Tag Archives: stop-ddos

The big data era for DDoS protection has arrived

Avi Freedman discusses the use of big data to cope with the increasingly large scale DDoS attacks. If you weren’t aware of just how “big” DDoS has gotten, the recent attack on Dyn (hopefully) serves as a wake-up call. Within the last month we’ve seen multiple 500 Gbps+ attacks launched by competing IoT botnets. DDoS is now hyperscale! So if DDoS is so big, why are defensive solutions so small? By small, I mean based on relatively limited, single server architectures, rather than on cloud-scale technology. After all, if you search today for any sort of DDoS defence solution, you’re going to be looking nearly exclusively at a set of physical appliances. Even cloud-based DDoS services are based on stacks of appliances, just operated at service provider PoPs. One reason is there’s no practical way around using ASICs and network processors to perform the variety of packet and traffic flow inspections needed to “scrub” IP traffic clean of DDoS packets at high bit rates. However, scrubbing internet traffic of the bad stuff is just one half of the DDoS defence story. Before you scrub, first you have to find the bad stuff . And the detection layer is where the “smallness” of traditional DDoS protection approaches has reached the end of the road. Appliance-based DDoS detection has hit its ceiling In the out of band DDoS protection architectures which are most common today, a detection appliance receives traffic summaries (NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX) and BGP routing data detects attacks based on that inbound data, then signals to mitigation layers to scrub the traffic in question. The problem with this isn’t necessarily the overall architecture, but the detection appliance’s compute and storage limitations. A multi-core CPU with NxGB of RAM and some TB of storage is a lot of power for a laptop, but not so much when dealing with huge volumes of traffic flow data. It takes most of the compute power just converting binary wire to text/numeric data. So a ton of compromises must be made in analysing the data to detect attacks, leading to fairly substantial inaccuracies. Big data helps DDoS detection sccuracy The application of big data to DDoS detection is transformative for accuracy, based on two factors. The first factor is how comprehensively the data is examined. For example, to perform any kind of baselining, it’s common for appliances to have to segment traffic flow data based on which router exported the flow records. So let’s say a host IP is being hit by a DDoS attack, but it’s coming in via multiple routers. Instead of seeing a large bump of network-wide traffic going to that host, the detection appliance will see a small bump of traffic across several routers — none of which will trigger any alert or mitigation. A big data approach doesn’t have the computing constraints, so it can always look at network-wide traffic, and so it will naturally notice attacks that would otherwise get missed. The second factor has to do with automation. With compute-constrained appliances, administrators either have to manually configure and maintain many individual IP addresses to baseline, or worse, configure cumulative baselining against a CIDR block, which severely dilutes accuracy. With big data scale, it’s possible to have an adaptive approach to baselining, where the system continuously figures out the set of IPs that are “interesting” based on how much total traffic they’re receiving within a given segment of time, then baselines and evaluates them for anomalies. Overall, big data capabilities have proven to increase DDoS detection and mitigation accuracy by 30 percent or more. Of course, just knowing that big data helps doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to achieve. Not all of the many big data platforms and technologies are suitable for DDoS detection, and not all IT or network teams have time and expertise to build a system. Some keys to building big data-powered DDoS detection are to ensure that the system can ingest streaming flow data at high rates; plan sufficient storage to retain data for a relatively long period of time to allow for network-wide anomaly detection; and allow for ad-hoc queries so that there is flexibility both in detection policies as well as forensic analyses to cope with both known and zero-day exploits. Despite these challenges, the good news is that big data technology, platforms and expertise are proliferating. DDoS is hyperscale, but big data can help defensive strategies scale to meet the challenge. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/the-big-data-era-for-ddos-protection-has-arrived/article/569500/

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The big data era for DDoS protection has arrived

BlackNurse Attack Lets Lone Computers Take Down Whole Networks

DDoS attacks generally rely on big numbers to get results. Hundreds of thousands of devices, millions of IP addresses all unleashing coordinated blasts of data at another device to bring it to its knees. A BlackNurse denial-of-service attack doesn’t need a massive army of zombies to be effective. The BlackNurse attack is much more efficient than the DDoS attacks that crippled security researcher Brian Krebs’ website and the DNS servers at Dyn. Some recent DDoS attacks have seen traffic peak at more than 1 Tbps. A BlackNurse attack has the ability to disrupt by sending just a fraction of that volume. As little as 21 Mbps can be enough to take down a firewall, according to security firm Netresec. What’s different about BlackNurse that allows it to inflict so much damage with so little effort? It’s the type of traffic it utilizes. BlackNurse directs Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets, which have been used in other DDoS attacks in the past. BlackNurse uses a specific type — ICMP type 3 code 3. An attack from a single laptop could, theoretically, knock an entire business offline, though it’s not likely to be a very large business. In their blog post, Netresec calls out firewalls made by Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Sonicwall, and Zyxel as being at risk. Most of the devices Netresec reports as being vulnerable to a BlackNurse attack (like the Cisco ASA 5506 and Zyxel Zywall USG50) were designed for small office or home office use. That said, TDC, a Denmark-based company that offers DDoS protection services to businesses, has seen enterprise-grade gear impacted. “We had expected that professional firewall equipment would be able to handle the attack,” they wrote, adding that they’ve seen around 100 of these attacks launched against their customers. TDC also notes that BlackNurse has the potential to create a lot of havoc. In Denmark’s IP space alone they discovered 1.7 million devices that respond to the ICMP requests that the BlackNurse attack leverages. If even a small percentage of those 1.7 million devices are vulnerable, the effects of a coordinated, large-scale attack could be disastrous. And that’s just Denmark. Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2016/11/14/blacknurse-attack-lets-lone-computers-take-down-whole-networks/#6d27bd961999

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BlackNurse Attack Lets Lone Computers Take Down Whole Networks

5 major Russian banks repel massive DDoS attack

At least five Russian major banks came under a continuous hacker attack, although online client services were not disrupted. The attack came from a wide-scale botnet involving at least 24,000 computers, located in 30 countries. The attack began Tuesday afternoon, and continued for two days straight, according to a source close to Russia’s Central Bank quoted by RIA Novosti. Sberbank confirmed the DDoS attack on its online services. “The attacks are conducted from botnets, consisting of tens of thousands computers, which are located in tens of countries,” Sberbank’s press service told RIA. The initial attack was rather massive and its power intensified over the course of the day. “We registered a first attack early in the morning … the next attack in the evening involved several waves, each of them was twice as powerful as the previous one. Bank’s cybersecurity noticed and located the attack in time. There have been no problems in client online services,” Sberbank representative said. Alfabank has also confirmed the fact of the attack, but called it a “weak” one. “There was an attack, but it was relatively weak. It did not affect Alfabank’s business systems in any way,” the bank told RIA Novosti. According to Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab, more than a half of the botnet devices were situated in the US, India, Taiwan and Israel, while the attack came from 30 countries. Each wave of attack lasted for at least one hour, while the longest one went on for 12 hours straight. The power of the attacks peaked at 660 thousands of requests per second. Some of the banks were attacked repeatedly. “Such attacks are complex, and almost cannot be repelled by standard means used by internet providers,” the news agency quoted Kaspersky Lab’s statement as saying. According to a source in Central Bank, the botnet behind the attack consists not only of computers, but also of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Computer security experts note, that various devices ranging from CCTV cameras to microwaves, are prone to hacking and pose a significant threat when assembled into a botnet. Owners of such devices underestimate the risks and often do not even bother to change a default password. A massive botnet, able to send more than 1.5Tbps and consisting of almost 150 thousands of CCTV cameras has been reportedly uncovered in September. According to Kaspersky Lab, it was the first massive attack on Russian banks this year. The previous attack of such a scale came in October 2015, when eight major banks were affected. Source: https://www.rt.com/news/366172-russian-banks-ddos-attack/

Is government regulation the way to blunt DDoS attacks?

Government regulation is a sticky issue in any industry, perhaps even more in cyber security. Every time the government creates a rule or an obligation, goes the argument, it merely opens a hole to be exploited. Exhibit number one is the call for makers of any product with encryption to create a secure back door police and intelligence agencies can use to de-crypt possibly criminal communications. Of course there’s no such thing as an absolutely secure back door, so it will end up being used by criminals or nation states. I raise this because last week security expert Bruce Schneier again raised the issue of whether governments should step in to help give more protection against distributed denial of service DDoS attacks. It’s easy for attackers to build powerful DDoS botnets that leverage insecure Internet connected devices like consumer webcams, he argues, the most recent of which was the attack last month on U.S. domain name service provider Dyn Inc., which temporarily impaired the ability of a number of online businesses including Twitter. It doesn’t matter, Schneier argues, if DDoS attacks are state-based or not. The fact the software is so easily available to their build a botnot or buy it as a service that can pour 1 TB and more of data at a target is the threat. “The market can’t fix this because neither the buyer nor the seller cares,” he has written. One logical place to block DDoS attacks is on the Internet backbone, he says, but providers have no incentive to do it because “they don’t feel the pain when the attacks occur and they have no way of billing for the service when they provide it.” So when the market can’t provide discipline, Schneier says, government should. He offers two suggestions: –impose security regulations on manufacturers, forcing them to make their devices secure; –impose liabilities on manufacturers of insecure Internet connected devices, allowing victims to sue them. Either one of these would raise the cost of insecurity and give companies incentives to spend money making their devices secure, he argues. I’m not sure. For one thing litigation is a long and expensive process. How do I sue a company headquartered in another country (say, China) that sells devices used by a person in a third country (say, Brazil) which is part of a botnet assembled by a person in another country (say, the U.S.) used to attack me in Canada? There’s also the problem of defining secure. What can a manufacturer do if it forces creation a long password for a device, but users insist on insecure passwords (like “password123456879.”) Still, we need to discuss short-term solutions because, as Schneier points out, with the huge number of insecure Internet connected devices out there the DDoS problem is only going to get worse. Let us know what you think in the comments section below. Source: http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/is-government-regulation-the-way-to-blunt-ddos-attacks/388238

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Is government regulation the way to blunt DDoS attacks?

Gartner: Despite the DDoS attacks, don’t give up on Dyn or DNS service providers

Enterprises going it alone against such an attack ‘would have been toast The DDoS attacks that flooded Dyn last month and knocked some high-profile Web sites offline don’t mean businesses should abandon it or other DNS service providers, Gartner says. In fact, the best way to go is to make sure critical Web sites are backed by more than one DNS provider, says Gartner analyst Bob Gill. It’s also the easiest way for an enterprise to defend against this type of attack and the only one known to be effective . “There’s nothing more elegant anyone has come up with in the intervening week,” he says. The high-volume, high-velocity attack was based largely on a botnet backed by Mirai malware that finds and infects internet of things devices that are virtually defenseless against it. It has proven capable of DDoS traffic of 1Tbps or more and the source code has been made public, so experts say it’s certain there will be more such attacks. Before the Dyn attacks, DNS services were considered vastly more reliable in-house DNS, and it still should be, Gill says. “If an enterprise had been hit with the volume Dyn was they would have been toast,” Gill says. He says he has been briefed by Dyn about the Oct. 21-22 attacks, most of which he can’t discuss publicly. But he says those Dyn customers that recovered quickly were those who dual-sourced their DNS service. “A significant number of Dyn customers popped back up after 10 to 15 minutes,” he says, and likely they were the ones with more than one DNS provider. Downsides of multiple providers is they represent an extra expense and not all providers offer exactly similar features such as telemetry, local-based routing and fault tolerance. So switching from one to another in an emergency might be complicated and might mean winding up with a different set of features. Coordinating multiple providers is an added headache. If cost is a concern, businesses could use a DNS provider like Amazon Web Service’s Route 53 that is inexpensive, relatively easy to set up and pay-as-you-go, he says. Gill says the motivation for the attack is hard to know. Dyn was a very attractive target for many possible reasons. It had advertised its security, and that might have been considered a reason for a glory-seeking attacker to go after it and take it down. A Dyn researcher delivered a paper on the links between DDoS mitigation firms and DDoS attacks the day before Dyn was hit, so perhaps the attack was revenge. Dyn has many high-profile customers, so perhaps the real target was one of them. It’s impossible to know for sure what the motive was. Gill says Dyn has learned a great deal about how to successfully mitigate this new class of attack. In general, after such incidents, providers ally themselves with other providers to help identify and block malicious traffic at the edges between their networks. Attacks may result in identifying new profiles of attack traffic that make it easier to sort out bad from good in future incidents. Source: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3137456/security/gartner-despite-the-ddos-attacks-don-t-give-up-on-dyn-or-dns-service-providers.html

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Gartner: Despite the DDoS attacks, don’t give up on Dyn or DNS service providers

How our household devices get hacked and join zombie bot networks in DDoS attacks

The Internet of Things: blessing or curse? That depends on how much you value your privacy against the ability of your fridge to order fresh milk. Either way, we are now more vulnerable to hackers. Here’s how. I won’t even attempt to answer the question in my opening gambit. Who can say for sure this early whether the Internet of Things is a blessing or a curse (aside from the fact that clichés are always a curse). For one this is something we all have to decide for ourselves – hopefully, after diligent public debate. We all have to decide what privacy is in the digital era, and whether it’s important to us. We may support more stringent data protection laws, even a global bill of rights. Or we may find ourselves in the “post-privacy” camp and not really care. It also depends on how highly we value our digital security. Unbeknownst to us Take the DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that brought down a litany of popular websites last Friday (21.10.2016). The affected websites included Esty, Github, HBO Now, PayPal, Pinterest, Playstation Network, Recode, Reddit, Spotify, Twitter, Netflix, Yammer, and Yelp. Your fridge, your mom’s webcam, computers at the local school, and a kid’s doll may have all taken part – without your even knowing it. Someone, somewhere launched a piece of malware called Mirai. We’ve known about Mirai – so something was in the wind. And DDoS attacks themselves have been around for ages. Mirai searched for poorly-protected, networked devices. That is, household devices that had little or no password protection. Reports suggest these included DVRs and webcams made by a Chinese company called Hangzhou XiongMai, which has since issued a recall on its webcams in the US. Mirai turned the connected devices into its slaves. They then launched the DDoS attack on servers run by Dyn, a so-called DNS host, and home to all those websites. Usually, when you call up a website, your “request” goes via one of these servers. But when the servers are overloaded with bad requests consisting of incomplete data, or they are bombarded with more requests than they can handle, they basically freak out. And no one is served. That’s what happened on Friday. Your fridge, webcam, toy truck and thousands more emitted a coordinated attack of useless information, bringing down some of the world’s most popular websites. The rest is history… Friday’s Mirai attack may well be history now, but it’s one which will surely repeat itself. Many, many times. The question is, where will it all end? If it’s only Netflix and Spotify you can’t access, you may really not care. Certainly if they are back up and running within a few hours. But what if it’s a vital government website, online access to your local hospital, the police, or the energy grid… and what if the attack lasts for days, weeks even? This is what we mean when we talk about cybersecurity. Private, commercial concerns, even dating apps, shouldn’t come into it. And yet what we do – and allow – at a private level can have a momumental impact on society. We may think it’s just the fridge ordering our milk or Barbie chatting to our kids. But we forget that every electronic device these days – especially those connected to the network – is vulnerable to hackers. And the Mirai attack has reminded us they can all be reprogrammed to do whatever the hackers want. Source: http://www.dw.com/en/how-our-household-devices-get-hacked-and-join-zombie-bot-networks-in-ddos-attacks/a-36181744

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How our household devices get hacked and join zombie bot networks in DDoS attacks

Ontario literacy test abandoned due to DDoS attack

There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories when it comes to guessing who’s behind cyber attacks. So when it was announced that a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was behind last week’s crash of an Ontario online literacy test for about 190,000 high school students the list was long. –One of the thousands of computer-literate students who want to Get Back At the Education System? (No shortage of them…) –One of the tens of thousands of Ontario high school graduates who want to Get Back At the Education System (Some of whom are reading this right now …) –General mischief makers around the world (Really no shortage of them) –The usual suspects blamed for everything bad (Russia, China). OK, probably not Russia and China. But with DDoS-as-a-service available on the dark web (all you need is Tor and a credit card) and — here’s the tricky part — the right URL — it’s not hard to launch an attack anywhere on the planet. Who had that URL and how they got hold of it is the question. It may not have been that hard because last week’s test was preceded by earlier, smaller ones. What we do know for sure is that on Monday the provincial Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) said the Oct. 20 province-wide trial of the online Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) had to be terminated because of what it called an “intentional, malicious and sustained” DDoS attack. “An extremely large volume of traffic from a vast set of IP addresses around the globe was targeted at the network hosting the assessment application,” the office said in a statement. No personal or private student information was compromised, it added. According to a statement Thursday from the EQAQ, a third party hosted the application. “We planned for a variety of cyber incidents,” the statement said, “but we are unable to disclose the specifics of this information because of the need to protect our infrastructure’s security. What we can say, however, is that we did not anticipate a DDOS of this magnitude. A forensics firm is investigating. “We were shocked to learn that someone would deliberately interfere with the administration of the online OSSLT,” Richard Jones, the office’s director of assessment, said in a statement. “There will be discussions over the next few weeks to determine how to strengthen the system, and we will continue to work with Ontario’s education community to understand how best to use online assessments to benefit our province’s students.” —Richard Jones, Director, Assessment Last week’s exercise was was a voluntary trial to test the system’s readiness before the regularly scheduled administration of the OSSLT — either online or on paper — in March 2017. The office is determined to keep to that schedule. Source: http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/ontario-literacy-test-abandoned-due-to-ddos-attack/387852

?How to defend against the internet’s doomsday of DDoS attacks

Last week assault on Dyn’s global managed DNS services was only the start. Here’s how to fend off hackers’ attacks both on your servers and the internet. We knew major destructive attacks on the internet were coming. Last week the first of them hit Dyn, a top-tier a major Domain Name System (DNS) service provider, with a global Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)attack. As Dyn went down, popular websites such as AirBnB, GitHub, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter followed it down. Welcome to the end of the internet as we’ve known it. Up until now we’ve assumed that the internet was as reliable as our electrical power. Those days are done. Today, we can expect massive swaths of the internet to be brought down by new DDoS attacks at any time. We still don’t know who was behind these attacks. Some have suggested, since Dyn is an American company and most of the mauled sites were based in the US, that Russia or Iran was behind the attack. It doesn’t take a nation, though, to wreck the internet. All it takes is the hundreds of millions of unsecured shoddy devices of the Internet of Things (IoT). In the Dyn onslaught , Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer said the DDoS attack used “tens of millions” devices. Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, a Chinese technology company, has admitted that its webcam and digital video recorder (DVR) products were used in the assault. Xiongmai is telling its customers to update their device firmware and change usernames and passwords. Good luck with that. Quick: Do you know how to update your DVR’s firmware? The attack itself appears to have been made with the Mirai botnet. This open-source botnet scans for devices using their default username and password credentials. Anyone can use it — China, you, the kid next door — to generate DDoS attacks. For truly damaging DDoS barrages, you need to know something about the internet’s architecture, but that’s not difficult. Or, as Jeff Jarmoc, a Salesforce security engineer, tweeted, “In a relatively short time we’ve taken a system built to resist destruction by nuclear weapons and made it vulnerable to toasters.” That’s funny, but it’s no joke. Fortunately, you can do some things about it. Securing the Internet of Things First, and this unfortunately is a long-term solution, IoT vendors must make it easy to update and secure their devices. Since you can’t expect users to patch their systems — look at how well they do with Windows — patching must be made mandatory and done automatically. One easy way to do this is to use an operating system, such as Ubuntu with Snap, to update devices quickly and cleanly. These “atomic” style updating systems make patches both easier to write and deploy. Another method is to lock down IoT applications and operating systems. Just like any server, the device should have the absolute minimum of network services. Your smart TV may need to use DNS, but your smart baby monitor? Not so much. That’s all fine and dandy and it needs to be done, but it’s not going to help you anytime soon. And, we can expect more attacks at any moment. Defending your intranet and websites First, you should protect your own sites by practicing DDoS prevention 101. For example, make sure your routers drop junk packets. You should also block unnecessary external protocols such as Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) at your network’s edge. And, as always, set up good firewalls and server rules. In short, block everything you can at your network edge. Better still, have your upstream ISP block unnecessary and undesired traffic. For example, your ISP can make your life easier simply by upstream blackholing. And if you know your company will never need to receive UDP traffic, like Network Time Protocol (NTP) or DNS, your ISP should just toss garbage traffic into the bit bin. You should also look to DDoS mitigation companies to protect your web presence. Companies such as Akamai, CloudFlare, and Incapsula offer affordable DDoS mitigation plans for businesses of all sizes. As DDoS attacks grow to heretofore unseen sizes, even the DDoS prevention companies are being overwhelmed. Akamai, for example, had to stop trying to protect the Krebs on Security blog after it was smacked by a DDoS blast that reached 620 Gbps in size. That’s fine for protecting your home turf, but what about when your DNS provider get nailed? You can mitigate these attacks by using multiple DNS providers. One way to do this is to use Netflix’s open-source program Denominator to support managed, mirrored DNS records. This currently works across AWS Route53, RackSpace CloudDNS, DynECT, and UltraDNS, but it’s not hard to add your own or other DNS providers. This way, even when a DDoS knocks out a single DNS provider, you can still keep your sites up and running. Which ones will work best for you? You can find out by using Namebench. This is an easy-to-use, open-source DNS benchmark utility. Even with spreading out your risk among DNS providers, DNS attacks are only going to become both stronger and more common. DNS providers like Dyn are very difficult to secure. As Carl Herberger, vice president for security solutions at Radware, an Israeli-based internet security company, told Bloomberg, DNS providers are like hospitals: They must admit anyone who shows up at the emergency room. That makes it all too easy to overwhelm them with massive — in the range of 500 gigabits per second — attacks. In short, there is no easy, fast fix here. One way you can try to keep these attacks from being quite so damaging is to increase the Time to Live (TTL) in your own DNS servers and caches. Typically, today’s local DNS servers have a TTL of 600 seconds, or 5 minutes. If you increased the TTL to say 21,600 seconds, or six hours, your local systems might dodge the DNS attack until it was over. Protecting the internet While the techniques might help you, they don’t do that much to protect the internet at large. DNS is the internet’s single point of total failure. That’s bad enough, but as F5, a top-tier ISP notes, DNS is historically under-provisioned. We must set up a stronger DNS system. ISPs and router and switch vendors should also get off their duffs and finally implement Network Ingress Filtering, better known as Best Current Practice (BCP)-38. BCP-38 works by filtering out bogus internet addresses at the edge of the internet. Thus, when your compromised webcam starts trying to spam the net, BCP-38 blocks these packets at your router or at your ISP’s router or switch. It’s possible, but unfortunately not likely, that your ISP has already implemented BCP-38. You can find out by running Spoofer. This is a new, open-source program that checks to see how your ISP handles spoofed packets. So why wasn’t it implemented years ago? Andrew McConachie, an ICANNtechnical and policy specialist, explained in an article that ISPs are too cheap to pay the small costs required to implement BCP-38. BCP-38 isn’t a cure-all, but it sure would help. Another fundamental fix that could be made is response rate limiting (RRL). This is a new DNS enhancement that can shrink attacks by 60 percent. RRL works by recognizing that when hundreds of packets per second arrive with very similar source addresses asking for similar or identical information, chances are they’re an attack. When RRL spots malicious traffic, it slows down the rate the DNS replies to the bogus requests. Simple and effective. Those are some basic ideas on how to fix the internet. It’s now up to you to use them. Don’t delay. Bigger attacks are on their way and there’s no time to waste. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-defend-against-the-internets-doomsday-of-ddos-attacks/

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?How to defend against the internet’s doomsday of DDoS attacks

Chinese firm recalls camera products linked to massive DDOS attack

Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology is recalling earlier models of four kinds of cameras due to a security vulnerability A Chinese electronics component maker is recalling 4.3 million internet-connected camera products from the U.S. market amid claims they may have played a role in Friday’s massive internet disruption. On Monday, Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology said it was recalling earlier models of four kinds of cameras due to a security vulnerability that can make them easy to hack. “The main security problem is that users aren’t changing the device’s default passwords,” Xiongmai said in a Chinese-language statement posted online. According to security firm Flashpoint, malware known as Mirai has been exploiting the products from Xiongmai to launch massive distributed denial-of-service attacks, including Friday’s, which slowed access to many popular sites, including Netflix, PayPal, and Twitter. Companies observing Friday’s disruption said botnets powered by the Mirai malware were at least partly responsible for the attack. Xiongmai, a maker of camera modules and DVR boards, has acknowledged that its products have been a target for hackers, but it said it patched the problem with the default passwords back in April 2015. For older products, the company has come up with a firmware update to fix the flaw. To prevent the security risks, the company has still decided to recall earlier models. However, Xiongmai has also dismissed news reports that its products were largely behind Friday’s DDOS attack as untrue and is threatening legal action against those who damage its reputation. “Security vulnerabilities are a common problem for mankind,” the company said. “All industry leaders will experience them.” Experts have said the Mirai malware is probably targeting products from several vendors, in addition to Xiongmai. The malicious coding is built to try a list of more than 60 combinations of user names and passwords when infecting devices . So far, the Mirai malware has gone on to infect at least 500,000 devices, according to internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications. Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3133962/chinese-firm-recalls-camera-products-linked-to-massive-ddos-attack.html

How Hackers Make Money from DDoS Attacks

Attacks like Friday’s are often financially motivated. Yesterday’s attack on the internet domain directory Dyn, which took major sites like Twitter and Paypal offline, was historic in scale. But the motivation for the attack may seem opaque, since no valuable information seems to have been stolen. A group called New World Hackers is claiming credit, but giving conflicting accounts of their motives—and security experts have called them “impostors.” So why else might someone have done it? This class of hack, known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, has been around for a while. And while many DDoS attacks are indeed motivated by politics, revenge, or petty trolling, there’s frequently money involved. For instance, DDoS attacks are often used as leverage for blackmail. Once a hacking group has a reputation for being able to field a large and dangerous botnet to knock servers offline, they can demand huge ‘protection’ payments from businesses afraid of facing their wrath. In fact, they don’t even have to do the hacking in the first place—in one recent case, someone posing as a notorious cabal merely emailed blackmail messages and managed to pocket tens of thousands of dollars before they were exposed. In the current case, there are rumors that Dyn was a target of extortion attempts before the attack. And the hackers behind what may be the biggest DDoS attack in history could demand a pretty penny to leave other companies alone. A wave of impostors will likely give it a shot, too. There’s another, even darker money-driven application of DDoS attacks—industrial sabotage. Companies seeking to undermine their competition can hire hackers to take the other guys offline. DDoS services are often contracted through so-called “booter” portals where anyone can hire a hacker’s botnet in increments as small as 15 minutes. Researchers found last year that three of the most prominent booter services at the time had over 6,000 subscribers in total, and had launched over 600,000 attacks. (And despite the criminal reputation of Bitcoin, by far the largest method used to pay for DDoS-for-hire was Paypal.) But it’s unlikely that this was some sort of hit called in by a competitor of Dyn—that tactic seems to primarily appeal to already-shady dealers, including online gambling operations. Finally, DDoS attacks can serve as a kind of smokescreen for more directly lucrative crimes. While a security team is struggling to deal with an army of zombie DVRs pummeling their system, attackers can grab passwords, credit card numbers, or identity information. In weighing possible explanations for Friday’s attack, it’s important to note the massive scale of the thing. Even if their claims of responsibility aren’t credible, New World Hackers’ description of about 1.2 terabits of data per second thrown at Dyn’s servers is both vaguely plausible and utterly mind-boggling. That’s around a thousand times as powerful as the huge 620 gigabit per second attack that knocked out a single website, Krebs on Security, last month. Dyn has also described the attack as sophisticated, arriving in three separate waves that targeted different parts of their systems. That kind of operation could have been pulled off by a gang of kids doing it for kicks—and maybe that’s the scarier scenario. But such a massive undertaking suggests bigger, and possibly more lucrative, motivations. Source: http://fortune.com/2016/10/22/ddos-attack-hacker-profit/

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How Hackers Make Money from DDoS Attacks