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Russian bank Alfa Says it was Under DNS Botnet Attacks

The Russian banking giant Alfa announced, in a press statement, that hackers targeted its cyber infrastructure in a large-scale DNS Botnet attack. The purpose appears to have been to make it seem as though the bank had been communicating with the Trump Organization. The bank is now asking U.S. to assist it to uncover the culprits. On Friday, the bank revealed that their servers were under three cyber attacks targeting the domain name server (DNS) since mid-February. It is unclear who was behind these attacks; the details show unknown hackers allegedly used Amazon and Google servers to send requests to a Trump Organization server posing to look like they came from Alfa Bank, pushing the Trump server to respond back to the bank. An Alfa Bank spokesperson said: “The cyber attacks are an attempt by unknown parties to manufacture the illusion of contact between Alfa Bank’s DNS servers and ’Trump servers’’. Furthermore, Alfa Bank revealed that it is ready to work with the U.S. law enforcement agency to identify the individuals involved in the campaign. The bank has already hired Stroz Friedberg, a US-based cyber security firm to get into the depth of the matter. “The cyber attacks are an attempt by unknown parties to manufacture the illusion of contact between Alfa Bank’s DNS servers and ‘Trump servers,” an Alfa Bank representative said in a statement. “We have gone to the U.S. Justice Department and offered our complete cooperation to get to the bottom of this sham and fraud.” On February 18, 2017, the bank claims it experienced suspicious cyber activity from an unidentified third-party. Specifically, the unidentified third-party repeatedly sent suspicious DNS queries from servers in the U.S. to a Trump Organization server. The unidentified individuals made it look as though these queries originated from variants of MOSCow.ALFAintRa.nET. The use of upper and lower case indicated the human intervention in the process. Moreover, Alfa Bank says it received more than 1,340 DNS responses containing mail.trump-email.com.moscow.alfaintra.net. Last week, CNN reported that the FBI’s counterintelligence team was investigating if there was a computer server connection between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank during the U.S. election, according to sources close to the investigation. The bank has now denied that there was ever a conversation between both parties. Mark McArdle, CTO at cyber security company eSentire commented on the issue and said that: “A botnet is typically associated with an attack that leverages scale, as it can employ thousands (potentially millions with IoT devices) of devices and use them to coordinate an attack on a target. We’ve seen this with some big DDoS attacks. We also see botnets being used as platforms for large-scale spamming. However, the number of DNS connections reported in the Alfa Bank attacks (1,340 in once case) don’t indicate massive scale. A botnet, however, can be used to add another layer of obfuscation between you and your attacker. Following the breadcrumbs back could bring you to a PVR that has been hacked and is now part of a botnet. I suspect in this case, the botnet is being used more for obfuscation of identity than scale. The attackers may be using a botnet to send spoofed DNS requests to a legitimate Trump server using a spoofed “reply-to” address inside Alfa-Bank’s infrastructure. Spoofing DNS lookups is not very difficult since DNS is not authenticated, and the ability to spoof source addresses is unfortunately still available – all you need is a system to launch your attack from that is connected to the Internet via an ISP that doesn’t filter out spoofed source addresses. While this type of attack has been around for a while, what’s new in this case is that someone is using it to try and contrive evidence of a relationship where neither party sought one. Additionally, there is also reference in Alfa Bank’s statement about Spam messages from marketing@trumphotels.com. It’s also possible to spoof email (spammers do this all the time). A spoofed email could include a reference to a legitimate Trump Org server and a real connection would be established if a user clicked on it (or selected “show images” in the email). Again, this does not mean the email came from Trump Org, just that it was sent in order to attempt to solicit “a connection” between Trump Org and Alfa-Bank.” Either way, identity is difficult to determine unless cryptographic certificates are used, and ultimate hack attribution is even more difficult. This is not the first time that allegations surrounding Trump’s relations with Russia have emerged. Some believe Russia hacked the US election to give Trump a way to win the presidency while some believe that Russian media was involved in spreading fake news against Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton. Either way, nothing has been proven yet. Source: https://www.hackread.com/russia-alfa-bank-target-with-dns-botnet-attacks/

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Russian bank Alfa Says it was Under DNS Botnet Attacks

Nine Ways To Protect Your Technology Company From DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks can wreak havoc on your company’s efficiency if you’re not careful. The Mirai botnet — malware that can be used for large-scale network attacks — can often go undetected due to common oversights and lack of preparation. It may be daunting to think about how IoT devices that make your company run smoothly can be used against you; however, it doesn’t take much time to set up multiple precautions to prevent it. Below, executives from Forbes Technology Council highlight simple and cost-effective ways that you can safeguard your company from baleful botnets. 1. Start By Looking At Your Infrastructure There are many botnets, Mirai just happens to be one of the largest known ones. Technology companies need to start developing more secure products rather than security being an afterthought. Firms need to look at their internet infrastructure to funnel botnet traffic away from their core business to enable the business to function when these attacks occur. – Heeren Pathak, Vestmark 2. Understand That Anyone Can Be A Target It’s very important to understand that anyone can be a target, no matter if you are a big or small company. If being offline just for a few minutes can cause a big economical impact, then you definitely should find a trusted partner that offers good solutions to mitigate against DDoS attacks. There are some companies offering this kind of service, but a quick Google search should be handy. – Cesar Cerrudo, IOActive 3. Choose The Right Hosting Partners No matter your line of business, your public-facing websites are potential targets of massive DDoS attacks. For business without a dedicated team of security experts, it’s important to choose the right hosting partners. For many customers of AWS, you automatically received free protection against some forms of attacks similar to Mirai botnet with the release of AWS Shield in December of 2016. – Jamey Taylor, Ticketbiscuit, LLC 4. Monitor Your Traffic Companies need to be skeptical of any device they have hanging on their networks. The average company now needs to apply firewall rules on a device-by-device basis, anticipating the possibility of a printer, web camera or AV control system becoming infected. Smart traffic monitoring software and methods of quarantining devices should be commonplace. – Chris Kirby, Voices.com 5. Set Strong, Custom Passwords IT security organizations should ensure their IoT devices have no direct public management access from outside the network. If an IoT device must be managed remotely through publicly accessible IPs, change the management password on the device from the default to a strong, custom one. IT admins need to put intrusion prevention, gateway anti-malware and network sandbox solutions at the network perimeter. – Bill Conner, SonicWall 6. Don’t Rely On The Internet Nearly all consumer products are computer-based in today’s marketplace, which makes reliance on the internet dangerous to a product’s infrastructure. That said, Cloudflare, Akamai and Dynect are solution services that will act as a protective wall for your servers and prevent large-scale network attacks. – Pin Chen, ONTRAPORT 7. Have The Right Company Policies In Place Technology companies should have policies in place to make sure IoT devices default factory credentials are changed as soon as they are procured. Will this guarantee they will never get infected with Mirai botnet? No. But this basic step along with modifying factory default privacy and security settings, firmware updates, audits, etc. will reduce the chances of an IoT device being infected. – Kartik Agarwal, TechnoSIP Inc 8. Cooperate And Act Mirai shows how an internet of everything can cause new kinds of net-quakes. Attackers can fire so much hostile traffic at one target that it takes down entirely unrelated sites nearby, in effect, causing major collateral damage. Unfortunately, there’s no simple defensive fix — it takes cooperation and active network control to deflect traffic tsunamis. – Mike Lloyd, RedSeal 9. Be Prepared Large-scale network attacks are not going away, and technology companies need to ensure they’re prepared. Doing a security audit of what protections are currently in place, and looking for existing holes that need to be plugged, is a good place to start. Also, make sure any IoT devices used at your company have security in place to prevent them from becoming part of this bot army. – Neill Feather, SiteLock Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/03/16/nine-ways-to-protect-your-technology-company-from-ddos-attacks/2/#73d67f6a7178

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Nine Ways To Protect Your Technology Company From DDoS Attacks

Standards and Security: The Great DDoS Challenge

Whether or not you work in IT security, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more visible by the day. In the last three months of 2016 alone, DDoS attacks greater than 100Gbps increased by 140% year-on-year, according to a recent report. This growth isn’t expected to decelerate any time soon. The damage inflicted by DDoS attacks in the past year has been seen across various aspects of the online world. We often hear of news sites and political campaigns being taken offline, but this is now moving towards more mission critical operations in hospitals, banks and universities. The most significant example in recent months is the DDoS attack against Domain Name Service (DNS) provider Dyn. Let’s take a look at this case and determine the potential impact that conformance to existing standards could have had on the incident. IoT and the DDoS dilemma The Dyn attack in October 2016 impacted a whole host of major websites including Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Spotify and Github, and was widely reported as the largest of its kind ever recorded. Its substantial impact was down to the huge number of connected devices used in the attack – not just laptops and PCs but routers, printers and baby monitors that make up the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). These devices were deliberately infected with the Mirai malware in order to create a botnet to carry out the momentous attack. It’s important to be clear on the mechanisms of the Mirai malware if we’re to consider the potential impact of standards on the attack. By using known passwords, it is able to search for susceptible IoT devices before infecting them with the malware. As a result, the device becomes part of a botnet which is capable of launching DDoS attacks from all of its infected devices. Seven out of 12 DDoS attacks in Q4 2016 were down to the Mirai botnet. In the Dyn case, it was estimated that the attack involved 100,000 malicious endpoints. The botnet sent around 1 TB of traffic per second to the company’s servers, meaning legitimate requests were denied. Mitigating DDoS attacks This attack was fundamentally a consequence of the devices involved still retaining their default password. There are two arguments as to where culpability lies in this instance. Some blame the users for not changing the default passwords once they were connected. Others feel more responsibility should fall on the manufacturers to ensure operators understand the importance of changing default passwords. In fact, in some cases manufacturers were distributing products with well-known default passwords and no option to change the password without purchasing a new product. In any case, these devices were vulnerable and open to attack. Standards: the silver bullet? DDoS attacks are becoming far more sophisticated so it’s essential that hardware and software manufacturers start to seriously consider standards to address the potential security risks in the growing Internet of Things. One key standard is the Open Trusted Technology Provider Standard, or O-TTPS, which addresses these issues around supply chain security and product integrity. Recently approved as ISO/IEC 20243, this set of best practices can be applied from design to disposal, throughout the supply chain and the entire product life cycle. Standards like the O-TTPS aim to reduce the risk of tainted (e.g., malware-enabled and malware-capable) and counterfeit hardware and software components from entering the supply chains and making their way into products that connect to the internet. This specific standard also has a conformance program that identifies Open Trusted Technology Providers who conform. The vendors involved in the Dyn incident could have followed the O-TTPS’ requirements for vulnerability analysis and notification of newly discovered and exploitable product weaknesses. If they had done so from the outset, the vulnerability that allowed the Mirai botnet to grow would have been caught early. The attack vector would have subsequently been blocked and the impact on businesses and consumers significantly reduced. Securing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on which our business enterprises and critical infrastructures depend is a serious problem that becomes even more daunting and complex as we extend those environments to IoT devices. ICT and IoT devices are developed, manufactured, and assembled in multiple countries around the world. They are then distributed and connected globally. Providing international standards like the O-TTPS (ISO/IEC 20243) that all IT providers and their technology partners (e.g., component suppliers, manufacturers, value-add resellers) in their supply chains can adopt, regardless of locale, is one significant way to increase cyber and supply chain security. Standards can’t categorically prevent the inception of DDoS attacks, but what they can do is mitigate their effectiveness and limit their economic damage. The adoption of a universal product integrity and supply chain security standard is a major first step in the continued battle to secure ICT products and IoT devices and their associated end users. Further steps need to be taken in the form of collaboration, whereby we reach a point where we can recognise which technology and technology providers can be trusted and which cannot. But adhering to global standards provides a powerful tool for technology providers and component suppliers around the world to combat current and future DDoS attacks. Source: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/opinions/standards-security-great-ddos/

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Standards and Security: The Great DDoS Challenge

DDoS Attacks; Can You Find Who Dunnit?

Kaspersky Lab and B2B International recently polled 4,000 businesses among 25 countries that had been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack; 40% of respondents said they believed that a rival business had launched the attack. Only 20% of DDoS victims blamed foreign governments and secret service organizations, and another 20% suspect disgruntled former employees. These are interesting statistics, given that it is extremely difficult to determine who launched a DDoS attack. Has law enforcement found any trends to support this belief that many DDoS attacks are caused by industrial sabotage? Maybe, maybe not. When it comes to hacking—especially DDoS hacks—law enforcers seldom find the perpetrators, because it is extremely difficult for anyone to trace the origins of DDoS attacks. The source is typically 1) a legitimate third-party server, running a service which has been leveraged by an attacker as part of a reflection/amplification attack, or 2) a direct flood attack from a single device, or 3) a botnet of many devices in which the IP source addresses are easily spoofed to ones that cannot be associated with the attacker. Motivations and Means Hacker motivations vary; some are political, others are financial. Certainly, if a business wanted to inflict financial or reputational harm upon a competitor, a DDoS attack would do the trick. After all, it is easy and relatively inexpensive for anyone to rent a botnet or DDoS-for-hire service to carry out a DDoS attack. Yes, it’s possible, but do victims have any evidence to back up their suspicions, or are they just paranoid about a rival business? Likewise, the threat of a disgruntled, malicious insider or former employee is a reasonable concern. But again, it is hard to trace the breadcrumbs. Speculating about “who dunnit” is usually pointless; there’s little hope of hunting down the perpetrator(s), and it costs time and money to conduct an investigation. Even if the perps are brought to justice, they’ve already damaged your business. The moral of the story is that it’s useless to close the proverbial stable door after the horse has left; the best approach is to prevent an attack by having DDoS protection in place. Source: http://www.dos-mitigation.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

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DDoS Attacks; Can You Find Who Dunnit?

IoT DDoS Reaches Critical Mass

In the wake of the Mirai botnet activity that dominated the end of last year, the “DDoS of Things (DoT)”, where bad actors use IoT devices to build botnets which fuel colossal, volumetric DDoS attacks, has become a growing phenomenon. According to A10 Networks, the DoT is reaching critical mass—recent attacks have leveraged hundreds of thousands of IoT devices to attack everything from large service providers and enterprises to gaming services, media and entertainment companies. In its research, it uncovered that there are roughly 3,700 DDoS attacks per day, and the cost to an organization can range anywhere from $14,000 to $2.35 million per incident. In all, almost three quarters of all global brands, organizations and companies (73%) have been victims of a DDoS attack. And, once a business is attacked, there’s an 82% chance they’ll be attacked again: A full 45% were attacked six or more times. There were 67 countries targeted by DDoS attacks in Q3 2016 alone, with the top three being China (72.6%), the US (12.8%) and South Korea (6.3%). A10 found that 75% of today’s DDoS attacks target multiple vectors, with a 60/40 percentage split of DDoS attacks that target an organization’s application and network layers, respectively. Meanwhile, DDoS-for-hire services are empowering low-level hackers with highly damaging network-layer bursts of 30 minutes or less. This relentless attack strategy systemically hurts corporations as colossal DDoS attacks have become the norm too; 300 Gbps used to be considered massive, but today, attacks often push past 1 Tbps thanks to the more than 200,000 infected IoT devices that have been used to build global botnets for hire. No industry is immune: While 57% of global DDoS attacks target gaming companies, any business that performs online services is a target. Software and technology were targeted 26% of the time; financial services 5%; media and entertainment, 4%; internet and telecom, 4%; and education, 1%. Source: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/iot-ddos-reaches-critical-mass/

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IoT DDoS Reaches Critical Mass

How Homeland Security plans to end the scourge of DDoS attacks

The agency is working on a multimillion dollar effort to protect the country’s most critical systems from distributed denial of service attacks, which are among the simplest digital assaults to carry out and the toughest to fight. MARCH 8, 2017 —In late October, in Surprise, Ariz., more than 100 phone calls bombarded the police department’s emergency dispatch line. Calls also overwhelmed the nearby city of Peoria’s 911 system and departments across California and Texas. But each time a dispatcher picked up, no one was on the line – and there was no emergency. The Arizona district attorney’s office says the calls clogging 911 lines resulted from a digital prank, which triggered a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on critical emergency communication systems. The prosecutor’s office tracked the torrent of calls to 18-year-old hacker Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai. Now, he’s facing four counts of felony computer tampering. While Mr. Desai said he didn’t intend to cause any harm, according to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, he did surface a potentially devastating glitch in smartphone software that could exact damage on any number of sensitive and critical targets. Whenever anyone clicked a certain link on his webpage via a mobile device, their phone automatically dialed 911. While this kind of DDoS targeting 911 systems is unprecedented, it’s exactly the type of attack that national law enforcement officials have been concerned about for years. In fact, the Homeland Security Department (DHS) has been working on technology to protect 911 centers from DDoS and telephone-based, or TDoS, attacks for three years. The Arizona incident proved someone can “cause a large number of phones or a large number of computers or a large number of whatever connected device to start generating these calls,” says Dan Massey, program manager in the cybersecurity division of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate. “It went from how much damage can I do from my phone” to a situation where, with just a handful of people, “if all of our phones started calling some victim, whether that’s 911 or a bank or a hospital, that can get very fast and very big.” DDoS attacks are both among the simplest forms of cyberattacks to carry out and the most difficult to defend against. They are designed to direct an overwhelming amount of digital traffic – whether from robocalls or web traffic – at targets to overwhelm them so they can’t handle legitimate business. Writ large, there has been an exponential increase in the intensity and frequency of DDoS attacks over the past six months and critical infrastructure components are possible future targets, according to DHS. For a sense of the scale of today’s DDoS attacks, compare the 100 megabits per second Internet speed at a typical company to the more than 1 million megabits (1 terabit) per second speed of a DDoS attack against Web hosting company Dyn in October. The attack, which drew power from insecure webcams and other internet-connected devices, knocked out widely used online services like Netflix, Twitter, and Spotify for hours. Such massive web DDoS assaults may also become a problem for 911, as the country moves toward a next generation 911 system that uses mapping services to locate callers and can support voice, text, data, and video communication. “What you’re seeing is a convergence of the traditional internet with the phone system and next generation 911 is a great example of that,” says Massey. “DDoS attacks and/or TDoS attacks kind of blend together a little bit there.” To help combat the problem, the department has given out $14 million in grants for DDoS prevention studies, including phone-based attacks. Some of that funding is piloting initiatives to stop phone-based attacks at 911 centers in Miami/Dade County and the City of Houston, as well as at a large bank that the department wouldn’t identify. So far, DHS efforts have yielded, among other things, a DDoS early warning system to flag organizations that an attack may be coming, and alerting them to adjust internet network settings to defend against an onslaught of traffic. Additionally, DHS-funded research from tech firm SecureLogix produced a prototype that can thwart phony telephone calls sent to a 911 system or other critical phone operation. The model attempts to detect bogus calls by monitoring for clues that indicate an incoming call is fake. “As we have seen, it is simple to flood a 911 center, enterprise contact center, hospital, or other critical voice system with TDoS calls,” says Mark Collier, SecureLogix chief technology officer. “The research is essential to get ahead” because the assailants “are generating more attacks, the attacks are more sophisticated, and the magnitude of the attacks is increasing. “ To be sure, the race to keep digital adversaries out of the country’s 911 system faces obstacles, some of which are outside the jurisdiction of Homeland Security and dispatch centers. The DHS DDoS defense program is “a good start,” but one “challenge in defending certain types of critical infrastructure is the fact that emergency services like 911 must serve anyone – immediately,” per Federal Communications Commission rules, “due to their life saving nature,” said Mordechai Guri, research and development head at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University Cyber-Security Research Center. “The approach of blocking the DDoS originators must be backed by a change in the laws and regulations.” Before the October attacks on the Arizona 911 systems, he and fellow Ben-Gurion researchers warned that DDoS attacks launched from cellphones could pose a significant threat to emergency services. During one experiment, it took fewer than 6,000 hacked phones to clog emergency services in a simulated US state, the academics wrote in a September 2016 paper. Such an attack can potentially last for days. The very nature of the 911 system makes shutting out any callers potentially dangerous, and some alternatives, like requiring a person in distress to authenticate themselves for assistance, are not viable, says Massey of DHS. “We really need to make sure that we’re not missing a critical 911 call,” he says. “So that’s a challenge for the project to make sure that we’re not misclassifying people.” Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2017/0308/How-Homeland-Security-plans-to-end-the-scourge-of-DDoS-attacks

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How Homeland Security plans to end the scourge of DDoS attacks

7 Security Steps To Defend Your Company Fram A DDoS Attack

Of all the cybersecurity threats today’s businesses face, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are among the most complex and devastating. This type of breach involves multiple compromised systems that work in conjunction to shut down service. Although security technology is becoming more sophisticated, so are hackers, and you don’t want to be caught unprepared if (or more likely, when) your company’s data gets compromised. Below, a few members of Forbes Technology Council each offer one important prevention measure to help your IT department defend against a DDoS attack. 1. Continue To Add Layers Of Defense Remain vigilant, continuing to add layers of security as they become available. Also provide your department with signs to look for so they have a better idea of potential threats. This provides for a much more proactive approach to security. – Chalmers Brown, Due 2. Practice Your Response Plan Have a plan on what to do and who should do it, then do a dry run against it a few times a year. Go further than just your IT team – involve your vendors, executive team, etc. and ask for feedback on what would help them help you in the face of a DDoS attack. Update your plan each time. This practice helps your team execute fast and has the added benefit of showing those around you that you’re prepared. – Brian Fritton, Patch of Land 3. Use A Web Application Firewall (WAF) A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is your best line of defense against a DDoS attack. It acts like an antivirus that blocks all malicious attacks on your website. It sits above your application at the network level to provide protection before the attacks reach your server. Using a WAF not only protects you against DDoS attacks, but also improves application performance and enhances user experience. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster 4. Leverage Cloud Services And Educate Yourself Continually Cloud providers will handle security better than you can do in-house — especially if you’re a target. Even the U.S. government leverages cloud providers to consult and augment security. Amazon has DDoS mitigation services, and their DNS is both inexpensive and secure. Educate yourself to stay aware of the potential threats and mitigation services that are available to you. – Tim Maliyil, AlertBoot 5. Help Employees Educate Each Other Since our inception, we’ve had a personal ‘buddy’ assigned to any new team member. They are responsible for teaching the new person all of the dos and don’ts of the department, and also get them more culturally aligned with the team/company. – Pin Chen, ONTRAPORT 6. Get Senior Management Involved In Security Planning It is critical for companies to include senior management in DDoS prevention planning. Most attacks are due to poor ongoing security practices or setups. Ransomware attacks alone cost over $1B in 2017. Companies should consider cloud solutions that offer cost-effective managed security solutions, with ongoing security and maintenance updates, so that they can focus on building their core business. – Cristina Dolan, Trading Screen 7. Segment Your IoT Devices Behind A Firewall While DDoS attacks are difficult to prevent, you can minimize the impact by enabling DDoS and flood protection on your organization’s firewalls. To restore order quickly in the event of an attack, develop a DDoS response plan. To minimize the chance of your IoT infrastructure being used in a DDoS attack, make sure all IoT devices are segmented on a dedicated safe zone behind a firewall. – Bill Conner, SonicWall Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/03/07/7-security-steps-to-defend-your-company-fram-a-ddos-attack/#4a04a540408

Businesses blame rivals for DDoS attacks

Industrial sabotage is considered to be the most likely reason behind a distributed denial of service attack, a study has revealed More than 40% of businesses hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack worldwide believe their competitors were behind it, research by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International has revealed. Rival firms are considered more likely culprits than cyber criminals, which were cited as suspects by just 38% of DDoS victims on average. Industrial sabotage is considered to be the most likely reason behind a DDoS attack, coming out higher than political conspiracy and personal vendettas against a business. Typically, DDoS attacks target web servers and aim to make websites unavailable to users. Although no data is stolen, the interruption to the service can be costly in terms of lost business damage to reputation. For example, a massive DDoS attack on Luxembourg’s government servers that started on 27 February 2017 reportedly lasted more than 24 hours, and affected more than a hundred websites. The joint Kaspersky Lab, B2B International study, which polled 4,000 businesses in 25 countries, found that only 20% of DDoS victims overall blamed foreign governments and secret service organisations, with the same proportion suspecting disgruntled former employees. Companies in Asia Pacific are the most suspicious of competitors, with 56% blaming their rivals for DDoS attacks and 28% blaming foreign governments. Personal grudges also carry more suspicion in the region too, with 33% blaming former staff. In Western Europe, only 37% of companies suspect foul play by their competitors, with 17% blaming foreign governments. Looking at attitudes by business size, businesses at the smaller end of the scale are more likely to suspect their rivals of staging an experienced DDoS attack. The study found that 48% of small and medium business representatives believe this to be the case compared with only 36% of enterprises. In contrast, respondents from big companies put more blame on former employees and foreign governments. “DDoS attacks have been a threat for many years, and are one of the most popular weapons in a cyber criminals’ arsenal,” said Russ Madley, head of B2B at Kaspersky Lab UK. “The problem we face is that DDoS attacks can be set up cheaply and easily, from almost anyone, whether that be a competitor, a dismissed employee, socio-political protesters or just a lone wolf with a grudge. “It’s therefore imperative that businesses find an effective way to safeguard themselves from such attacks,” he said. Significant advances in DDoS attacks There were significant advances in DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2016, according to Kaspersky, with the longest DDoS attack in lasting 292 hours or 12.2 days, which set a record for 2016 and was significantly longer than the previous quarter’s maximum of 184 hours. The last quarter of 2016 also saw the first massive DDoS attacks using the Mirai IoT (internet of things) botnet technology, including attacks on Dyn’s Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure and on Deutsche Telekom, which knocked 900K Germans offline in November. There were also similar attacks on internet service providers (ISPs) in Ireland, the UK and Liberia, all using IoT devices controlled by Mirai technology and partly targeting home routers in an attempt to create new botnets. Stakeholders recognise lack of security in IoT devices According to Kaspersky, stakeholders worldwide, in particular in the US and EU, recognise the lack of security inherent in the functional design of IoT devices and the need to set up a common IoT security ecosystem. Kaspersky expects to see the emergence of further Mirai botnet modifications and a general increase in IoT botnet activity in 2017. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab also believe that the DDoS attacks seen so far are just a starting point initiated by various actors to draw up IoT devices into the actors’ own botnets, test drive Mirai technology and develop attack vectors. First, they demonstrate once again that financial services like the bitcoin trading and blockchain platforms CoinSecure of India and BTC-e of Bulgaria, or William Hill, one of Britain’s biggest betting sites, which took days to come back to full service, were at the highest risk in the fourth quarter and are likely to remain so throughout 2017. Second, cyber criminals have learnt to manage and launch very sophisticated, carefully planned, and constantly changing multi-vector DDoS attacks adapted to the mitigation policy and capacity of the attacked organisation. Kaspersky Lab’s analysis shows that the cybercriminals in several cases tracked in 2016 started with a combination of various attack vectors gradually checking out a bank’s network and web services to find a point of service failure. Once DDoS mitigation and other countermeasures were initiated, researchers said the attack vectors changed over a period of several days. DDoS enters its next stage of evolution Overall, they said these attacks show that the DDoS landscape entered the next stage of its evolution in 2016 with new technology, massive attack power, as well as highly skilled and professional cyber criminals. However, the Kaspersky researchers note that unfortunately, this tendency has not yet found its way into the cyber security policies of many organisations that are still not ready or are unclear about the necessary investments in DDoS protection services. Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450414239/Businesses-blame-rivals-for-DDoS-attacks

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Businesses blame rivals for DDoS attacks

Luxembourg government servers forced offline by DDoS attack

Authorities in Luxembourg have said that government servers had come under a DDoS attack on Monday. According to reports from the Luxemburger Wort, the attack started at 9.30 am, forcing the web servers of many state authorities offline or difficult to reach. Just over an hour later, the state-owned IT operator “Centre des Techniques de l’information de l’Etat” (CTIE) sent a message via Twitter, to confirm that the network was the victim of a DDoS attack. Reports by Luxemburg publication Paperjam said that over a hundred servers had been affected by the attack and that the attack impacted servers for more than 24 hours. Gilles Feith, chief of the CTIE government IT centre, said that this was the first-time Luxembourg authorities had been targeted to such an extent but could not confirm the origin of the attack. “Before it gets back to normal, it may take some time to wait,” said Feith, adding it may take “a few hours or even days.” Stephanie Weagle, VP, Corero Network Security, told SC Media UK that DDoS attacks have become many things over the last decade; weapons of cyberwarfare, security breach diversions and service impacting strategies. “The motivations for these attack campaigns are endless – financial, political, nation-state, extortion and everything in between,” she said. Weagle added: “Continuing to rely on traditional IT security solutions, and or human intervention to deal with the growing DDoS epidemic will continue to prove devastating to businesses. As recent events have confirmed once again, proactive, automated protection is required to keep the Internet connected business available in the face of DDoS attacks.” Pascal Geenens, Radware EMEA security evangelist, told SC Magazine that these days anyone has access to booter or stresser services or DDoS-for-hire. “Services are available on the Darknet as well as on the Clearnet and for just a couple of Euros one can launch a DDoS attack by a click of the mouse,” he said. Geenens added the release of the Mirai source code last October was a turning point. “We saw a huge rise in the number of botnets leveraging IoT devices (mostly IP cams and residential routers) and attacks grew in size. A 1Tbps attack should not come as a surprise today, the potential certainly is there.” He said the motivation behind DDoS attacks can be many things, combined with the user-friendly experience and low price provided by the services to perform them, the spectrum of motivations is only widening. “The main drive of most cyber-crime is still money, we have witnessed countless cyber-ransoms leveraging DDoS. This attack could be precursor of a larger RDoS. Attackers typically provide some proof they have the ability to interrupt the service, which is typically followed by a message with a demand for ransom and if the victim does not pay there will be an ultimatum followed by a much larger and longer attack.” Geenens said the number and size of DDoS attacks is growing and we do not predict this trend will slow in the near future. “My advice to any online business or government, it is five past 12, everybody is a potential target. Make DDoS protection a priority. UEBA is another technology that should be part of the strategy for organisations that carry important or sensitive information.” Source: https://www.scmagazineuk.com/luxembourg-government-servers-forced-offline-by-ddos-attack/article/641003/

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Luxembourg government servers forced offline by DDoS attack

74 Percent of Companies that Suffer a Data Breach Don’t Know How It Happened

And just two thirds of IT pros say their current IT security budget is sufficient, a recent survey found. According to the results of a recent survey [PDF] of 250 IT professionals, 34 percent of companies in the U.S. were breached in the past year, and 74 percent of the victims don’t know how it happened. The survey, conducted by iSense Solutions for Bitdefender, also found that two thirds of companies would pay an average of $124,000 to avoid public shaming after a breach, while 14 percent would pay more than $500,000. One third of CIOs say their job has become more important in their company’s hierarchy, and another third say their job has been completely transformed in the past few years. And while nine in 10 IT decision makers see IT security as a top priority for their companies, only two thirds say their IT security budget is suifficient — the remainder say they would need an increase of 34 percent on average to deliver efficient security policies. Cloud security spending increased in the past year at 48 percent of companies, while the budget for other security activities remained the same. On average, respondents say only 64 percent of cyber attacks can be stopped, detected or prevented with their current resources. Separately, a survey of 403 IT security professionals in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Europe found that only three percent of organizations have the technology in place and only 10 percent have the skills in place to address today’s leading attack types. The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Tripwire, also found that just 44 percent of organizations have the skills, and 43 percent have the technology, to address ransomware attacks effectively. “Most organizations can reasonably handle one or two key threats, but the reality is they need to be able to defend against them all,” Tripwire senior director of IT security and risk strategy Tim Erlin said in a statement. “As part of the study, we asked respondents which attack types have the potential to do the greatest amount of damage to their organization. While ransomware was cited as the top threat, all organizations were extremely concerned about phishing, insider threats, vulnerability exploitation and DDoS attacks.” Respondents felt most confident in their skills to handle phishing (68 percent) and DDoS attacks (60 percent), but less confident in their abilities to deal with insider threats (48 percent) and vulnerability exploitations (45 percent). Similarly, respondents felt more confident in the technology they have in place to address phishing (56 percent) and DDoS attacks (63 percent), but less confident in the technology to address insider threats (41 percent) and vulnerabilities (40 percent). A separate survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers by Kaspersky Lab and HackerOne found that 22 percent of respondents are more likely to make a purchase if they know a company hired hackers to help boost security. Knowing what they do about their own company’s cyber security practices, just 36 percent of respondents said they would choose to be a customer of their own employer. Almost two in five U.S. adults don’t expect companies to pay a ransom if hit by ransomware. When asked what types of data they would expect a company to pay a ransom for, 43 percent expect companies to do so for employee Social Security numbers, followed by customer banking details (40 percent) and employee banking details (39 percent). Source: http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/74-percent-of-companies-that-suffer-a-data-breach-dont-know-how-it-happened.html

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74 Percent of Companies that Suffer a Data Breach Don’t Know How It Happened