Tag Archives: marketing

DOSarrest Rolls Out Cloud Based Layer 7 Load Balancing

DOSarrest has begun offering a Cloud based Layer 7 local and global Load balancing solution to its DDoS protection services customer base. The Load balancing service is a fully managed solution, whereby customers can create pools of servers; a pool can be 1 or many servers and can be located in multiple locations. Load balancing types available include: Round Robin, IP Hash, least connections, weighted. Other options include: By Domain or Host Header, allows customers to direct our servers to pick-up and cache content based on the domain name or host header that is being requested by the visitor. By Resource, allows customers to direct our servers to pick-up and cache content based on the resource being requested by the visitor. Mydomain.com goes to one server(s) mydomain.com/images goes to another server(s) and/or location. The load balancing solution also can be used as Active/Active -All servers are is use Or Active/Passive -some servers are only used when one or more have a failure. Health checks are all part of the service to determine if a particular server or instance is active or not. Jag Bains, CTO at DOSarrest comments “I used to be in the hosting game and when I see the advantages of our cloud based solution over a hardware based solution, this is definitely the way to go.” Bains also adds “There is no capital required, no technical expertise is needed, no single point of failure, it’s able to handle 100?s of millions of requests and can be setup in 5 minutes…top that.” General Manager at DOSarrest, Mark Teolis states “It’s a natural add-on to our DDoS protection services, which already incorporates extensive caching of customers content, this way customers can leverage any combination and location of VPS’s, Instances, private cloud and dedicated servers. I can’t see why anyone would want to buy or manage a Load balancing device again, it just doesn’t make sense anymore.” Details on this service can be found here: www.dosarrest.com/solutions/load-balancing/

See original article:
DOSarrest Rolls Out Cloud Based Layer 7 Load Balancing

SNMP could be the future for DDoS attacks

DNS amplification and NTP reflection are two big buzz-terms in the modern world of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but when successful defensive measures force those wells to run dry, a lesser-used reflection attack vector, known as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), could take the forefront. Johannes Ullrich, dean of research with the SANS Technology Institute, told SCMagazine.com in a Monday email correspondence that SNMP, a UDP-based protocol used to read and set the configurations of network devices, hasn’t posed as big a threat as DNS and NTP attacks because there are not as many reflectors available as there are for other protocols. Ullrich said that most network-connected devices support SNMP in some form and, in a Thursday post, opined that it could be the next go-to vector for attackers after he observed a DDoS reflection attack taking advantage of an unnamed video conferencing system that was exposing SNMP. In this instance, the attacker spoofed a SNMP request to appear to originate from 117.27.239.158, Ullrich said, explaining that the video conferencing system receives the request and then replies back to the IP address with a significant reply. An 87 byte “getBulkRequest” resulted in a return of 60,000 bytes of fragmented data, Ullrich wrote in the post, adding that the individual reporting the attack observed roughly five megabits per second of traffic. “The requests are pretty short, asking for a particular item, and the replies can be very large,” Ullrich said. “For example, SNMP can be used to query a switch for a list of all the devices connected to it. SNMP provides replies that can be larger than DNS or NTP replies.” As people improve configurations, effectively causing those DNS and NTP reflectors to dry up, SNMP could be the attack vector of choice, Ullrich said – a point that John Graham-Cumming, a programmer with CloudFlare, agreed with in a Monday email correspondence with SCMagazine.com. “I think that attackers will turn to SNMP once other attack methods are thwarted,” Graham-Cumming said. “At the moment it’s easy to use NTP and DNS for attacks, so there’s no need for SNMP.” To get a jumpstart defending against this DDoS vector, Graham-Cumming suggested that network operators limit access to the SNMP devices on their networks. Ullrich went so far as to say that SNMP devices should not be exposed to the internet at all. Both experts added that the “community string,” which serves as a password for accepting requests, should not be so obvious. Source: http://www.scmagazine.com/snmp-could-be-the-future-for-ddos-attacks/article/346799/

Link:
SNMP could be the future for DDoS attacks

Point DNS blitzed by mystery DDoS attack assault

Domain hosts Point DNS has been hammered with a high intensity DDoS attack on Friday, knocking servers out for hours. The size of the attack and techniques used – much less who might be behind the attack – remains unclear. Several Reg readers got in touch to notify us about the issue and the company confirmed the attack online. “We’re experiencing a DDoS attack on all DNS servers we are working hard mitigate the attack,” Point DNS said in a update to its Twitter profile. “We’re still working through a massive DDoS. We’re adding more nameservers and working with our network providers,” it added. The firm, whose services are used by more than 220,000 domains, was badly affected by the attack. This had a knock-on effect on firms who used its services – while websites were up and running as normal attempts to reach them by typing in a name to a browser would not resolve as normal. The snafu also means email won’t be delivered as normal to affected sites, with early indications suggesting clients clustered in Asia and Europe were worst affected. Security specialists Incapsula spotted a similar attack, which peaked at 25 million packets per second. It reported seeing floods of non-spoofed IP data coming from two DDoS protection services as the cause of the outage. “DNS flood have been around for a while but now the modern high-capacity servers take the attack to a new level,” Incapsula product evangelist Igal Zeifman told El Reg in a statement. “Unlike amplification attacks, that could be easily spotted and filtered on-edge, DNS flood queries can’t be dismissed before they could be allowed to be processed by the server. With powerful botnet machines pumping millions of malicious request each second, and aiming them directly and the most vulnerable server resources (eg CPU), the old threat is now making a comeback in a very dangerous manner.” Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/09/point_dns_ddos/

More:
Point DNS blitzed by mystery DDoS attack assault

DDoS attacks: half of targeted firms get hit again

Two new reports reveal that DDoS attacks are not only getting bigger- now logged between 250 and 325 Gbps, but that these attacks often target the same organisation more than once. The business challenge presented by DDoS attacks hit the spotlight once again this morning, after a research analytics firm revealed that 35 per cent more firms were hit by attacks during 2013 than in 2012 – and with 28 per cent of logged attacks seen last years lasting two days or more. The most revealing takeout from the Neustar analysis – the firm’s second annual report, entitled `DDoS Attacks & Impact Report – 2014: The Danger Deepens’ – is that once attacked, there is an estimated 69 percent chance of a repeat attack. And whilst 31 per cent of these companies were DDoS-attacked once, over 48 percent said they had been targeted between two to 10 times. Neustar’s figures confirm Arbor Networks’ report – released last week – which saw a record 325 Gbps attack hit a French organisation earlier this year, with a massive spike logged by the research division of the DDoS remediation firm on the first quarter of this year. Arbor says that it 72 attacks larger than 100 Gbps in size and volume, as well as 50 percent more attacks in the first quarter of 2014 than the entirety of 2013. Back at Neustar, the research company claims that 32 percent companies hit by a DDoS attack last year estimated the events had cost them more than £240,000 per day during the outage. Additionally, the reports notes larger DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent with a 200 percent increase in attacks affecting bandwidth of between 1 and 20 Gbps. For its research, Neustar took in response from 331 companies in the UK, across a range of public and private sector organisations. The company says its results show that DDoS attacks disrupt multiple business units – with public-facing areas like call centres, customer service and marketing operations absorbing more than 40 per cent of DDoS-attack related costs. This high cost may because these business functions are key revenue earners in most commercial companies, SCMagazineUK.com notes, but the report also cautions that DDoS attacks are now being used as smokescreens for other attacks – an attack vector that security researcher Brian Krebs has reported on several times over the last 12 months. Rodney Joffe, Neustar’s senior VP and technology fellow, said that organisations must remain constantly vigilant and abreast of the latest threats. “As an example, Neustar’s UltraDNS network suffered an attack just last week peaking at over 250 Gbps – a massive attack by industry standards. Even with proper mitigations in place, the attack caused an upstream ripple. It is a constantly changing threat landscape,”he noted. According to Mark Teolis, general manager with DOSarrest, a DDoS remediation specialist, the key problem with the latest generation of attacks is not just the volume and bandwidth used, but their general sophistication, with Layer 7 attacks now being seen in the mainstream. Layer 7 is the highest of the seven IP layers defined under the OSI (Open System Interconnection) model and represents the application layer – the location on the computing resource where data both originates and returns. Speaking with SCMagazineUK.com last week at the Infosecurity Europe show, Teolis said his firm’s latest software has been enhanced to deal with these latest Layer 7 attacks, by combining IDS (intrusion detection systems), load balancing, WAF (web application firewall) and DDoS mitigation under a single IT umbrella. Using an IDS, he explained, allows security professionals to pinpoint sophisticated layer 7 attacks, as well as provide cloud based WAF services. “Using these approaches – coupled with spreading the load across multiple cloud resources – significantly mitigates the effects of even the highest volume DDoS attack,” he said. Keith Bird, UK managing director with Check Point, told SCMagazineUK.com that DDoS attacks have been used as a hacktivist weapon for several years – and, as this research illustrates, now the net is widening to businesses at large. “We are seeing smokescreen-type attacks, and also more complex, multi-vector attacks on Web sites that combine DDoS with account tampering and fraud attempts,” he said adding, that, whilst these are difficult to defend against, firms should consider contingency and remediation plans in the event of such attacks. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/ddos-attacks-half-of-targeted-firms-get-hit-again/article/345878/

See original article:
DDoS attacks: half of targeted firms get hit again

Infosecurity Europe: Are cybercriminals winning the security game?

One of the hot topics at the Infosecurity Europe show – held in London this week – is the scale and complexity of the latest attacks against corporates. Whilst several research operations and vendors competed with each other to come up with reports on how bad the attack landscape is at the moment, the real question that C level executives attending the event want to know is: how bad are the attacks really – and what can I do to defend against the threat? According to Ian Pratt, the co-founder of Bromium Labs, the threats situation is potentially quite serious, as his research team has uncovered a new type of attack vector called the Kernel Kracker, which is what some experts call a layered attack. The attack exploits a vulnerability in the Windows operating system kernel and allows the attacker to gain admin/system level privileges on the host system, so allowing them effectively peel away the various layers of security the company has installed. Having said this, Pratt says that the use of multiple layers of security to protect an organisation’s IT resources is still a very viable defence approach, as, although no set of security layers is ever going to reach 100 percent protection, the use of multiple layers is still a lot better than the old single-suite option of yesteryear. “The underlying problem is that all commodity operating systems are now too big to protect in their entirety,” he said, adding that – as an example – Windows XP had more than 100 patches applied to it last year by Microsoft. Against this backdrop, Pratt argues that the best solution is create virtual instances of a given operating system environment, taking the concept of virtual machines to its logical conclusion. This means, he says, that even if the defences fail and an attack succeeds, its effects are severely limited to the privileges assigned to the given Web browser session. After the session on a given Web resource finishes, the virtual machine collapses the session and a fresh one is started for the set Web site. “You can let the exploit happen, and its effects are limited,” he explained, adding that he fully expects cybercriminals to come up with new attack vectors on a constant basis. Will there ever come a time when it ceases to become viable for the cybercriminals to develop new attack vectors to attack corporate IT systems, we asked him. That time, he replied, is still a very long way off, as new methodologies will arrive all the time. “Over the last 18 months, it’s all been about Java. That is going to change, and you will see a new set of security threats being used,” he said. Jag Bains, CTO of DOSArrest, agreed that the threat landscape will continue to evolve from its current mix of DDoS attacks and operating system-specific vectors. “Today you’re seeing customised Javascript DDoS attacks – I think this attack vector is going to continue to evolve, as hackers continue to have the motivation to attack a corporate system,” he explained. David Gibson, vice president of Varonis Systems, agreed that cybercriminal attack vectors are evolving, but cautioned that the fundamental problem remains the volume of data to which users of IT systems have access. “We had a meeting with a client recently where users had the same levels of access rights [to data] as their high level management. As a result, we discovered that volumes of company data were being exfiltrated from the system, despite their use of multiple layers of security,” he said. It’s against this backdrop, he told SCMagazineUK.com , that he fully expects attacks to evolve for the foreseeable future, but he adds that the inside attacker is likely to be the “next big thing” in the security attacks arena. “For this reason, I am of the opinion that companies must continue to develop the technical controls required to protect the data in their organisation, as well as evolving the security being used to defend the IT resource,” he concluded. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/infosecurity-europe-are-cybercriminals-winning-the-security-game/article/344740/

View post:
Infosecurity Europe: Are cybercriminals winning the security game?

UltraDNS Dealing with DDoS Attack

UltraDNS said it has mitigated a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for most of its customers after the service was held down for most of the day. “Currently, only customers utilizing a segment of UltraDNS Name Server addresses are experiencing resolution latency due to intermittent network saturation in the Western US,” said Neustar director of product management, security solutions, Jim Fink in an email to Threatpost. “We continue to aggressively refine mitigations for these customers and hope to have the issue resolved shortly. We have been and will continue to provide regular updates to our UltraDNS customers via our usual customer notification process.” UltraDNS is a Neustar company. The SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center said this afternoon that it received multiple reports of outages and DNS resolution issues, reportedly because of a 100 Gbps DDoS attack against one of UltraDNS’ customers that resulted in latency issues for others. “One reporting party did indicate that they learned that the management of UltraDNS had said that one of their customers was being attacked and that they black-holed that customer to get back on trend,” wrote ISC handler Russ McRee. “Resolver nodes around the world are resetting.” DDoS attacks the size of this one are quickly becoming the norm. A report from Arbor Networks this week said it has already tracked more than 70 DDoS attacks of 100 Gbps or more of bad traffic, topping out at 325 Gbps. The largest attacks on public record were recorded by traffic optimization and security provider CloudFlare Most volumetric attacks rely on some kind of amplification such as DNS reflection or Network Time Protocol amplification attacks where the requesting IP address is spoofed as the target’s and massive amounts of traffic is returned at relatively little cost to the attacker. With DNS amplification attacks, attackers take advantage of any number of the 28 million open DNS resolvers on the Internet to launch large-scale DDoS attacks. The motivations are varied. Ideological hackers use them to take down services in protest, while profit-motivated criminals can use DDoS as a cover for intellectual property theft and financial fraud. Beginning with the DDoS attacks against large U.S. banks early last year, the spike in these attacks merited a mention in the recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. “We’re seeing a growing trend of combining DDoS with APT campaigns,” said Arbor Networks’ Gary Sockrider said. “Go back a few years, and DDOs was thought of more as a takedown mechanism, not for data exfiltration. Now we’re seeing it more frequently combined with APT, prolonged campaigns where an attacker is on your network and now need to get the data out, they’ll initiate a DDoS attack. It’s the equivalent of a natural disaster and while you’re dealing with it, that’s when they’ll exfiltrate data.” Source: http://threatpost.com/ultradns-dealing-with-ddos-attack/105806

See the original article here:
UltraDNS Dealing with DDoS Attack

France Getting Battered By DDoS Attacks

France is seeing massive amounts of DDoS traffic going through its networks, thanks to sizeable hits on the country’s popular hosting providers As the UK enjoys a relatively low volume of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, France is seeing deluges of traffic hitting organisations frequently, according to research. Major hosting providers, including the hugely-polular, OVH have attracted DDoSers to France, which was only outdone by the US in terms of the amount of DDoS traffic passing through the countries’ networks, according to Arbor Networks. A record 325Gbps attack hit France this year, but it is not known who was involved. DDoS threat getting bigger and bigger Darren Anstee, director of solutions architects at Arbor, said France was being attacked largely because of the popularity of those hosting providers. “They’ve got a lot of big hosting providers and some of those are used by the gaming industry [which is subject to significant sized attacks],” he told TechWeekEurope . Arbor spotted an unprecedented rise in DDoS attacks over the first quarter of 2014. It saw 72 attacks larger than 100Gbps and 1.5 times the number of attacks over 20Gbps as in the whole of 2013. The epic increase in attack size has come as a result of what’s known as amplification. Protocols such as Network Time Protocol can be used to generate massive DDoS attacks with relatively little effort on behalf of the offenders. They can abuse vulnerable NTP servers by spoofing the IP address of a target, sending small requests and getting massive responses. The target IP is then flooded with that traffic. Even protocols used by popular gaming services, from Quake to the Steam protocol, can be abused for amplification purposes. Source: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/ddos-france-gaming-hosting-companies-144777

View the original here:
France Getting Battered By DDoS Attacks

How to abuse Facebook feature to conduct powerful DDoS attack

A researcher discovered a flaw in the section “notes” of the social network Facebook that could be exploited by anyone to conduct a powerful DDoS attack. The Security researcher Chaman Thapa, also known as chr13, discovered a vulnerability in the section ‘Notes’ of the popular social network Facebook that could be exploited by anyone to launch the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack of more than 800 Mbps Bandwidth on any website. Chaman Thapa demonstrated that simply reading a ‘Note’ created by anyone on the Facebook platform an attacker could automatically generate malicious traffic against a target. The researcher published a blog post to describe the vulnerability, he exploited the possibility to include tags inside the post to allow the creation of notes that have images from any source. The attack scenario is very simple, Facebook downloads external images from the original source for the first time only, to improve the performance it stores them in the cache for successive uses. If the image url has dynamic parameters, Facebook is not able to store the image in cache and practically it download all the images included in a note each time whenever anybody view the note. “Facebook Notes allows users to include tags. Whenever a tag is used, Facebook crawls the image from the external server and caches it. Facebook will only cache the image once however using random get parameters the cache can be by-passed and the feature can be abused to cause a huge HTTP GET flood.” Let’s see the DDoS attack scenario described by Chaman Thapa, let’s chose the target website “ target.com” which include a large image on its server (e.g. 1Mb). The researcher creates a Facebook Note which includes the above image multiple times with dynamic parameters, and some text. Facebook servers are forced to download 1 MB of file 1000 times in one page view (It has been estimated that each note is now responsible for 1000+ http requests). If 100 Facebook users are reading the same note at the same time, then Facebook servers will be forced to download 1 x 1000 x 100 = 100,000 Mb or 97.65Gb bandwidth within few seconds from the targeted servers. In the image below is reported the graph for the 400 Mbps traffic generated from 127 Facebook servers in the proof-of-concept made by Thapa by attacking on his own web server. Following the description provided in the post by the Chaman Thapa. Steps to re-create the bug as reported to Facebook Bug Bounty on March 03, 2014. Step 1. Create a list of unique img tags as one tag is crawled only once .. Step 2. Use m.facebook.com to create the notes. It silently truncates the notes to a fixed length. Step 3. Create several notes from the same user or different user. Each note is now responsible for 1000+ http request. Step 4. View all the notes at the same time. The target server is observed to have massive http get flood. Thousands of get request are sent to a single server in a couple of seconds. Total number of facebook servers accessing in parallel is 100+. The researcher explained that the amplification factor of the DDoS attack depends on the dimension of the image downloaded, it could be even higher if the attacker includes in the note a pdf or a video. “A scenario of traffic amplification: when the image is replaced by a pdf or video of larger size, Facebook would crawl a huge file but the user gets nothing.” “Each Note supports 1000+ links and Facebook blocks a user after creating around 100 Notes in a short span. Since there is no captcha for note creation, all of this can be automated and an attacker could easily prepare hundreds of notes using multiple users until the time of attack when all of them is viewed at once.” noted Chaman Thapa. There is the concrete risk that a bad actor creates hundreds of notes with specially crafted script using multiple users at the same time, resulting a powerful DDoS attack. The alarming news is that the flaw is still unpached and Facebook has no plans to fix it. “ In the end, the conclusion is that there’s no real way to us fix this that would stop attacks against small consumer grade sites without also significantly degrading the overall functionality, ” replied Facebook to the researcher. Click here to read the entire article. Source: http://www.arie.co.za/how-to-abuse-facebook-feature-to-conduct-powerful-ddos-attack/

Follow this link:
How to abuse Facebook feature to conduct powerful DDoS attack

UK webhost 123-Reg in DDOS attack

Businesses using 123-Reg’s web hosting service were knocked offline on Wednesday evening following a reported distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. 123-Reg is the UK’s largest domain provider hosting over 1.4 million websites. The company said it was hit by a DDoS style attack that caused disruption to some customers on its shared hosting packages. DDoS attacks typically use a botnet of computers in a co-ordinated attack, driving web traffic to a particular website. The attack appeared to cause patchy service for websites hosted by the company for several hours with many customers taking to Twitter to vent their frustration. UK games and mobile apps start-up Greedy Goblin Games (@GreedyGoblins) tweeted 123-Reg: “It appears your shared hosting servers are down. Can access FTP but not websites”. While IT consultant @thepaulturvey tweeted: “Is there a problem with 123-Reg shared hosting? Multiple sites not responding”. 123-Reg support staff told one UK website owner: “There has been a DDOS type of attack targeting a website from our shared hosting platform which unfortunately affected some of our customers. Our system administrators have contained the attack and the connectivity issues should shortly be resolved”. Update: I’ve received the following statement from 123-Reg confirming the attack. 123-Reg did experience a DDoS attack targeted against one particular customer domain. It was a sustained attack which we monitored closely over the course of several hours. The attack itself was from 823 different IP addresses globally. This resulted in denigrated service to our hosting platform, meaning some customer sites were running slower, but no sites were taken offline as a result of this attack. Customer impact measured in terms of support queries was minimal — and likewise our social platforms saw a handful of comments — which are being addressed on a one to one basis via our support teams. Source: http://betanews.com/2014/04/23/uk-webhost-123-reg-in-ddos-attack/

Read this article:
UK webhost 123-Reg in DDOS attack

DOSarrest Releases Latest Generation DDoS Mitigation System Software

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA–(Marketwired – Apr 23, 2014) – DOSarrest has just released its latest generation of proprietary backend software that incorporates an all-new customer-facing portal. This new release will enable DOSarrest to implement changes to customer configurations in seconds, enabling them to apply custom made DDoS mitigation modules extremely quickly. It is also equipped with an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), allowing the security team to pinpoint sophisticated layer 7 attacks as well as provide cloud based Web Application Firewall (WAF) services for its customers. Mark Teolis, GM at DOSarrest said: “This upgrade is by far our largest project to date, it has taken us over 2 years of development and testing to get here. This latest generation of software is extremely powerful, and can stop the next generation of sophisticated layer 7 attacks.” DOSarrest is now able to offer additional services, including: Cloud Based Web Application Firewall (WAF) Cloud based layer 7 load balancing, Local, Global with health checks Enhanced reporting on traffic types, status codes, cache performance, etc Create virtual servers, to have us pick-up, cache and deliver content from multiple customer servers IDS engine to detect and help stop any malicious traffic “We recognised our customers’ requirements to have comprehensive security related services, rather than disparate point solutions; this new system has all the features that we need to accommodate them. The best part about this new generation of software is its flexibility at the core. What used to take days and weeks to develop and implement, can now be measured in minutes and hours,” added Jag Bains, CTO at DOSarrest. Bains went on to say: “The best part of this new release is that it enables us to quickly react and stop sophisticated attacks that have not even been created yet!” Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/23/idUSnMKWNkbj9a+1e0+MKW20140423

See the original article here:
DOSarrest Releases Latest Generation DDoS Mitigation System Software