors offer specialised anti-DDoS modules, that can be deployed at the perimeter of your network or data center, which are designed to detect and filter malicious traffic. However, these are not automated and need to be constantly managed and updated by your operations team. While there is no single ‘silver bullet’ solution that can stop a DDoS attack in its tracks once the traffic starts hitting your website, you can lessen its impact on your business by using a combination of the methods I’ve outlined here. As DDoS continues to be used as a cyber-weapon against websites and online resources, organisations should ensure that they have a response plan in place that includes these mitigation techniques, to help deny attempted denial-of-service attacks. Source: http://www.information-age.com/technology/security/123460891/denying-deniers-how-effectively-tackle-ddos-attacks#sthash.HM41ehWS.dpuf

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Denying the deniers: how to effectively tackle DDoS attacks