Tag Archives: networks

Three ways retailers can safeguard against cybercrime

Chinese New Year is always a shopping boom time in town. People are generous in spending on food, decorations, and fashion during the important cultural festival. While retailers are focused on ensuring that they successfully take advantage of spikes in online and in-store sales, are they as prepared as they need to be to defend against major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks? Avoiding a cyber-crime catastrophe Thanksgiving officially kicks off the biggest shopping period of the year globally. The period through to Chinese New Year may be a sales bonanza, but it’s also a period of high vulnerability that criminals exploit to maximize the threat to a retailer’s business. Along with gaming and finance companies, retailers are popular targets because they store sensitive data that thieves can use for financial gain. Additionally, DDOS attacks are often used to distract organizations so that even more costly web application attacks can take place at the same time. But the truth is no industry is immune and the threat is increasing in its relentlessness. With Chinese New Year sales accounting for a sizeable chunk of most retailers’ revenues, from a criminal’s perspective, there could hardly be a better time to launch a cyber attack. What’s more, with systems already creaking under a load of peak volumes, it might not take much of a straw to break the camel’s back. The last thing a retailer wants is for their business to spectacularly and very visibly come to a sudden halt because they can’t defend against and mitigate a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Retailers face a growing threat Talk of cyber attacks are more than mere scaremongering – the threat is very real. For example, in September, the release of the Mirai code — a piece of malware that infects IoT devices enabling them to be used for DDoS attacks — opened a Pandora’s box of opportunities for ruthless cyber entrepreneurs who want to disrupt their target markets and exploit the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of companies who honestly serve their customers. This code gives criminals the ability to orchestrate legions of unsecured Internet of Things (IoT) devices to act as unwitting participants in targeted DDoS attacks. These objects could be anything from domestic hubs and routers to printers and digital video recorders — as long as they’re connected to the internet. The latest large DDoS attacks have used botnets just like this — proving that the bad guys are multiplying and, most likely, gearing up for bigger things. Asia is not immune and Hong Kong is a prime target According to a recent report by Nexusguard, DDoS attacks increased 43 percent in Q2 to 34,000 attacks in the Asia-Pacific region and 83 percent worldwide. The largest increase was seen in Hong Kong, where attacks rose an astonishing 57 percent. China, which saw a 50% increase in attacks, is the number one target in the region. According to the report, over the course of a month, a Chinese website was attacked 41 times. The fact is, that every company needs to pay this issue serious attention and put effective plans in place. Prevention is the better than the cure There are no easy answers to the question of how to secure IoT smart devices — especially at the ‘budget conscious’ end of the market. That’s why we expect that these DDoS attacks will continue to proliferate, meaning that targeted DDoS attacks of increasing scale and frequency will almost certainly occur as a result. So how can retailers defend themselves against the threat of an attack? Organizations have to use a combination of measures to safeguard against even the most determined DDoS attack. This include: 1. Limiting the impact of an attack by absorbing DDoS traffic targeted at the application layer, deflecting all DDoS traffic targeted at the network layer and authenticating valid traffic at the network edge 2. Choosing an ISP that connects directly to large carriers and other networks, as well as internet exchanges — allowing traffic to pass efficiently 3. Employing the services of a network-based DDoS provider — with a demonstrable track record of mitigating DDoS attacks and sinking significant data floods. This will safeguard specific IP address ranges that organizations want to protect. Chinese New Year is a critical period for retailers — and hopefully for all the right reasons. But in an increasingly digital world, consideration needs to be given to the IT infrastructure that underpins today’s retail business and the security strategy that protects it. Source: http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/article/three-ways-retailers-can-safeguard-against-cybercrime-512090779

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Three ways retailers can safeguard against cybercrime

Google caps punch-yourself-in-the-face malicious charger hack

Another reason to avoid those DEF CON charging stations. Google has capped a dangerous but somewhat obscure boot mode vulnerability that allowed infected PCs and chargers to put top end Nexus phones into denial of service states.…

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Google caps punch-yourself-in-the-face malicious charger hack

DDoS Attacks on the Rise—Here’s What Companies Need to Do

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been going on for years. But in recent months they seem to have gained much more attention, in part because of high-profile incidents that affected millions of users. For instance, in late October 2016 a massive DDoS assault on Domain Name System (DNS) service provider Dyn temporarily shut down some of the biggest sites on the Internet. The incident affected users in much of the East Coast of the United States as well as data centers in Texas, Washington, and California. Dyn said in statements that tens of millions of IP addresses hit its infrastructure during the attack. Just how much attention DDoS is getting these days is indicated by a recent blog post by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. The post, entitled, “Distributed Denial of Service Attacks: Four Best Practices for Prevention and Response,” became SEI’s most visited of the year after just two days, said a spokesman for the institute. To help defend against such attacks, organizations need to understand that this is not just an IT concern. “While DDoS attack prevention is partly a technical issue, it is also largely a business issue,” said Rachel Kartch, analysis team lead at the CERT Division of SEI, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by CMU, and author of the DDoS post. Fortunately there are steps organizations can take to better protect themselves against DDoS attacks, and Kartch describes these in the post. In general, organizations should begin planning for attacks in advance, because it’s much more difficult to respond after an attack is already under way. “While DDoS attacks can’t be prevented, steps can be taken to make it harder for an attacker to render a network unresponsive,” Kartch noted. To fortify IT resources against a DDoS attack, it’s vital to make the architecture as resilient as possible. Fortifying network architecture is an important step not just in DDoS network defense, Kartch said, but in ensuring business continuity and protecting the organization from any kind of outage. To help disperse organizational assets and avoid presenting a single rich target to an attacker. organizations should locate servers in different data centers; ensure that data centers are located on different networks; ensure that data centers have diverse paths, and ensure that the data centers, or the networks that the data centers are connected to, have no notable bottlenecks or single points of failure. For those organizations that depend on servers and Internet presence, it’s important to make sure resources are geographically dispersed and not located in a single data center, Kartch said. “If resources are already geographically dispersed, it is important to view each data center as having more than one pipe to [the] Internet, and ensure that not all data centers are connected to the same Internet provider,” she said. While these are best practices for general business continuity and disaster recovery, they will also help ensure organizational resiliency in response to a DDoS attack. The post also describes other practices for defending against DDoS. One is to deploy appropriate hardware that can handle known attack types and use the options in the hardware that can protect network resources. While bolstering resources will not prevent a DDoS attack from happening, Kartch said, doing so will lessen the impact of an attack. Certain types of DDoS attacks have existed for a long time, and a lot of network and security hardware is capable of mitigating them. For example, many commercially available network firewalls, web application firewalls, and load balancers can defend against protocol attacks and application-layer attacks, Kartch said. Specialty DDoS mitigation appliances also can protect against these attacks. Another good practice is to scale up network bandwidth. “For volumetric attacks, the solution some organizations have adopted is simply to scale bandwidth up to be able to absorb a large volume of traffic if necessary,” Kartch said. “That said, volumetric attacks are something of an arms race, and many organizations won’t be able or willing to pay for the network bandwidth needed to handle some of the very large attacks we have recently seen. This is primarily an option for very large organizations and service providers.” It’s likely that DDoS attacks will continue to be a major issue for organizations. A 2016 study by content delivery network provider Akamai said these types of incidents are rising in number as well as in severity and duration. The company reported a 125% increase in DDoS attacks year over year and a 35% rise in the average attack duration. Cyber security executives need to make it a top priority to protect their organizations against DDoS. Source: http://www.itbestofbreed.com/sponsors/bitdefender/best-tech/ddos-attacks-rise-here-s-what-companies-need-do

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DDoS Attacks on the Rise—Here’s What Companies Need to Do

ICIT Finds Healthcare Sector at Great Risk for DDoS Attacks

Healthcare, financial, and energy are the top three sectors facing the highest risk of a DDoS attack, a recent ICIT report found. With its high dependency on digital records, network connectivity, accessible information, and real-time communication, healthcare is one of the sectors at greatest risk for a DDoS attack, the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) explained in a recent publication. The financial industry and energy sector are also at high risk for such attacks, ICIT said in “Rise of the Machines: The Dyn Attack Was Just a Practice Run. “Obstructions to even an email server could cause delays in treatment, while widespread attacks that holistically render a critical service unavailable, such as an IoT DDoS attack, would pose a serious risk to patient and staff safety,” wrote ICIT Senior Fellow James Scott and ICIT Researcher Drew Spaniel. Citing research from a previous ICIT brief, the duo explained that healthcare is incorporating, and interacting with connected devices that are often designed without necessary security measures. Previously, this has led to instances such as MRI machines or pacemakers being infected with ransomware. “While there is no indication that healthcare devices have been incorporated into DDoS botnets, it may be only a matter of time before an adversary adapt an IoT malware such as Mirai, to harness the computational resources of medical devices because many lack basic access controls such as multi-factor authentication (or any authentication whatsoever),” the authors maintained. There is also the potential danger of an IoT malware or a worm that would “brick” or kill “infected medical devices in order to cause panic, extort a ransom, or as part of a multi-tiered attack.” Overall, Scott and Spaniel stated that a “perfect storm” is brewing across the nation with regard to private critical infrastructures facing cybersecurity threats. More organizations are utilizing the internet and IoT devices, but device manufacturers will sometimes “negligently avoid incorporating security-by-design into their systems.” This happens because the manufacturers have not been properly incentivized, and instead pass the potential risk onto the end-user. “As the adversarial landscape of nation state and mercenary APTs, hacktivists, cyber-criminal gangs, script kiddies, cyber caliphate actors, and hail-mary threat actors continues to hyperevolve, America’s treasure troves of public and private data, IP, and critical infrastructure continues to be pilfered, annihilated, and disrupted, while an organizational culture of ‘Participation Trophy Winners” managed by tech neophyte executives continue to lose one battle after the next.” A key area of concern is the Mirai malware, which “offers malicious cyber actors an asymmetric quantum leap in capability.” Specifically, Mirai has a strong development platform “that can be optimized and customized according to the desired outcome of a layered attack by an unsophisticated adversary.” While Mirai has forced different industries to review devices that lack security by design and other IoT device vulnerabilities, the authors noted that it “will not forever remain the favorite tool of unsophisticated malicious threat actors.” DDoS attacks on the healthcare industry were addressed earlier this month in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) latest newsletter. OCR reiterated that healthcare often uses IoT in several ways, such as allowing healthcare facilities to monitor medical devices, patients, and personnel. This can open organizations up to certain cybersecurity threats. “An attacker may be able to deter patients or healthcare personnel from accessing critical healthcare assets such as payroll systems, electronic health record databases, and software-based medical equipment (MRI, EKGs, infusion pumps, etc.),” OCR stated, citing data from US-CERT. For preventing such attacks, OCR advised that organizations continuously monitor and scan for vulnerable and comprised IoT devices on their networks. Entities should also adhere to the necessary remediation actions. “Password management policies and procedures for devices and their users should also be implemented and adhered to. All default passwords need to be switched to strong passwords,” OCR said, adding that default usernames and passwords for most devices can be found online. Source: http://healthitsecurity.com/news/icit-finds-healthcare-sector-at-great-risk-for-ddos-attacks

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ICIT Finds Healthcare Sector at Great Risk for DDoS Attacks

A year in infosec: Bears, botnets, breaches … and elections

History made How often can we say that an IT blunder might have changed the course of world history? Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server whilst serving as outgoing US President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State became a key element in the US presidential election this year.…

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A year in infosec: Bears, botnets, breaches … and elections

Mirai variant turns TalkTalk routers into zombie botnet agents

Infosec folk spot web of compromised British devices Hundreds of Mirai-infected home routers across the UK are currently acting as DDoS bots.…

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Mirai variant turns TalkTalk routers into zombie botnet agents

Sh… IoT just got real: Mirai botnet attacks targeting multiple ISPs

Now ZyXEL and D-Link routers from Post Office and TalkTalk under siege Analysis   The Mirai botnet has struck again, with hundreds of thousands of TalkTalk and Post Office broadband customers affected. The two ISPs join a growing casualty list from a wave of assaults that have also affected customers at Deutsche Telekom, KCOM and Irish telco Eir over the last two weeks or so.…

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Sh… IoT just got real: Mirai botnet attacks targeting multiple ISPs

Three ways to prevent a DDoS disaster this Black Friday

Black Friday will be a big day for retailers — and hopefully for all the right reasons. Some of the biggest shopping days of the year are upon us. But while retailers are focused on ensuring that they cope with huge peaks in online and in-store sales, are they as prepared as they need to be to defend against major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks? Avoiding a cyber-crime catastrophe Black Friday is here (along with the increasingly popular Cyber Monday). As ever, crowds of shoppers will flock to retailers’ stores and websites in search of rock-bottom prices. And this will mean a huge increase in sales for both physical and online stores. Black Friday may be a sales bonanza but it’s also a period of high vulnerability that criminals could exploit to maximise the threat to a retailer’s business. With Christmas sales accounting for a sizeable chunk of most retailers’ annual revenues, from a criminal’s perspective, there could hardly be a better time to launch a cyber attack. What’s more, with systems already creaking under the load of peak volumes, it might not take much of a straw to break the camel’s back. The last thing a retailer wants is for their business to spectacularly and very visibly come to a sudden halt because they can’t defend against and mitigate a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Retailers face a growing threat Talk of cyber attacks are more than mere scaremongering – the threat is very real. For example, in September, the release of the Mirai code — a piece of malware that infects IoT devices enabling them to be used for DDoS attacks — opened a Pandora’s box of opportunities for ruthless cyber entrepreneurs who want to disrupt their target markets and exploit the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of companies who honestly serve their customers. This code gives criminals the ability to orchestrate legions of unsecured Internet of Things (IoT) devices to act as unwitting participants in targeted DDoS attacks. These objects could be anything from domestic hubs and routers, to printers and digital video recorders — as long as they’re connected to the internet. The latest large DDoS attacks have used botnets just like this — proving that the bad guys are multiplying and, perhaps, gearing up for bigger things. Prevention is better than the cure There are no easy answers to the question of how to secure IoT smart devices — especially at the ‘budget conscious’ end of the market. That’s why we expect that these DDoS attacks will continue to proliferate, meaning that targeted DDoS attacks of increasing scale and frequency will almost certainly occur as a result. So how can retailers defend themselves against the threat of an attack on Black Friday? Organisations have to use a combination of measures to safeguard against even the most determined DDoS attack. These include: Limiting the impact of an attack by absorbing DDoS traffic targeted at the application layer, deflecting all DDoS traffic targeted at the network layer and authenticating valid traffic at the network edge. Choosing an ISP that connects directly to large carriers and other networks, as well as internet exchanges — allowing traffic to pass efficiently. Employing the services of a network-based DDoS provider — with a demonstrable track record of mitigating DDoS attacks and sinking significant data floods. This will safeguard specific IP address ranges that organisations want to protect. Black Friday will be a big day for retailers — and hopefully for all the right reasons. But in an increasingly digital world, consideration needs to be given to the IT infrastructure that underpins today’s retail business and the security strategy that protects it. Source: http://www.itproportal.com/features/three-ways-to-prevent-a-ddos-disaster-this-black-friday/

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Three ways to prevent a DDoS disaster this Black Friday

It’s time: Patch Network Time Protocol before it loses track of time

Synchronise your watches before someone exploits DDOS bug, or nine other nasties The maintainers of the Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) have pushed out a patch for ten security vulnerabilities.…

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It’s time: Patch Network Time Protocol before it loses track of time

Why you should have a DDoS defence

Duncan Hughes explains the best methods to use to effectively protect businesses and ensure networks can stand up to a DDoS attack. The latest headlines have shown that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been growing in both size and complexity. In the last month, two high-profile DDoS attacks reached more than 600 Gbps and 1 Tbps. The most recent attacks have ranked among the largest DDoS attacks on record. The ferocity and frequency of these attacks has suggested that this trend is only set to upsurge in the near future. With the most recent DDoS attack targeting the service provider, rather than a specific website, resulting in Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify and others being severely affected, it is clear to see how DDoS attackers are increasing their capability.  In my opinion, this most recent DDoS incident is a new spin on an old attack, as the bad guys are finding new and innovative ways to cause further discontent. It was an interesting point to see that the bad guys are moving upstream for DDoS attacks on the DNS providers, instead of just on sites or applications.  What is also interesting to see is that threat actors are leveraging unsecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices to launch some of these large DDoS attacks. The immediate solution is for manufacturers to eliminate the use of default or easy passwords to access and manage smart or connected devices. That said, consumer adoption will be tricky, but this change is critical for the greater security of all. This response will hinder many of the global botnets that are created and deployed for malicious use. DDoS attacks can impact businesses of all types and sizes. Retail stores, enterprises and service providers can all find themselves at threat of the DDoS crosshairs. According to a recent report commissioned by A10 Networks in its A10 Networks  IDG Connect report – everyone is a target, but some types of businesses come under fire more frequently. Entertainment and gambling are targeted the most targetted, with 33 percent of DDoS attacks aimed at that industry, followed by advertising media and web content (28 percent), and traditional and online retail (22 percent).  The financial impact of DDoS attacks for businesses can be severe and a recent Ponemon Institute study revealed that between 2011 and 2016, the costs associated with a DDoS attack swelled by 31 percent, with some larger attacks exceeding US$2 million (£1.6 million) due to lost revenue, business disruption and other hard costs. Brand and reputation damage, can also have a lasting effect which cannot be financially measured.  The IDG Connect report found the average company suffers 15 DDoS attacks per year (some averaging as many as 25 DDoS attacks annually), and the average attack causes at least 17 hours of disruption, whether that’s downtime, latency, denied customer access or crashes. That’s 255 hours of disruption a year, can businesses afford this level of interruption? I would suggest that the answer is probably not. So to be properly prepared, businesses must brace for the worst-case scenario. The following points below outline four main steps in prevention to ensure networks can stand up to a DDoS attack: Be proactive. Do not wait for a major crash. You may already be experiencing attacks with slowed or blocked customer access, which can result in lost sales or dissatisfied customers.  Beware of the “world of denial.” Ask tough questions. What do your customer satisfaction metrics reveal? Do you see indicators of lost sales? What’s the real cost of service restoration?  Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Invest in sufficient DDoS protection and mitigation solutions early, before a major attack strikes.  Defend against all vectors. Consider dedicated multi-vector DDoS protection using in-path mitigation, coupled with integrated threat intelligence, for the best accuracy. Include hybrid protection with a cloud-bursting service as an extra precaution to combat volumetric attacks.  Businesses of all sizes need to be able to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks particularly ‘multi-vector’ ones that simultaneously attack the bandwidth, application and network layers. This is all the more important because we have all seen that major DDoS attacks are taking place – and growing exponentially in size. Not only are the implications of this profound but these attacks are leveraging botnets comprising hundreds of thousands of unsecured IoT devices.  With industry analysts expecting IoT usage to grow substantially the issue is coming into ever more sharper focus. Referring back to the Ponemon research, some of the main findings really bring to light the extent of the problem. From the research in which over 1000 IT and IT security practitioners in North America and EMEA participated, one of the most frightening takeaways was that organisations are highly concerned that they aren’t able to detect and stop encrypted attacks, but aren’t sure where to start or how best to defend their business. Clearly a lot needs to be done within the industry to protect against cyber-security threats.  The one key thing that should be reflected from this is to not let your network remain unprotected against such attacks that are noticeably increasing and could end up being more costly for your business in the long run. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/why-you-should-have-a-ddos-defence/article/570782

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Why you should have a DDoS defence