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Legal blog site suffered Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

When a blog that typically attracts 30,000 visitors a day is hit with 5.35 million, its operators had better have been prepared for what seems way too big to be called a spike. The popular SCOTUSblog, which provides news and information about the United States Supreme Court, was put to this test last week after the historic healthcare ruling and it passed with flying colors, thanks to months of planning and a willingness to spend $25,000. “We knew we needed to do whatever it took to make sure we were capable of handling what we knew would be the biggest day in this blog’s history,” says Max Mallory, deputy manager of the blog, who coordinates the IT. The massive traffic spike was somewhat of a perfect storm for SCOTUSblog, which Supreme Court litigator Tom Goldstein of the Washington, D.C., boutique Goldstein & Russell founded in 2002. Not only is the site a respected source of Supreme Court news and information, but in the days leading up to the ruling, buzz about the blog itself began picking up. President Barack Obama’s press secretary named SCOTUSblog as being one source White House officials would monitor to hear news from the court. When the news broke, two of the first media organizations to report it — Fox News and CNN — got the ruling wrong. Many media outlets cited SCOTUSblog as being the first to correctly report that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in a 5-4 decision. But even before “decision day,” as Mallory calls it, the small team at SCOTUSblog knew Thursday would put a lot of strain on the blog’s IT infrastructure. The first indications came during the health care arguments at the Supreme Court in March, when SCOTUSblog received almost 1 million page views over the three days of deliberations. The blog’s single server at Web hosting company Media Temple just couldn’t handle the traffic. “That was enough to crash our site at various points throughout those days and it just generally kept us slow for a majority of the time the arguments were going on,” Mallory says. In the weeks leading up to the decision, Mallory worked with a hired team of developers to optimize the website’s Java code, install the latest plugins and generally tune up the site. Mallory realized that wouldn’t be enough, though. No one knew for sure when the high court would release the most anticipated Supreme Court case in years, but each day it didn’t happen there was a greater chance it would come down the next day. Traffic steadily climbed leading up to the big day: The week before the ruling the site saw 70,000 visitors. Days before the decision, the site got 100,000. “It became clear we weren’t going to be able to handle the traffic we were expecting to see when the decision was issued,” Mallory says. A week before the decision, Mallory reached out to Sound Strategies, a website optimization company that works specifically with WordPress. The Sound Strategies team worked throughout the weekend recoding the SCOTUSblog site again, installing high-end caching plugins, checking for script conflicts and cleaning out old databases from previous plugins that had been removed. The team also installed Nginx, the open source Web server, to run on the Media Temple hardware. All of the improvements helped, but when the decision did not come on Tuesday, July 26, it became clear that Thursday, July 28, the last day of the court’s term, would be decision day. Mallory was getting worried: Earlier in the week SCOTUSblog suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack targeting the website. That couldn’t happen on Thursday, when the court would issue the ruling. “This was our time, it just had to work,” Mallory says. The night before decision day, Mallory and Sound Strategies took drastic measures. Mallory estimated the site could see between 200,000 and 500,000 hits the next day, so the group decided to purchase four additional servers from Media Temple, which Sound Strategies configured overnight. SCOTUSblog ended up with a solution Thursday morning that had a main server acting as a centralized host of SCOTUSblog, with four satellite servers hosting cached images of the website that were updated every six minutes. A live blog providing real-time updates — which was the first to correctly report the news — was hosted by CoveritLive, a live blogging service. As 10 a.m. EDT approached, the system began being put to the test. At 10:03, the site was handling 1,000 requests per second. By 10:04 it had reached 800,000 total page views. That number climbed to 1 million by 10:10, and by 10:30 the site had received 2.4 million hits. Because of the satellite caching, Mallory says, the site was loading faster during peak traffic than it ever had before. In post-mortem reviews, Sound Strategies engineers said they found evidence of two DDoS attacks, one at 9:45 a.m. and another at 10 a.m., which the servers were able to absorb. “We built this fortress that was used basically for two hours that morning,” Mallory says. “It worked and it never slowed down.” Since the healthcare decision, SCOTUSblog has seen higher-than-normal traffic, but nowhere near the 5 million page views the site amassed on the biggest day in the blog’s history. “It was a roller coaster,” Mallory says. “You can have the best analysis, the fastest, most accurate reporting, but if your website crashes and no one can see it that moment, it doesn’t matter.” Source: http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/429473/how_legal_blog_survived_traffic_tidal_wave_after_court_healthcare_ruling/?fp=4&fpid=1090891289

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Legal blog site suffered Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attack

Distributed Denial of Service `DDoS` mitigation a key component in network security

`Attacker motivations behind distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) have shifted away from solely financial (for example, the extortion of online gambling sites and retailers) toward socially and politically motivated campaigns against government websites, media outlets and even small businesses. Hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous, LulzSec and others have used DDoS attacks to damage a target’s reputation or revenue since December 2010 when Anonymous began targeting corporate websites that opposed Wikileaks. At that time, attacks were conducted using botnets to flood sites’ servers with large quantities of TCP or UDP packets, effectively shutting down the sites for hours at a time. Today, botmasters have begun to use more complex strategies that focus on specific areas of the network, such as email servers or Web applications. Others divert security teams’ attention with DDoS flood attacks while live hackers obtain the actual objective, valuable corporate or personal information. This tactic was utilized in the infamous attack against Sony in 2011, according to Carlos Morales, the vice president of global sales engineering and operations at Chelmsford, Mass.-based DDoS mitigation vendor Arbor Networks Inc. Rapid growth in the sophistication of DDoS attacks combined with the prevalence of attacks across markets makes for a dangerous and fluid attack landscape. Security researchers and providers agree that it’s becoming more important for companies to protect themselves from denial-of-service attacks, in addition to implementing other measures of network security. DDoS attacks can quickly cripple a company financially. A recent survey from managed DNS provider Neustar, for example, said outages could cost a company up to $10,000 per hour. Neustar’s survey, “DDoS Survey Q1 2012: When Businesses Go Dark” (.pdf), reported 75% of respondents (North American telecommunication, travel, finance, IT and retail companies who had undergone a DDoS attack) used firewalls, routers, switches or an intrusion detection system to combat DDoS attacks. Their researchers say equipment is more often part of the problem than the solution. “They quickly become bottlenecks, helping achieve an attacker’s goal of slowing or shutting you down,” the report stated. “Moreover, firewalls won’t repel attacks on the application layer, an increasingly popular DDoS vector.” For those reasons, experts suggest companies with the financial and human resources incorporate DDoS-specific mitigation technology or services into their security strategy. Service providers such as Arbor Networks, Prolexic and others monitor traffic for signs of attacks and can choke them off before downtime, floods of customer support calls, and damage to brand or reputation occur. Purchasing DDoS mitigation hardware requires hiring and training of employees with expertise in the area, but experts say that can be even more expensive. “In general, it’s very hard to justify doing self-mitigation,” said Ted Swearingen, the director of the Neustar security operations center. All the additional steps a company has to take to implement their own DDoS mitigation tool, such as widening bandwidth, increasing firewalls, working with ISPs, adding security monitoring and hiring experts to run it all, make it a cost-ineffective strategy in the long term, he said. Three percent of the companies in Neustar’s survey reported using that type of protection. In some cases, smaller DDoS mitigation providers even turn to larger vendors for support when they find themselves facing an attack too large, too complex or too new to handle on their own. Secure hosting provider VirtualRoad.org is an example. The company provides protection from DDoS attacks for independent media outlets in countries facing political and social upheaval—places where censorship by the government or other sources is rampant, such as Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe. A specific niche like that in a narrow market with small clients doesn’t usually require extra support, but VirtualRoad.org has utilized its partnership with Prolexic a few times in the last year, according to CTO Tord Lundström. They have their infrastructure to deal with attacks, Lundström said, but they also have parameters for the volume and complexity that they can handle. When it gets to be too much, they route the traffic to Prolexic, a security firm that charges a flat fee regardless of how many times you are attacked. “It’s easy to say, ‘We’ll do it when an attack comes,’ and then when an attack comes they say, ‘Well, you have to pay us more or we won’t protect you,’” Lundström said of other services. Extra fees like that are often the reason why those who need quality DDoS protection, especially small businesses like VirtualRoad.org clients, can’t afford it, he said. The impact can be worse for companies if the DDoS attack is being used as a diversion. According to a recent survey by Arbor Networks, 27% of respondents had been the victims of multi-vector attacks. The “Arbor Special Report: Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report,” which polled 114 self-classified Tier 1, Tier 2 and other IP network operators from the U.S. and Canada, Latin/South America, EMEA, Africa and Asia, stated that not only is the complexity of attacks growing, but the size as well. In 2008, the largest observed attack was about 40 Gbps. Last year, after an unusual spike to 100 Gbps in 2010, the largest recorded attack was 60 Gbps. This denotes a steady increase in the size of attacks, but Morales of Arbor Networks believes the numbers will eventually begin to plateau because most networks can be brought down with far smaller attacks, around 10 Gbps. Even if they stop growing, however, DDoS attacks won’t stop happening altogether, Morales said. Not even the change to IPv6 will stop the barrage of daily attacks, as some were already recorded in the report. Because of the steady nature of this attack strategy, experts suggest all companies that function online prepare themselves for this type of attack by doing away with the “it won’t happen to me” attitude. Luckily, recent “hacktivist” activities have given DDoS attacks enough press that CSOs and CEOs are starting to pay attention, but that’s just the first step, Morales said. It’s important to follow through with getting the protection your business needs if you want to achieve the goal, said VirtualRoad.org’s Lundström. “The goal is to keep doing the work,” he said. Source: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/2240159017/DDoS-mitigation-a-key-component-in-network-security

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Distributed Denial of Service `DDoS` mitigation a key component in network security

Banking Outage Prevention Tips

A series of fresh technology shutdowns this spring at banks around the world reveals the financial services industry still has a long way to go toward ensuring full up time for networks, as well as communicating with the public about why tech glitches have happened and what is being done about them. In May, Santander, Barclays and HSBC were all hit by digital banking outages. Some customers of Barclays and Santander were unable to access accounts online for a time near the end of the month, an outage blamed largely on end-of-the-month transaction volume. At HSBC, an IT hardware failure temporarily rendered ATMs unable to dispense cash or accept card payments in the U.K. Barclays and Santander both apologized for the outages though statements, while HSBC’s approach revealed both the power and peril of social media in such cases. HSBC’s PR office took to social media to communicate updates on the outage, and to also receive criticism about the outage (HSBC, Santander and Barclays did not return queries for comment). After an earlier outage in November, HSBC had set up a social monitoring team to be more proactive about communicating with the public about tech glitches, a move that seemed to have some positive impact, as not all of the Twitter and Facebook postings about the most recent outage were complaints. The basic task of making sure the rails are working, and smoothing things over with customers when systems invariably shut down, is an even more pressing matter considering the propensity for outrage to spread quickly among the public via new channels. “One thing that’s true about outages is we’re hearing more about them. The prevalence of social media use by irate customers and even employees makes these outages more publicized,” says Jacob Jegher, a senior analyst at Celent. Jegher says the use of social media for outage communication is tough – balancing the need to communicate with customers with internal tech propriety is easier said than done. “While it’s certainly not the institution’s job nor should it be their job to go into every technical detail, it’s helpful to provide some sort of consistent messaging with updates, so customers know that the bank is listening to them,” Jegher says. National Australia Bank, which suffered from a series of periodic online outages about a year ago that left millions of people unable to access paychecks, responded with new due diligence and communications programs. In an email response to BTN, National Australia Bank Chief Information Officer Adam Bennett said the bank has since reduced incident numbers by as much as 40 percent through a project that has aimed to improve testing. He said that if an incident does occur, the bank communicates via social media channels, with regular updates and individual responses to consumers where possible. The bank also issued an additional statement to BTN, saying “while the transaction and data demands on systems have grown exponentially in recent years led by online and mobile banking, the rate of incidents has steadily declined due to a culture of continuous improvement…The team tests and uses a range of business continuity plans. While we don’t disclose the specifics, whenever possible we will evoke these plans to allow the customer experience to continue uninterrupted.” While communicating information about outages is good, it’s obviously better to prevent them in the first place. Coastal Bank & Trust, a $66 million-asset community bank based in Wilmington, N.C., has outsourced its monitoring and recovery, using disaster recovery support from Safe Systems, a business continuity firm, to vet for outage threats, supply backup server support in the event of an outage, and contribute to the bank’s preparation and response to mandatory yearly penetration and vulnerability tests. “Safe Systems makes sure that the IP addresses are accessible and helps with those scans,” says Renee Rhodes, chief compliance and operations officer for Coastal Bank & Trust. The bank has also outsourced security monitoring to Gladiator, a Jack Henry enterprise security monitoring product that scours the bank’s IT network to flag activity that could indicate a potential outage or external attack. The security updates include weekly virus scans and patches. Coastal Bank & Trust’s size – it has only 13 employees – makes digital banking a must for competitive reasons, which increases both the threat of downtime and the burden of maintaining access. “We do mobile, remote deposit capture, all of the products that the largest banks have. I am a network administrator, and one of my co-workers is a security officer. With that being said, none of us has an IT background,” Rhodes says. “I don’t know if I could put a number on how important it is to have these systems up and running.” Much of the effort toward managing downtime risk is identifying and thwarting external threats that could render systems inoperable for a period of time. Troy Bradley, chief technology officer at FIS, says the tech firm has noticed an increase in external denial of service attacks recently, which is putting the entire banking and financial services technology industries on alert for outage and tech issues with online banking and other platforms. “You’ll see a lot of service providers spending time on this. It’s not the only continuity requirement to solve, but it’s one of the larger ones,” he says. To mitigate downtime risk for its hosted solutions, FIS uses virtualization to backstop the servers that run financial applications, such as web banking or mobile banking. That creates a “copy” of that server for redundancy purposes, and that copy can be moved to another data center if necessary. “We can host the URL (that runs the web enabled service on behalf of the bank) at any data center…if we need to move the service or host it across multiple data centers we can do that…we think we have enough bandwidth across these data centers to [deal with] any kind of denial of service attack that a crook can come up with,” Bradley says. FIS also uses third party software to monitor activity at its data centers in Brown Deer, WI; Little Rock and Phoenix, searching for patterns that can anticipate a denial of service attack early and allow traffic connected to its clients to be routed to one of the other two data centers. For licensed solutions, FIS sells added middleware that performs a similar function, creating a redundant copy of a financial service that can be stored and accessed in the case of an emergency. Stephanie Balaouras, a vice president and research director for security and risk at Forrester Research, says virtualization is a good way to mitigate both performance issues, such as systems being overwhelmed by the volume of customer transactions, and operational issues such as hardware failure, software failure, or human error. “If it’s [performance], the bank needs to revisit its bandwidth and performance capacity. With technologies like server virtualization, it shouldn’t be all that difficult for a large bank to bring additional capacity online in advance of peak periods or specific sales and marketing campaigns that would increase traffic to the site. The same technology would also allow the bank to load-balance performance across all of its servers – non-disruptively. The technology is never really the main challenge, it tends to be the level of maturity and sophistication of the IT processes for capacity planning, performance management, incident management, automation, etc.,” she says. In the case of operational issues, server virtualization is still a great technology, Balaouras says, adding it allows the bank to restart failed workloads within minutes to alternate physical servers in the environment or even to another other data center. “You can also configure virtual servers in high-availability or fault-tolerant pairs across physical servers so that one hardware failure cannot take down a mission-critical application or service,” Balaouras says. Balaouras says more significant operational failures, such as a storage area network (SAN) failure, pose a greater challenge to network continuity and back up efforts. “In this case, you would need to recover from a backup. But more than likely a bank should treat this as ‘disaster’ and failover operations to another data center where there is redundant IT infrastructure,” she says. Source: http://www.americanbanker.com/btn/25_7/online-banking-outage-prevention-strategies-1050405-1.html

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Banking Outage Prevention Tips

Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attacks: The Zemra Bot

Symantec has become aware of a new Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) crimeware bot known as “Zemra” and detected by Symantec as Backdoor.Zemra. Lately, this threat has been observed performing denial-of-service attacks against organizations with the purpose of extortion. Zemra first appeared on underground forums in May 2012 at a cost of €100. This crimeware pack is similar to other crime packs, such as Zeus and SpyEye, in that is has a command-and-control panel hosted on a remote server. This allows it to issue commands to compromised computers and act as the gateway to record the number of infections and bots at the attacker’s disposal. Similar to other crimeware kits, the functionality of Zemra is extensive: 256-bit DES encryption/decryption for communication between server and client DDoS attacks Device monitoring Download and execution of binary files Installation and persistence in checking to ensure infection Propagation through USB Self update Self uninstall System information collection However, the main functionality is the ability to perform a DDoS attack on a remote target computer of the user’s choosing. Initially, when a computer becomes infected, Backdoor.Zemra dials home through HTTP (port 80) and performs a POST request sending hardware ID, current user agent, privilege indication (administrator or not), and the version of the OS. This POST request gets parsed by gate.php, which splits out the information and stores it in an SQL database. It then keeps track of which compromised computers are online and ready to receive commands. Inspection of the leaked code allowed us to identify two types of DDoS attacks that have been implemented into this bot: HTTP flood SYN flood The first type, HTTP flood, opens a raw socket connection, but has special options to close the socket gracefully without waiting for a response (e.g. SocketOptionName.DontLinger). It then closes the socket on the client side and launches a new connection with a sleep interval. This is similar to a SYN flood, whereby a number of connection requests are made by sending multiple SYNs. No ACK is sent back upon receiving the SYN-ACK as the socket has been closed. This leaves the server-side Transmission Control Blocks (TCBs) in a SYN-RECEIVED state. The second type, SYN flood, is a simple SYN flood attack whereby multiple connects() are called, causing multiple SYN packets to be sent to the target computer. This is done in an effort to create a backlog of TCB creation requests, thereby exhausting the server and denying access to real requests. Symantec added detection for this threat under the name Backdoor.Zemra, which became active on June 25, 2012. To reduce the possibility of being infected by this Trojan, Symantec advises users to ensure that they are using the latest Symantec protection technologies with the latest antivirus definitions installed. Source: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/ddos-attacks-zemra-bot

LulzSec Members Confess To Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attacks to SOCA, Sony and etc

Four alleged members of the LulzSec hacktivist group had their day in British court Monday. Two of the people charged–Ryan Cleary, 20, and Jake Leslie Davis, 19–appeared at Southwark Crown Court in England to enter guilty pleas against some of the charges against them, including hacking the public-facing websites of the CIA and Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA). All told, Cleary, who’s from England, pleaded guilty to six of the eight charges lodged against him, including unauthorized access to Pentagon computers controlled by the U.S. Air Force. Meanwhile, Davis–who hails from Scotland’s Shetland Islands–pleaded guilty to two of the four charges made against him. The pair pleaded not guilty to two charges of violating the U.K.’s Serious Crime Act by having posted “unlawfully obtained confidential computer data” to numerous public websites–including LulzSec.com, PasteBin, and the Pirate Bay–to encourage or assist in further offenses, including “supplying articles for use in fraud.” They did, however, confess to launching numerous botnet-driven distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks under the banners of Anonymous, Internet Feds, and LulzSec. According to authorities, the pair targeted websites owned by the Arizona State Police, the Fox Broadcasting Company, News International, Nintendo, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The pair have also been charged with targeting, amongst other organizations, HBGary, HBGary Federal, the Atlanta chapter of Infragard, Britain’s National Health Service, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and Westboro Baptist church. [ Learn about another hacker indictment. See Feds Bust Hacker For Selling Government Supercomputer Access. ] The two other alleged LulzSec members charged Monday are England-based Ryan Mark Ackroyd, 25, as well as a 17-year-old London student who hasn’t been named by authorities since he’s a minor. Both also appeared at Southwark Crown Court and pleaded not guilty to four charges made against them, including participating in DDoS attacks, as well as “encouraging or assisting an offense.” All four of the LulzSec accused are due to stand trial on the charges leveled against them–for offenses that allegedly took place between February and September 2011–on April 8, 2013. According to news reports, the court heard Monday that reviewing all of the evidence just for the charges facing Cleary will require 3,000 hours. Three of the accused have been released on bail. Cleary was not released; he had been released on conditional bail in June 2011, but violated his bail conditions by attempting to contact the LulzSec leader known as Sabu at Christmastime. LulzSec–at least in its original incarnation–was a small, focused spinoff from Anonymous, which itself sprang from the free-wheeling 4chan image boards. LulzSec was short for Lulz Security, with “lulz” (the plural of LOL or laugh out loud) generally referring to laughs gained at others’ expense. According to U.S. authorities, Davis often operated online using the handles topiary and atopiary, while Ackroyd was known online as lol, lolspoon, as well as a female hacker and botnet aficionado dubbed Kayla. What might be read into Ackroyd allegedly posing as a female hacker? According to Parmy Olson’s recently released book, We Are Anonymous, such behavior isn’t unusual in hacking forums, given the scarcity of actual women involved. “Females were a rare sight on image boards and hacking forums; hence the online catchphrase ‘There are no girls on the Internet,’ and why posing as a girl has been a popular tactic for Internet trolls for years,” wrote Olson. “But this didn’t spell an upper hand for genuine females. If they revealed their sex on an image board … they were often met with misogynistic comments.” In related LulzSec prosecution news, Cleary last week was also indicted by a Los Angeles federal grand jury on charges that overlap with some of the ones filed by British prosecutors. At least so far, however, U.S. prosecutors have signaled that they won’t be seeking Cleary’s extradition, leaving him to face charges in the United Kingdom. The shuttering of LulzSec both in the United States and Great Britain was facilitated by the efforts of SOCA, as well as the FBI, which first arrested Anonymous and LulzSec leader Sabu–real name, Hector Xavier Monsegur–in June 2011, then turned him into a confidential government informant before arresting him again, earlier this year, on a 12-count indictment. As revealed in a leaked conference call earlier this year, British and American authorities were working closely together to time their busts of alleged LulzSec and Anonymous operators on both sides of the Atlantic, apparently using evidence gathered by Monsegur. Source: informationweek

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LulzSec Members Confess To Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attacks to SOCA, Sony and etc

Financial Gain is Main Motivation for Cyber Criminals

Announcing the findings of “The Impact of Cybercrime on Businesses” survey, carried out by Ponemon Institute, Check Point Software Technologies revealed that 65% of the organizations which experienced targeted attacks reported that an attacker’s primary objective was to make a financial gain. Disrupting business operations and stealing customer data were attributed as the next likely motivation for attackers, as stated by 45 % of the surveyed organizations. The report also stated that only around 5% of security attacks were driven by political or ideological agendas. The report, which surveyed 2,618 C-level executives and IT security administrators in the US, United Kingdom, Germany, Hong Kong and Brazil across organizations of various types and sizes, showed that companies reported an average of 66 new security attack attempts per week. Respondents in all countries stated that the most serious consequences of such attacks were disruption of business and loss of sensitive information, including intellectual property and trade secrets. Diminished reputation and impact on brand name were the least of their worries, with the exception of respondents in the UK. Successful attacks could end up costing businesses anywhere between $100,000 and $300,000: the participants estimated the average cost of such an attack at $214,000 USD. Tomer Teller, security evangelist and researcher at Check Point Software Technologies, was quoted in the press release as saying, “Cybercriminals are no longer isolated amateurs. They belong to well-structured organizations, often employing highly-skilled hackers to execute targeted attacks, many of whom receive significant amounts of money depending on the region and nature of the attack.” “For the most part, the goal of attackers is to obtain valuable information. These days, credit card data shares space on the shelves of virtual hacking stores with items such as employee records and Facebook or email log-ins, as well as zero-day exploits that can be stolen and sold on the black market ranging anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000,” he added. While Denial of Service (DoS) attacks were seen as the type of cyber crime that posed the greatest risk to organizations, SQL injections were cited, by 43% of the respondents, as the most serious types of attack organizations had experienced in the last two years, the report stated. Other threats cited in the survey included APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats), botnet Infections and DoS attacks cited by 35%, 33%, and 32% of the respondents respectively. On the threats posed by activities of their employees, organizations, across all the surveyed countries, unanimously cited the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs as the biggest concern, followed by the use of social networks and removable media devices such as USB sticks. Hong Kong and Brazil reported on an average the highest percentage of mobile devices infected through an act of cyber crime, at 25 percent and 23 percent, respectively. The U.S. and Germany had the lowest average of infected mobile devices and machines connected to the network at 11 percent and nine percent respectively. The report found that for protecting themselves from these threats, a majority of organizations have instituted Firewall and Intrusion Prevention solutions. However, at the same time, less than half of the surveyed organizations have implemented the necessary protections to fight botnets and APTs. “Cybercrime has become a business. With bot toolkits for hackers selling today for the mere price of $500, it gives people insight into how big the problem has become, and the importance of implementing preemptive protections to safeguard critical assets,” Teller stated. It was pointed out that only 64% of companies said that they have current training and awareness programs in place to prevent targeted attacks. “While the types of threats and level of concern companies have may vary across regions, the good news is that security awareness is rising,” Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute, was quoted as saying in the press release. “Across the board, C-level executives reported high levels of concern about targeted attacks and planned to implement security precautions, technology and training to mitigate the risk of targeted attacks.” For fast DDoS protection click here . Source: http://www.computerworld.in/news/check-point-survey-financial-gain-main-motivation-cyber-criminals-12922012

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Financial Gain is Main Motivation for Cyber Criminals

Asia to see rise in cloud DDoS security biz

COMMUNICASIA, SINGAPORE–With the rise of cloud services adoption, businesses also have escalating security concerns over distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and that presents an opportunity for carrier service providers to offer cloud-based DDoS protection, which one industry executive adds is set to gain traction in Asia. Among enterprises, the constant discussion around cloud to make it “sexy and pervasive” to customers cannot ignore the question of what happens when the cloud service becomes unavailable due to an attack, said Lau Kok Khiang, director for Asia-Pacific IP division at Alcatel-Lucent. There is hence “strong pent-up demand” for cloud-based DDoS protection, for which carrier cloud services are in a good position to provide, he said. Lau was presenting at the Telco Rising Cloud conference in CommunicAsia here Tuesday. Large attacks have become commonplace, and enterprises are basically losing the arms race in the Internet security space, Lau described. Among the various DDoS attacks in 2011 alone that saw businesses worldwide suffer a “great amount of damage” involved Sony PlayStation Network, the Hong Kong stock exchange, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and WordPress, he pointed out. The executive emphasized that cloud-based DDoS security was a “win-win” scenario for both the service provider and enterprise customers. For the service provider, it is a new revenue opportunity, which also complements existing enterprise services such as virtual private network (VPN) and business broadband. Additionally, this could help drive customer stickiness, Lau said. That is because from the customers’ point of view, having cloud-based DDoS protection ensures 24-by-7 availability of the cloud services they use, which mean better safeguards for their enterprise assets such as confidential client data, he added. On the event sidelines, Lau told ZDNet Asia that cloud DDoS security is set to gain traction in Asia, due to increasing awareness of the risks and prevalence of DDoS. This will prompt companies to consider cloud DDoS protection as added security measures, in order to ensure their service availabilities meet customer demands as well as industry-specific regulations. Also, apart from commercial entities, governments in the region are also pushing the message that organizations need to protect themselves from becoming the next victim of an attack, he added, referring to the massive DDoS attacks that disrupted Internet services in Myanmar in November 2010. Another speaker at the conference, Anisha Travis, partner at law firm Webb Henderson, said while the cloud has benefits and opportunities for businesess, they should go into space with “their eyes open”. In other words, they need to understand and prepare for mitigate the major risks associated with cloud, one of which is service levels, she pointed out during her presentation. It is essential that service level agreements (SLAs) are well-drafted for specific service levels and must also include “practical remedies” when there is downtime or outage, Travis advised. Customers cannot rely solely on the service provider, and should do their due diligence in clarifying ownership, consequences, and failures, she added. Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/communicasia/asia-to-see-rise-in-cloud-ddos-security-biz-62305165.htm

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Asia to see rise in cloud DDoS security biz

Security fears for ACT’s govt files

The ACT government’s computer systems fought off more than a million attempts to compromise their security in the nine months to April, the territory’s auditor-general has found. And despite a ”denial of service” attack on a key government website just as the audit was coming to an end, auditor Maxine Cooper has found the territory’s information security system is ”robust”. But Dr Cooper’s report found 95 per cent of the 1025 information management systems in the government’s sprawling network were not complying with the requirement to have a security plan and even fewer had undertaken a threat-and-risk assessment. Advertisement: Story continues below Dr Cooper’s office audited the government’s computer network nine months before March, but as the audit period came to a close, the Justice and Community Safety Directorate’s website came under successful attack. The department, which holds sensitive information from the city’s justice agencies, was targeted by the Anonymous group in what is believed to be a case of mistaken identity. The hackers appeared to believe they were attacking the Australian ”justice department”, protesting the federal government’s attitude toward WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Dr Cooper warned that unauthorised accessing of information held by the government, including health and medical records, criminal records, case management records and sensitive government documents could cause strategic damage. But Dr Cooper found successful attacks were externally exceptional in an otherwise good security record for the territory but which could be improved if all government websites were internally hosted. ”The protection of the ACT government network is robust,” the Auditor-General said yesterday. ”Shared Services ICT Security Section’s security regime has successfully defended against over one million attempts to access the ACT government’s network in the nine-month period to 31 March, 2012. ”Future similar breaches could be minimised if all directorate and agency websites were hosted on the ACT government network ran ACT government endorsed supplier.” Dr Cooper also wants to see improvements, including more IT bureaucrats reading up on the essential documents governing security. ”While the administrative structures and processes that support whole and procedures are overall satisfactory there are some shortcomings,” Dr Cooper said. ”ICT security governance is based on the Protective Security Policy and Guidelines which is the ACT government’s pre-eminent protective security document. ”However it is unclear if the status of this document is well understood or if adequate processes exist to ensure that directorates and agencies are complying with it.” The auditor was also unhappy with a failure to put plans in place to secure information management systems in the government network ”Despite it being a requirement, only 5 per cent of the ACT government’s 1025 information management systems have a system security plan; and even fewer, some 2.24 per cent have a threat-and-risk assessment,” she said. Source: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/security-fears-for-acts-govt-files-20120608-201v5.html

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Security fears for ACT’s govt files

North Korea ships malware-infected games to South Korean users, uses them to launch DDoS attacks

According to an independent report published in Korea’s JoongAng Daily, Seoul’s Metropolitan Police Agency has intercepted a cyber attack plot orchestrated by North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, which successfully shipped malware-infected games to South Korean users which were later on used to launch a DDoS attack against the web site of Incheon Airport. More details: According to the police, the South Korean man, identified by the surname Jo, traveled to Shenyang, northeastern China, starting in September 2009 and met agents of an alleged North Korean trading company. He allegedly asked them to develop game software to be used in the South. Jo purchased dozens of computer game software for tens of millions of won, which was a third the cost of the same kind of software in the South. The games were infected with malignant viruses, of which Jo knew, an official at the police agency said. Jo sold the games to South Korean operators of online games. When people played the games, the viruses used their computers as zombies, through which the cyberattack was launched. This is the second attempt by North Korea in recent months to engage in electronic warfare with South Korea, following the use of GPS jammers causing difficulties in air and marine traffic controls. What’s particularly interesting about North Korea’s infection vector in this campaign, is that it’s not a novel approach to spread malware. Instead, it relies on a chain of trust, from the unknown origin of the produced games, to the sellers claims that they are malware-free, and ultimately targets bargain hunters. In the past, software piracy has proven to be a key driving force behind the growth of malware campaigns internationally. Distribution of malware-infected games greatly reminds me of a case which happened in Eastern Europe in the 90s where a malware coder participating in a popular IT magazine’s coding contest, on purposely backdoored his game, which ended being shipped to thousands of subscribers on a magazine-branded CD. Although a good example of a flawed QA (Quality Assurance) on behalf of the magazine, South Korean authorities claim that the person who purchased the games actually knew that they were infected with malware, hence the lower price for purchasing them. Just how big of a cyber threat is North Korea? It’s an emerging market player, having actively invested in the concept over the years, that’s for sure. In my recent conversation with cyber warfare expert Jeffrey Carr, he pointed out that he doubts Russia or China will knowingly supply the irrational North Korea with cyber warfare ‘know how’. However, Russia or China’s chain of command doesn’t need to know that this outsourcing will ever take place, as North Korea could easily outsource to sophisticated cybercriminals doing it for the money, not for the fame. Summary: Seoul’s Metropolitan Police Agency has intercepted a cyber attack plot orchestrated by North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, which successfully shipped malware-infected games to South Korean users. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/north-korea-ships-malware-infected-games-to-south-korean-users-uses-them-to-launch-ddos-attacks/12383

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North Korea ships malware-infected games to South Korean users, uses them to launch DDoS attacks

Counting the cost of a DDoS attack

In the past month, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the Leveson inquiry website, Visa and Virgin Media have all been hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Much had been made of the motives for such attacks, and the methods that attackers use, but what impact do they have on the victim’s finances? John Pescatore, analyst at research firm Gartner, told Computing that there were three main costs associated with attacks. “There is the cost of the outage, as it means that a business’s customers cannot reach them through the internet. Then there is the cost of making the attack stop – and, often, a third cost in the form of a potential extortion fee,” he said. Obviously losses vary, depending on how much revenue is generated directly from a company’s web presence. John Roberts, head of managed services at MSP Redstone, said: “If a betting organisation trades £600m a year – or £2m a day in revenue terms – and 50 per cent of that comes from the web, then they are losing £1m a day.” Any web-dependent organisation within the global 1,000 might incur similar losses, he added. But there are some less obvious victims of these blunt-instrument attacks. “A Scottish football club who were playing in a European match had its website taken down by the opposing teams’ fans with a DDoS attack. The club was not able to generate significant revenue, because a number of its customers were signed up to stream live games on a monthly fee basis. So an organisation as innocuous as a football club can lose hundreds of thousands of pounds as well,” Roberts said. Public-sector bodies can also suffer substantial financial damage through loss of productivity. “There is a cost implication for local government as people will be looking to procure services over the internet. If those services are unavailable, public-sector staff will receive a lot more incoming phone calls,” he said. Other repercussions are harder to assess and quantify. For example, businesses can suffer reputational damage from DDoS attacks, said Andrew Kellett, analyst at research firm Ovum. “With [the attack on] the Serious Organised Crime Authority [SOCA], the issue was that this was not the first time it had been exposed to a DDoS attack. You would have thought that enough resilience would have been built after the first attack to deal with something similar a year later,” he said. But Gartner’s Pescatore said that reputational damage is often less severe than many organisations fear; customers are used to websites not working for any number of other reasons that are not related to DDoS attacks. “There is reputational damage if the website is defaced or if the website is attacked and customers’ financial information is disclosed, but DDoS generally does not have much of a reputational impact,” he argued. Kellett disagreed and emphasised that reputational damage can itself cause financial loss to enterprises, as their customers opt for an alternative service from a similar provider. He warned that DDoS attacks could also be used as cover for a simultaneous assault on the targeted business. “The noise around DDoS attacks can be used to hide another backdoor-style assault, such as data being stolen from within the organisation. “There is an example of clerical records, including credit card information, being stolen from an organisation when a DDoS attack was taking place. It was a hacktivist attack where the credit card details were used to make donations to a charity. For any organisation protecting those details it would be both embarrassing and expensive, as they could lose customers and have to repay anyone who has had money taken from their accounts,” he said. Pescatore said that, of the three costs typically associated with DDoS attacks, extortion attempts have reduced significantly. “In the last two years, businesses have not paid off extortion attempts and are focusing on putting in place services to mitigate DDoS attacks. Several years ago there were incidents where it was deemed less expensive to pay off the attackers as they would only be asking for €5,000,” he said. Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/2181680/analysis-counting-cost-ddos-attack

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Counting the cost of a DDoS attack