Tag Archives: dos 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

Several bugs detected in IBM Java Runtime could lead to DDoS attacks

Multiple vulnerabilities that could enable a remote attacker to launch a denial-of-service attack have been detected in the IBM Runtime Environment Java Technology Edition v6, according to an IBM Security Bulletin posted on Tuesday. The integrated software is used by Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA, a platform which provides management for services, applications and middleware. These bugs, which include the vulnerability popularly known as “SLOTH,” were reported by IBM when it updated Java SDK in January 2016. “The TLS protocol could allow weaker than expected security caused by a collision attack when using the MD5 hash function for signing a ServerKeyExchange message during a TLS handshake,” the bulletin stated. Employing man-in-the-middle techniques, a saboteur could exploit this flaw to mimic a TLS server and glean credentials, IBM wrote. No workarounds or mitigations have yet been provided. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/several-bugs-detected-in-ibm-java-runtime/article/475405/

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Several bugs detected in IBM Java Runtime could lead to DDoS attacks

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

World’s Largest DDoS Attack Breaks Records, Clocks At Massive 500 Gbps

In its latest Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, Arbor Networks reports on the biggest distributed denial of service attack, which had a whopping load of 500 Gbps. The previous largest DDoS attack was of “only” 300 Gbps. It involved young aspiring hacker Seth Nolan-Mcdonagh, who temporarily took down SpamHaus’ webpage. In some cases, the attacks are carried out by state-funded organizations instead of individuals. Last year, GitHub went down after it suffered a DDoS attack, and the main suspect was China, which has a tumultuous history with the software repository. The programming website was even blocked by the Chinese authorities for a short amount of time. The yearly Arbor survey uses data from hosts, mobile service providers and service providers. The survey, which ran until November 2015, got the results based on the 354 global participants who answered questions on network safety specifically about protocols used for reflection/amplification. “The largest attack reported by a respondent this year was 500Gbps, with other respondents reporting attacks of 450Gbps, 425Gbps, and 337Gbps,” the report states. This marks a worrying trend among top-end size DDoS attacks, which get more ambitious every year. The security firm has the numbers to back this statement up. In the previous report, Arbor discovered that one-fifth of respondents got slammed with attacks that topped 50 Gbps. This year’s survey shows a hefty increase, as a quarter of respondents talk of attacks that go more than 100 Gbps. While only five respondents found evidence of DDoS attacks topping 200 Gbps, there were many reports of attacks between 100 and 200 Gbps. Arbor Networks points out that cloud-based services are increasingly becoming tempting targets, as they now make up 33 percent of attacks. Another staple of last year’s hacking attempts is the exploitation of weaknesses in the network time protocol. Reflection and amplification attacks can easily make use of the soft spots in the security infrastructure, leading to significant damages. As a countermeasure, servers keep receiving updates and security patches that should (in theory) keep them safe from attackers who gain a large response to a small query and use it towards a target of their choosing. “[S]ecurity is a human endeavor and there are skilled adversaries on both sides,” Darren Anstee, chief security technologist at Arbor Networks, says. An interesting shift exists in the DDoS attackers’ motivation: the perpetrators no longer seem to find joy in hacktivism or vandalism. Unlike in previous years, extorting the victims and banking on the vulnerabilities of network systems now seem to be the prevalent reasons. In order to accomplish this, they use multi-vector simultaneous attacks which plow through applications, services and infrastructure. A vast majority of respondents identified application-layer DDoS attacks, which targeted DNS services instead of Web servers. Looking at the larger picture, multi-vector attacks counted for 56 percent of customer outages, up from 42 percent in the previous year. More than 50 percent of the respondents told Arbor that DDoS attacks go after the inline firewalls and bring down the internet connectivity. Arbor explains that these devices are the first to fall in case of a DDoS attack and underlines that being inline can greatly add to network latency. Source: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/128260/20160127/worlds-largest-ddos-attack-breaks-records-clocks-at-massive-500-gbps-worldwide-infrastructure-security-report.htm

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World’s Largest DDoS Attack Breaks Records, Clocks At Massive 500 Gbps

Telephonic DoS tied to Ukraine power grid takedown

More information is being revealed regarding the late December attack on the Ukrainian power grid with reports indicating the attack on the utility was supported by a simultaneous telephonic denial of service (DoS)incident. The Ukrainian DoS attack took out the company’s call center so its customers could not call and let workers know that service was being disrupted, according to a published report. A telephonic DoS attack works in the same manner as one hitting a computer system, but in this case a call center is overwhelmed with calls to shut it down. In addition, with the telephone system down the utility company staffers could not communicate effectively to fix the problem. Telephonic DoS attacks can be used to obfuscate any type of attack to attract an IT department’s attention while the real assault takes place against another segment of the network. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/telephonic-dos-tied-to-ukraine-power-grid-takedown/article/467076/

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Telephonic DoS tied to Ukraine power grid takedown