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Dating Website Plenty Of Fish Hit By DDoS Attack

Add Plenty of Fish to the list of technology companies whose websites have come under DDoS attacks from unknown cybercriminals in recent days. The company says that it was the victim of a five-hour attack today that affected approximately 1 million users. Initially, the attacks took down the Plenty of Fish website, then later the company’s mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Android. As per the usual M.O., the attacker first contacted the site to warn them of the impending DDoS at 6:45 AM PT, then the attack started at 8:13 AM PT where it continued for several hours, off and on. The company says it was only recently able to mitigate the flood, and is now fully up and running again. The attack was 40 Gigabits in size, which makes it larger than the attack which took Meetup.com offline for nearly five days last month – that attack was “only” 8 GBps, the company had said at the time. These DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service attacks) have become more powerful as of late, thanks to the way attackers are exploiting older internet protocols like Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to increase their size. That seems to be the case here, given the size of the attack that Plenty of Fish suffered. Other companies that have been attacked more recently include TypePad, Basecamp, Vimeo, Bit.ly, and as of this past weekend, marketing analytics software provider Moz, to name just a few. In Plenty of Fish’s case, the attacker demanded $2,000 to have them stop the attack. Want to know if your company is about to have a bad day? Look for an email like this: From: dalem leinda Date: Tue, May 20, 2014 at 12:09 PM Subject: Re: DDoS attack, warning If you feel ready to negotiate, I’m still here. For something around $2k, I will stop the current attack and I will not resume further attacks. The amount depends on how quickly you can make the payment. Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/20/dating-website-plenty-of-fish-hit-by-ddos-attack/?ncid=rss

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/

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SNMP could be the future for DDoS attacks

5 People Arrested for Launching DDOS Attacks on Systems of Chinese Gaming Company

A total of five individuals have been arrested by Chinese authorities on suspicion of being behind distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks launched against the systems of a Shanghai-based online gaming company. According to police in Shanghai ‘s Xuhui District, cited by Ecns.cn, the first suspect, surnamed Wu, was arrested in January, after the targeted company provided authorities with information needed to track him down. Wu told investigators that he had been hired by one of the targeted company’s competitors, an Internet firm based in the Henan Province operated by an individual called Tu. Tu’s firm offered not only online games, but also hacking services. The individuals he hired would hack into the systems of various organizations and use the hijacked computers to launch DDOS attacks against various targets. The attacks launched against the Shanghai online games company are said to have resulted in damage of close to 10 million Yuan ($1.6 million / €1.16 million). The attacks were aimed at the login page for an online game and prevented paying customers from accessing their accounts. Police detained Wu, Tu and three other individuals suspected of being responsible for the cyberattacks. The company operated by Tu is believed to be involved in other illegal activities as well, including hacking, distribution of obscene materials, and hosting illegal ads. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/5-People-Arrested-for-Launching-DDOS-Attacks-on-Systems-of-Chinese-Gaming-Company-441863.shtml

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5 People Arrested for Launching DDOS Attacks on Systems of Chinese Gaming Company

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/

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Point DNS blitzed by mystery DDoS attack assault

Majority of UK firms unprepared for DDoS attacks, study finds

New research released by Neustar suggests that the majority of UK businesses are unprepared to cope with the threat of DDoS attacks. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a common method for cyberattacks to disrupt an online businesses. A DDoS attack uses compromised computer systems to attack a single target, sending traffic from multiple points of origin in a flow, which often overwhelms a system, causing it to deny authentic traffic access to services. According to research released by Neustar, a third of UK businesses estimate losses of £240,000 per day when hit with DDoS attacks. After surveying 331 companies in the United Kingdom across numerous industries including financial services, technology, and the public sector, the analytics provider says larger DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent with a 200 percent increase in attacks affecting bandwidth between 1-20Gbps, in addition to a significant increase in attacks on bandwidth with a magnitude of 100Gbps or more. Neustar’s report, “ United Kingdom DDoS Attacks & Impact Report. 2014: The Danger Deepens ,” also states that DDoS attacks are a “growing threat to organisations with potentially calamitous consequences for companies” without proper protection. Not only can DDoS attacks have an immediate impact on sales and business revenue, they can have long-lasting detrimental effects on brand value, customer trust, and public reputation. Key findings from the survey include: DDoS attacks often disrupt multiple business units, with public-facing areas like call centres, customer service, and marketing absorbing over 40 percent of DDoS-attack related costs. Over 35 percent more UK companies were hit by DDoS attacks in 2013 compared with 2012. In 2013, there was an increased number of longer attacks, with 28 percent lasting up to two days or more. Once attacked, there is an estimated 69 percent chance of a repeat attack. While 31 percent of these companies were DDoS-attacked once, over 48 percent were targeted two to 10 times. In 2013, attacks requiring over six people to mitigate rose to 39 percent compared to 25 percent in 2012, a 56 percent increase. In addition, Neustar’s research highlights an increase in a trend dubbed “smokescreening.” These types of DDoS attacks are used by cybercriminals in order to divert IT department attention while malware and viruses are inserted within a business network, with the overall aim of stealing valuable data or funds. Rodney Joffe, Senior Vice President and Technology Fellow at Neustar commented: 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 250Gbps — 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. In February, Web performance company CloudFlare reported the mitigation of a DDoS attack on a French website which reached a record-setting attack of at least 325Gbps, and a potential reach of 400Gbps. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/majority-of-uk-firms-unprepared-for-ddos-attacks-study-finds-7000029178/

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Majority of UK firms unprepared for DDoS attacks, study finds

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/

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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

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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

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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/

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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/

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UK webhost 123-Reg in DDOS attack