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How cybercriminals and hacktivists use DDoS tools to attack

Network professionals know that distributed denial-of-service attacks are an ever-growing danger. The recent assault on Twitter is just the latest evidence. Using a mushrooming array of advanced tools, including pay-per-use services and mobile devices, attackers are taking down websites, DNS and email servers, often using these tools to destroy a company’s online revenue, customer service and brand reputation. But the technology is only half the story. The thinking that shapes attacks an evolving blend of careful planning, probing and improvisation is often the difference between duds and strikes that leave victims begging for mercy. So who launches DDoS attacks and why? The most common profiles: extortionists, ruthless competitors and “hacktivists,” those attacking not for money, but in the name of social or political protest. The latter gets the most press, thanks to the media-savvy tactics of groups that have punished the likes of Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce. However, even though reliable statistics about attacks are hard to find, it’s likely that money, not justice, is the main motive. Regardless of the attacker’s identity or incentive, criminals use common tools and tactics in varying combinations. Many of these tools are cheap or free and easily available. They also require no more specialised skill than typing in the target’s name and hitting “enter.” The low-orbit ion cannon (LOIC), for example, is an open-source DDoS application which floods a server with enough UDP or TCP packets to disrupt service. The LOIC even offers multiple attack vectors. Attackers can send anything from packets with the text of their choice to random HTTP GET requests which imitate legitimate application-layer traffic. The future of malware The means to launch an assault doesn’t stop there though, as there are many other resources for attackers to use. If someone rents a server from a hosting company, but doesn’t secure it, an attacker could obtain administrative rights to the server, load scripts onto it and execute them at will. This is known as accessing a “shell booter.” There are also remote-access Trojans and DDoS bots, both forms of malware that infect PCs and mobile phones, letting criminals control them remotely to execute attacks. A group of such computers is a “botnet” and each computer infected is a “zombie.” Each family of malware has its own destructive capabilities. The most advanced the ones that avoid detection the longest and support the most types of attacks are often sold as software or as a complete pay-by-the-hour service. Attackers can also infect mobile phones to be used as extra resources. It’s the same idea as launching attacks with other people’s computers in a botnet. However, the added benefit is that there are billions of smartphones in use all around the world. And unlike desktop computers and laptops which are shut off for hours each day, mobile phones are always on, connected and able to abet attacks. In the DDoS world, it’s all about how much traffic you can generate, which depends on the number of hosts under your control. Mobile phones are simply too tempting to resist, and a new weapon that network security personnel have to keep an eye out for. However, before going through choosing a weapon and firing, the smartest attackers do their homework first. After all, there’s a ton of public information available about any business, including yours. For instance, a simple DNS look-up can reveal a lot of information about your public-facing assets. Attackers will also check your infrastructure for open ports, protocols, applications and firewalls. By doing recon on your infrastructure and understanding what it’s built to support ecommerce, customer service or public information, let’s say the bad guys will assess what’s at risk and will look for the best ways to exploit these weak spots in your infrastructure. In the ramp-up to an attack, you might notice bursts of heavier traffic in key areas of your network. The attacker is probing, trying to find a way in. While some will simply try to flood you, others will try to find a little crack in your network defenses, some piece of infrastructure too tempting to ignore. If you’re a retailer, for example, and someone succeeds in bringing down your point-of-sale applications, the pain could be acute. For the attacker, it’s well worth the time investment and ensures that your entire organization will take notice of the attack. Know your network and security inside-out Everything’s not all doom and gloom though. While criminals have many tools at their disposal, understanding what’s at risk, and how it will be attacked, allows you to understand how to take the first steps in order to protect it. For starters, make sure your team knows not only your network inside-out but also your security set-up. Conduct a security assessment, either in-house or with third-party experts who can give independent validation. Use these findings to help optimize your systems. It’s also critical to monitor traffic, so you know what’s normal and what’s not. With a clear baseline, you’ll be able to spot and mitigate DDoS attacks faster. Maybe most important of all, devise a DDoS response plan to counteract some of the tactics described here, listing procedures to follow and which team members are responsible for what. And practice executing this plan regularly. If you have to dust it off in the midst of an attack, you’re inviting chaos. Run regular drills including simulated communications with customers, so you can become adept at managing their expectations. At the end of the day, it’s not only attackers whose thinking makes a difference. Companies that invest more brainpower in understanding how DDoS attacks work, to better protect themselves are also more skilled in deploying the technologies designed to keep their online presences safe. For DDoS protection against your e-commerce site click here . Source: http://features.techworld.com/security/3378864/how-cybercriminals-hacktivists-use-ddos-tools-attack/

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How cybercriminals and hacktivists use DDoS tools to attack

Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack stymies vote in Miss Hong Kong beauty contest

Residents of the island, a Special Administrative Region of China, are up in arms after plans for a popular vote in the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant were sidelined by a distributed denial-of-service attack that knocked the voting system offline. The attack on Sunday evening swamped systems used for the vote with millions of bogus votes – far more than contest organizers had anticipated. Organizers were forced to cancel the online vote and ask the pageant judges to elect the winner themselves, according to a story in The Standard . Hong Kong Station TVB issued a statement on Monday apologizing for the wrinkle in the first ever Idol-style vote for the island’s beauty queen, putting the blame on audience reaction that was more “warm” than expected. The voting snafu forced organizers to throw the decision to the pageant judges, who chose a winner based on the three finalists overall performance. (Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work, anyway?) According to a story in The Standard , however, the “overly warm” response from viewers was, in fact, a DDoS attack against the pageant’s Microsoft Azure cloud-based voting system that flooded the servers with millions of votes, knocking them offline. The RC station planned for around half a million viewers to vote during a 10-minute slot Sunday evening, but actual traffic far exceeded that, according to TVB’s deputy director for foreign affairs Tsang Sing-ming, who is quoted by the media. Another station official, TVB general manager Cheong Shin-keong, is quoted saying that the extra traffic was “deliberately made” and that the station had hired an outside firm to investigate. The controversy over the apparent DDoS attack was exacerbated by the judges’ decision to choose contestant Carat Cheung Ming-nga as the next Miss Hong Kong, rather than Tracy Chu Chin-suet, the public’s favorite, who was second runner-up, The Standard reported. A related contest to give a Mini Cooper car to an online voter, selected at random, was cancelled after the voting system went down. Immediately after the vote, Hong Kong’s Communications Authority was flooded with more than 400 complaints on Monday about the aborted voting. The incident was a black eye for Microsoft, as well. That company partnered with TVB, lending its Azure cloud based infrastructure to host the voting system. Outraged viewers also left comments on TVB’s webpage, castigating the station for its mistake, for its reliance on Microsoft and – not least – for picking the wrong gal. Once a British colony, Hong Kong transferred to China in 1997 and has been run as one of two Special Administrative Regions ever since, following a “one government, two systems” policy under which residents enjoy greater freedom of expression and political voice than their countrymen on the Chinese mainland. However, that system is slowly changing, with the Communist Party slowly exerting control over more facets of life on the island. In July, thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest changes to Hong Kong’s public schools and school curriculum that was seen as emphasizing Communist Party orthodoxy and downplaying Hong Kong’s unique history. Hong Kong being Hong Kong, the parallels between the aborted Miss Hong Kong vote and the island’s larger political context weren’t lost on viewers. “Prove in Hong Kong does not have universal suffrage!” wrote one viewer on the TVB website. For fast DDoS protection against your e-commerce site click here . Source: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/08/28/ddos-hong-kong-beauty/

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Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack stymies vote in Miss Hong Kong beauty contest

Keep Your Content Online in Case of a Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

San Francisco, CA – infoZine – Denial of service attacks – flooding websites with traffic in order to make them unavailable to the public – have become an increasingly popular way to take down or block Internet content. A new online guide from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) outlines how website operators can fend off these attacks and keep their sites alive and accessible. “Denial of service attacks have been used by governments to silence online criticism as well as by activists protesting companies and organizations they don’t like,” said EFF Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York. “Major websites often have the resources to keep running during a denial of service attack, but smaller sites – such as those belonging to independent media or human rights organizations – are sometimes taken down permanently. Our online guide is aimed at leveling the playing field.” EFF’s “Keeping Your Site Alive” guide includes tips on choosing an appropriate webhost to provide the security and technical assistance needed to weather an attack. The guide also gives advice on how to back up and mirror content so it can be made available elsewhere in case the site is compromised, and includes tutorial videos with background information on the technical concepts involved. Denial of service attacks are an issue for websites across the globe, so EFF’s guide is available in many different translations, including Chinese, Russian, Persian, and Arabic. “Lack of resources or knowledge can mean some websites are more vulnerable than others,” said EFF International Freedom of Expression Coordinator Eva Galperin. “We want to give website operators around the world the tools they need to protect their content and stay online.” Source: http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/52927/

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Keep Your Content Online in Case of a Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

India hit with Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack from Anonymous

Earlier this year, India had an encounter with “Anonymous”, a diffuse alliance of what are commonly (and incorrectly) called hackers. In its much-publicized “Operation India”, Anonymous blocked public access to, hacked and defaced various websites in protest against the rising censorship of the Internet. This is a legitimate political cause. However, a movement cannot be judged purely by the legitimacy of its goals, and it is important to consider the legitimacy of the means used to achieve these goals. Anonymous used distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attacks to submerge, albeit temporarily, many websites. The DDoS attack bombards the target website with more user requests than it can bear, until it becomes unavailable to all others. Many compare this to picketing, and use the term “virtual sit-in” for it. The DDoS attack does not breach a website’s security, and is therefore not hacking (more correctly called “cracking”). In contrast, defacement of websites, deletion of data or leaking restricted data, entails hacking, which involves breaching a website’s security and is more analogous to breaking and entering physical premises. Anonymous has done this too in India—defacing some websites and leaking confidential data from others. There are a few crucial differences between picketing as civil disobedience, and the DDoS attack. One is that picketing requires many people to come together and sit in protest. One or two peace protesters cannot successfully block a road. Although there was a time when DDoS attacks also required a large number of people to bombard the target, they can now be achieved by one person with the technological skills to “fire” a large number of computers at the target website.Therefore, a DDoS attack no longer implies that a sizeable section of the public cares enough to be part of a virtual sit-in. The second difference between DDoS attacks and civil disobedience lies in the “hacktivists” unwillingness to be accountable. Martin Luther King and Gandhi made it clear that civil disobedience includes accepting the penalty for breaking the law. Faceless untraceable hackers are far removed from this ethic. While it is true that they risk harsh reprisal if identified, the legitimacy and heroic aura of civil disobedience comes from the willingness to risk that reprisal. It may therefore be difficult to argue that even the DDoS attacks by Anonymous qualify as civil disobedience, which arguably is the most legitimate of the spectrum of options available to a political dissident. If political activists use varied and escalating tactics in the physical world, “hacktivists” use strategies ranging from DDoS to more intrusive defacement, disabling and leaking of data to draw attention to political causes. The legitimacy of these methods—the proportionality and justification of harm caused—can only be determined with reference to particular contexts. One has to evaluate the threat necessitating activism, innocent casualties of the activists’ actions and whether less harmful strategies have already been explored. This is difficult. For instance, the indirect repercussions of a DDoS attack or leaking data may not be apparent at first glance. Anonymous tried setting boundaries to avoid harming innocent citizens during Operation India. It declared that infrastructure websites such as the railway booking portal were not to be attacked, and it prevented disclosure of sensitive financial information when a cinema tickets database was hacked. These precautions, though laudable, are however not quite enough. The influential members of Anonymous cannot successfully identify every action that may cause public harm. For instance, when Anonymous attacked the Supreme Court of India and the Reserve Bank of India websites, it seemed ignorant of the potential impact on litigants and the economy. When it leaked confidential police records, it seemed unaware of the significant hazards of leaking people’s names, addresses and other private data. The precautions taken by Anonymous may vanish next time, since the loosely knit, ever-changing nature of Anonymous community means that power and influence can shift; splinter groups with fewer scruples can emerge. Anonymous cannot achieve the control and accountability possible in a more tangible organized group. This collective operates under disturbingly low levels of transparency and accountability, greatly exacerbated by its ability to veil itself in the shadows of the Internet. New recruits are sometimes endangered by misleading information about the legality and consequences of joining in DDoS attacks. Guerilla warfare is often used without properly exploring more peaceable means, thanks to the power and revenge mob-ethic by which Anonymous is driven. The use of technological arsenal to launch cyber-attacks ignores the likelihood of escalation— “hacktivists” tend to forget that technology is a neutral tool that governments can also use. The government may counter-attack, using its considerable resources to acquire the necessary technological capacity. Citizens may end up being the casualties of the exchange. Phase one of Operation India was riddled with moral ambiguity. If OpIndia participants wish to show the world that they are more than bored nerds playing at a social movement like it is a video game, with all the accompanying air-punching, adrenaline boosting, self-aggrandising thrills, they will ensure that phase two’s constructive and legitimate Right to Information campaign is a roaring success. For instant DDoS services against your e-commerce website click here . Source: http://www.livemint.com/2012/08/19212459/The-perils-of-8216hactivism.html

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India hit with Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack from Anonymous

WikiLeaks Back In Business After Being Hit By A Week Of Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

The WikiLeaks website came back online last Tuesday after being down for almost a week due to Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). The secret-leaking organization says it has been targeted by DDoS making its website inaccessible or sluggish for several days. The attack was said to have began at the beginning of August and has intensified to affect other affiliated sites. A group calling itself “AntiLeaks” claimed responsibility for the attacks following their post on Twitter saying that they were against Julian Assange’s intention to seek political asylum in Ecuador. DDoS attacks work by sending heavy amount of traffic to the servers of a website in the hopes to overload them and to force them to shut down. Such type of attack is the most common form of cyber attacks. According to Wiki Leaks, its servers have been flooded with 10 gigabits per second of fake traffic from thousands of different machines. Experts monitoring the issue noted that the amount of traffic is larger than the usual attacks seen in the past few years. AntiLeaks claim it has no ties to the United States government or any other governments tagged as enemies of WikiLeaks. Many people thinks the DDoS attacks on WikiLeaks was a response to the whistleblower website’s posting of documents showing how TrapWire works. TrapWire is a system being utilized in the US to counter terrorism by collecting and analyzing footages from security cameras and license plate readers around the country. Details about the counterterrorism surveillance system were revealed by Anonymous following an email hacking incident on security intelligence firm Stratfor. WikiLeaks released the documents obtained by Anonymous early this year. Observers believe that it’s a secret digital surveillance effort currently being used around the world. For fast protection for DDoS for your e-commerce website click here . Source: http://thedroidguy.com/2012/08/wikileaks-back-in-business-after-being-hit-by-a-week-of-hacking-attack/

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WikiLeaks Back In Business After Being Hit By A Week Of Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

Bambuser Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack may be connected with Assange embassy stream

Bambuser came under a distributed denial-of-service attack on Thursday morning, possibly in connection with a user’s coverage of the Ecuadorian embassy where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is holed up. The connection is not certain, but Bambuser’s Swedish proprietors say they had received threatening tweets just prior to the attack. Bambuser chief Jonas Vig told ZDNet that the DDoS took the service down for “almost an hour” and made it “hard to reach for another hour”. Bambuser lets people stream live video from their smartphones to the web. It has become very popular with activists and protestors, from the Occupy movement to Russia and Syria. The service has come under attack before, with the attacks generally coinciding with marches and protests that are being covered on Bambuser. The stream that appears to have solicited the DDoS is that of ‘citizen journalist’ James Albury, who has stationed himself outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Julian Assange has been inside the embassy since June, and the Ecuadorian government is set to announce its decision regarding his asylum bid later on Thursday. A diplomatic row erupted overnight, after Ecuador accused UK authorities of preparing to storm the embassy. Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over sexual coercion and rape allegations, and the UK wants to extradite him there under a European Arrest Warrant. Vig explained that the tweets Bambuser had received were not of the ‘tango down’ variety, but they did indicate that “it was someone aiming the attack directly at some specific users of ours”. “We still don’t want to speculate who was behind it, but there’s some indication it was directly aimed at blocking the streams from the embassy,” he added. “It was quite a serious attack,” Vig said. “We consider all DDoSes as serious.” A new anti-Wikileaks hacker, or group of hackers, called Antileaks has suggested on Twitter that he, she or they might be responsible for the DDoS. For fast DDoS protection against your e-commerce website click here . Source:

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Bambuser Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack may be connected with Assange embassy stream

What Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attack Are and How to Survive Them

Never heard of a DDoS attack? Small companies that do business online ought to learn about this growing online threat — and figure out how they’ll respond should one ever hit them. Consider what happened to Los Angeles-based business-planning publishing and advisory company Growthink. Last September, a surprise flood of bogus traffic knocked its website off the internet for several days. Growthink turned to its hosting firm for help, only to have its website sidelined so other sites wouldn’t be collateral damage. It finally recovered by hiring a DDoS-protection firm, BlockDos, to filter out the bad traffic. Then it moved to a new hosting service, Rackspace, so it would be better prepared next time. “It was pretty intense,” says Kevin McGinn, Growthink’s IT director. “We had no idea why we were being singled out.” Growthink had suffered a “distributed denial-of-service” attack. In a DDoS attack, legitimate site visitors are denied access by hackers who immobilize the site either with a flood of bogus internet traffic or a surgical strike that exhausts the resources of a specific web application. Successful attacks can cripple business operations. Growthink estimates its website outage erased $50,000 in revenue. As Growthink discovered, it isn’t always clear who’s out to get you. Experts say e-commerce outfits and other businesses that rely heavily on the web for their livelihoods are most at risk. Smaller companies are most often attacked by unscrupulous competitors and extortionists, although disgruntled former employees, vandals and “hacktivists,” or hackers with a political agenda, are also known culprits. With both the number and ferocity of attacks rising, DDoS incidents are a growing threat. In the last year, CloudFlare, a San Francisco cloud-based web performance and security firm, said it has seen a 700 percent rise in DDoS traffic. Small companies are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs, experts say, as the cost of mounting attacks drops and large companies get better at stopping them. Attackers can rent “botnets” of 1,000 hijacked malware-infected home PCs capable of taking down sites of most small-to-medium-sized businesses for only $400 a week, according to Incapsula, a competitor to CloudFlare that’s a subsidiary of security firm Imperva, both of Redwood Shores, Calif. Even modest extortionists can profit. Australian e-commerce company Endless Wardrobe received an email in May demanding $3,500 via Western Union. When the firm didn’t comply, its site was knocked offline for a week by a torrent of bogus visits. The downtime cut revenue by at least the amount of the demanded ransom. Here are tips on how to survive if you find your business under a DDoS attack, too. Find a hosting service or ISP that will help. Many hosting services put large numbers of small websites on the same servers to boost efficiency. That’s fine until one site is attacked and the hosting company takes it offline so other customers on the server aren’t hurt as well. Check your contracts and speak with your hosting service or internet service provider, or ISP, to find out what it will do if you come under attack. Will it help you stop the attack and recover, and if so, at what cost? Will it send you a giant bill because an attack generated a ton of extra traffic to your site? A growing number of these service providers are offering security features, including DDoS protection, as a way to differentiate themselves in a crowded market. Such companies, which often employ technology from specialists such as Arbor Networks, include Firehost, Rackspace and iWeb. Hire Help. Companies that provide website acceleration services also often help fend off DDoS attacks. For instance, CloudFlare provides a free basic level of DDoS protection that it says will stop most attacks, and two tiers of service at $20 and $200 a month that can stop larger attacks. Incapsula includes DDoS protection as part of its Enterprise tier of service for an undisclosed fee. If you’re targeted with a highly sophisticated attack, however, you may want to consider hiring a DDoS-protection specialist, such as DOSarrest , a cloud-based security company based in Canada. Investigate ways to fortify your site. CloudFlare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince suggests using nginx web server software — favored by the likes of Netflix and WordPress — because it can be more resistant to DDoS than other programs. He also recommends using the latest versions of your web software, such as WordPress and shopping carts, to prevent some application-based attacks. For fast protection DDoS protection for your e-commerce website click here . Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224099?cam=Dev&ctp=Carousel&cdt=13&cdn=224099

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What Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attack Are and How to Survive Them

Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ crooks: Do you want us to blitz those phone lines too TDoS?

Cybercrooks are now offering to launch cyberattacks against telecom services, with prices starting at just $20 a day. Distributed denial of attacks against websites or web services have been going on for many years. Attacks that swamped telecoms services are a much more recent innovation, first starting around 2010. While DDoS attacks on websites are typically launched from botnets (networks of compromised Windows PCs under the control of hackers), attacks on telecom lines are launched using attack scripts on compromised Asterisk (software PBX) server. Default credentials are one of the main security weaknesses used by hackers to initially gain access to a VoIP/PBX systems prior to launching voice mail phishing scams or running SIP-based flooding attacks, say researchers. Telecoms-focused denial of service attacks are motivated by the same sorts of motives as a DDoS on a website. “Typical motives can be anything from revenge, extortion, political/ideological, and distraction from a larger set of financial crimes,” a blog post by Curt Wilson of DDoS mitigation experts Arbor Networks explains. Many of the cybercrime techniques first seen while crooks blitzed websites with junk traffic are being reapplied in the arena of flooding phone lines as a prelude to secondary crimes, according to Arbor. “Just as we’ve seen the Dirt Jumper bot used to create distractions – by launching DDoS attacks upon financial institutions and financial infrastructure at the same time that fraud is taking place (with the Zeus Trojan, or other banking malware or other attack technique) – DDoS aimed at telecommunications is being used to create distractions that allow other crimes to go unnoticed for a longer period.” Arbor details an array of services offered by hackers, some of which offer to flood telephones (both mobile and fixed line) for $20 per day. The more cost-conscious would-be crooks can shop around for a service that offers to blitz lines for $5 an hour, the price offered in another ad spotted by the ASERT security research team. As well as blitzing phone lines, other attacks against a targeted organisation’s VoIP system or SIP controllers are possible. Poorly configured VoIP systems can be brought down even by something as simple as a port scan, Wilson notes. “In such cases, an attacker could bring down an organisations’ phone system quickly if they were able to reach the controller. The benefits of proactive security testing can help identify such brittle systems ahead of time, before an attacker might latch onto the vulnerability. “Any system is subject to availability attacks at any point where an application layer or other processor-intensive operation exists as well as the networks that supply these systems via link saturation and state-table exhaustion. Telecommunications systems are no exception to this principle, as we have seen. Clearly, there is money to be made in the underground economy or these services would not be advertised,” Wilson concludes. For fast protection against your e-commerce website click here . Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/02/telecoms_ddos/

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Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ crooks: Do you want us to blitz those phone lines too TDoS?

Indicted College Student Speaks Up About Her Case for involvement of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks

A college student arrested last year for alleged involvement in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks waged by Anonymous appeared publicly here Saturday on a panel discussing the hacktivist collective and online civil liberties. Mercedes Haefer, an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who was indicted in July 2011 with 13 others for alleged conspiracy to commit DDoS attacks against PayPal’s website, spoke out briefly about her case in the panel session entitled “Anonymous and the Online Fight for Justice.” “I am charged with conspiracy to DDoS,” Haefer said during the panel discussion, noting that she found the charges “amusing.” She would not comment on the specific circumstances that led to her arrest. Anonymous talk at Def Con focused more on online civil liberties and activism, and came amid the backdrop of a screening of “We Are Legion” documentary held at the famed hacker conference. It was a far cry from last year’s Def Con, where some members donned their signature Guy Fawkes masks, while others shouted down speakers during a question-and-answer session on a panel about building a “better” Anonymous. Legal experts on Saturday’s panel pointed to a disparity in sentencing for physical activism versus hacktivism. Marcia Hoffman, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the penalty for online civil disobedience is severe. “I’m not talking spending the night in jail. Federal hacking law [prescribes] up to 10 years in prison: That’s an incredibly harsh penalty,” Hoffman says. “It’s disconcerting that young people flexing their political muscle get 10 years in prison for [a] first-time offense.” Whether DDoS should be considered a legitimate form of protest was also debated. “Under certain circumstances, DDoS is protected political speech and should be afforded First Amendment rights,” said criminal defense attorney Jay Leiderman, who is representing Christopher Doyon, an alleged member of Anonymous who goes by the handle “Commander X.” Leiderman said an interview today that Commander X’s case and the PayPal case are classic examples of how some DDoS attacks should be treated as free speech. In the former, Commander X and others camped out for months in front of the Santa Cruz, Calif., courthouse protesting a crackdown on homeless people sleeping in the streets. “In the wake of more arrests, he and a small number of people allegedly DDoS’ed the County of Santa Cruz, slowing its server for 18 minutes,” he says. “That use of DDoS is a classic form of political speech, where the government is ignoring you and [you] get their attention in a nonharmful and noninvasive way with something to let them know you are out there.” Josh Corman, who has been researching Anonymous and, along with Brian Martin writing a series on “Building A Better Anonymous,” says the DDoS-as-free-speech argument made by the panel was interesting. Corman says he sees the disparity in a $250 fine for physical civil disobedience and a 10-year prison sentence for the digital equivalent. “I can see a reasonable argument that this is a legitimate form of free speech … I can see the disparity in the law there. Maybe they have a case there, but I’ll let people smarter than me decide,” Corman says. “[But] then I realize what a massive distraction that [argument] was.” The free speech DDoS argument distracts from the more malicious activity some members of Anonymous have conducted, he says. “And all of that drowns out the potentially noble” activity, he says. The bottom line is that DDoS doesn’t really accomplish what the hacktivists want it to, anyway, he says. “It doesn’t have any lasting damage at all. It’s a tool of fear” and is noisy, but hasn’t effected the type of change in the targeted organizations that the hacktivists had intended, Corman says. Sony, for example, suffered “orders of magnitude more” in financial losses from the massive earthquake in Japan than from the more than 21 DDoS attacks waged against it, he says. Meanwhile, Haefer offered a little insight into how Anonymous operates: In response to a question about how an Anonymous plan to out Mexican government officials with ties to drug cartels didn’t materialize, she said sometimes the intentions are there, but action may not be “feasible at that time.” “A lot of times where people start up an op with the intention of trying to do something, and someone will jump the gun and say, ‘We’re going to [f’ing] do it,’ and sometimes it’s not always possible with the people we have around and their lives” and other commitments, she said. At A Crossroads Corman says a small group of Anonymous members should define what free speech online means, and a find a better way to protest than DDoS attacks, he says. “I can envision truly noble online activism as transformative as a civil rights movement,” he says. Corman and others at an earlier panel at Def Con urged the security community to be aware and speak out about privacy and freedom concerns at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) meeting. Experts say the meeting could result in the potential restructuring and governance of the Internet that could ultimately hamper user access and freedoms. The security community could be doing more to carry the torch here as a more formal means for Internet activism, he says. “The original Def Con crowd could be a force of organized chaos that keeps the peace actively or passively,” Corman says. And Anonymous, meantime, is at a crossroads, according to Corman. “Several [of them] are ready to engage on what a better Anonymous might look like,” he says. For fast DDoS protection against your website click here to view DOSarrest services. http://www.darkreading.com/database-security/167901020/security/attacks-breaches/240004684/indicted-college-student-speaks-up-about-her-case-anonymous.html

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Indicted College Student Speaks Up About Her Case for involvement of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks

Tablet’s Server Outages due to Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

For the last several months, Tablet Magazine’s servers have been coming under recurring distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS attacks . Yesterday we suffered two major attacks, the first around 1:30 p.m., shortly after we posted Michael C. Moynihan’s explosive article about the further dishonesty of Jonah Lehrer, the author and New Yorker writer. The Lehrer story brought us an unprecedentedly large legitimate traffic load. Some commentators and observers speculated that that’s what brought us down. It’s true that the rush of readers coming to the Lehrer story was much larger than normal, but I am assured by our IT team that we had more than sufficient bandwith and server memory to handle it. Notably, for several midafternoon hours, when we were not under attack, we served extraordinarily high traffic loads uneventfully. Our IT team strongly believes that what we were experiencing—and have been for some time—are sophisticated attacks specifically targeting Tablet, not just run-of-the-mill Internet-as-Wild-West hijinks. It is possible that whoever is out to get us seized on a moment when we had high publicity and high server demand to attack. It sounds a little paranoid, granted, but as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. The romantic in me hopes it’s the Iranians. Meantime, we’re doing what we can to keep the site up, and we apologize for our no-doubt maddening unreliability. And if you’re a DDoS-mitigation expert who’s eager for some pro-bono work, you know where to find us. Source: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/107948/on-tablet%E2%80%99s-server-outages

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Tablet’s Server Outages due to Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack