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Critical infrastructure not ready for DDoS attacks: FOI data report

The UK’s critical infrastructure is vulnerable to DDoS attacks due to failure to carry out basic security defence work – 39 percent of respondents to a recent survey had not completed the government’s ’10 Steps to Cyber Security’ programme, which was first issued in 2012. New data was obtained by Corero Network Security under the Freedom of Information Act surveying 338 critical infrastructure organisations in the UK, including fire and rescue services, police forces, ambulance trusts, NHS trusts, energy suppliers and transport organisations; it also showed that 42 percent of NHS Trusts had not completed the programme. More than half (51 percent) of these critical infrastructure organisations were described by Corero as ignoring the risk of short, stealth DDoS attacks on their networks – which typically account for around 90 percent of DDoS attacks and are used by attackers to plant malware or ransomware, or engage in data theft. Corero reports that these stealth attacks are typically less than 30 minutes in duration, and 98 percent of those stopped by the company were less than 10Gbps in volume, hence they often go unnoticed by security staff, but are frequently used by attackers in their efforts to target, map and infiltrate a network. In a statement issued today, Sean Newman, director of product panagement at Corero, comments: “Cyber-attacks against national infrastructure have the potential to inflict significant, real-life disruption and prevent access to critical services that are vital to the functioning of our economy and society. These findings suggest that many such organisations are not as cyber resilient as they should be, in the face of growing and sophisticated cyber threats.” Newman adds, “ By not detecting and investigating these short, surgical, DDoS attacks on their networks, infrastructure organisations could also be leaving their doors wide-open for malware or ransomware attacks, data theft or more serious cyber attacks.” It was also pointed out that in the event of a breach, these organisations could be liable for fines of up to £17 million, or four percent of global turnover, under the UK government’s proposals to implement the EU’s Network and Information Systems (NIS) directive, from May 2018. In an email to SC, David Emm, principal security researcher, Kaspersky Lab observed, “The world isn’t ready for cyber -threats against critical infrastructure – but criminals are clearly ready and able to launch attacks on these facilities. We’ve seen attempts on power grids, oil refineries, steel plants, financial infrastructure, seaports and hospitals – and these are cases where organisations have spotted attacks and acknowledged them. However, many more companies do neither, and the lack of reporting these incidents hampers risk assessment and response to the threat.” Edgard Capdevielle, CEO of Nozomi Networks, also emailed SC to comment: “This report emphasises the impact of DDoS attacks and how they are often used as a cover to distract security teams while infecting systems with malware or stealing data. Such initiatives are often the first step in “low and slow” attacks that provide the perpetrators with the information and access they need to carry out system disruptions. Examples of this are the Ukraine power outages of 2015 and 2016, both of which involved cyber-attacks which persisted for many months before culminating in shutdowns. “In light of this information, CNI organisations should give a high priority to re-assessing their cyber-security programmes, evaluate where they are in relation to government recommendations, and inform themselves about current technologies available for protection….The right approach is to both shore up defenses and be able to quickly respond when attacks do occur.” Previously, when talking about the new UK legislation targetting CNI, Eldon Sprickerhoff, founder and chief security strategist at eSentire commented in an email to SC, “Although cyber-security regulations will require significant effort for the companies that are affected, this new legislation by the UK government demonstrates that they understand the severity of cyber-threats in today’s digital world and the destruction they can cause, if undeterred. Even if you’re not a CNI, cyber-threats should concern you. With cyber-criminals constantly adjusting their tactics, it is imperative that companies never stop defending themselves by constantly improving and expanding their cyber-security practices. Managed detection and response and incident response planning are common ways companies can stay ahead of their attackers.” Sprickerhoff recommended the same measures be taken by CNI organisations to improve cyber-security as for other enterprises, namely: Encryption – store sensitive data that is only readable with a digital key Integrity checks – regularly check for any changes to system files Network monitoring – use tools to help you detect for suspicious behaviour Penetration testing – conduct controlled cyber-attacks on systems to test their defences and identify vulnerabilities Education – train your employees in cyber-security awareness and tightly manage access to any confidential information Source: https://www.scmagazineuk.com/critical-infrastructure-not-ready-for-ddos-attacks-foi-data-report/article/684838/

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Critical infrastructure not ready for DDoS attacks: FOI data report

Hackers Use Thousands Of Infected Android Devices In DDoS Attacks

Hundreds of thousands of home routers, IP cameras and other internet-of-things devices have been infected with malware over the past year and have been used to launch some of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever recorded. Attackers are now doing the same with Android devices, with the help of malicious applications hosted on Google Play and other third-party app stores. A joint investigation by the security teams from Akamai, Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Google, RiskIQ and Team Cymru has led to the discovery of a large botnet made up of over 100,000 Android devices located in more than 100 countries. The investigation was launched in response to large DDoS attacks that have hit several content providers and content delivery networks over the past few weeks. The goal behind DDoS attacks is to flood servers with bogus traffic in order to use up their available internet bandwidth or their CPU and RAM resources so they can no longer serve requests from legitimate users. Servers are typically configured to handle a certain number of concurrent connections based on the estimated number of visitors that they’re expected to receive. Load balancers, firewalls and other anti-DDoS technologies are used to limit the negative impact of any sudden traffic spikes, but with enough firepower, attackers can disrupt even the most well-protected networks. This particular Android botnet, which has been dubbed WireX, was used to send tens of thousands of HTTP requests that were meant to resemble those coming from legitimate browsers. The researchers were able to establish a pattern to the User-Agent string reported by the rogue clients and traced them back to malicious Android applications. Some of the applications were available in third-party app stores that came pre-installed on devices, but around 300 of them were hosted on Google Play. “Many of the identified applications fell into the categories of media/video players, ringtones or tools such as storage managers and app stores with additional hidden features that were not readily apparent to the end users that were infected,” the researchers said in a report. Most of the rogue applications requested device administrator permissions during installation, which allowed them to launch a background service and participate in DDoS attacks even when the applications themselves were not actively used or when the devices were locked. Google has removed the malicious applications from Google Play and started to remotely remove them from affected devices as well. Furthermore, the Play Protect feature which runs locally on Android devices prevents these apps from being reinstalled, the researchers said. Some antivirus products detect the malicious applications as an “Android Clicker” Trojan which might suggest that the botnet’s original purpose was click fraud, a method of earning revenue from fraudulent clicks on advertisements. However, by the time it was discovered, the botnet had clearly been repurposed for DDoS and was receiving attack instructions from command-and-control servers hosted under the same domain name. This is not the first Android-based DDoS botnet ever found, but it is certainly the largest. At the peak of the attacks, the researchers observed malicious traffic coming from over 120,000 unique IP addresses per hour. Last year, security firm Imperva uncovered a similar botnet that was used to launch DDoS attacks from around 27,000 infected Android devices. While Google is making significant efforts to keep malware off Google Play and constantly scans the apps hosted on its platform, this is not the first time when malicious applications have made it past its defenses. Just last week, the company removed applications that were using an advertising toolkit with spying capabilities and in May the company removed around 40 apps that included click fraud functionality. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lconstantin/2017/08/28/hackers-use-thousands-of-infected-android-devices-in-ddos-attacks/#67c498825228

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Hackers Use Thousands Of Infected Android Devices In DDoS Attacks

3 Ways to Defeat DDoS Attacks

In 2012, a number of DDoS attacks hit Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and PNC Bank. These attacks have since spread across most industries from government agencies to local schools and are showing an almost yearly evolution, with the most recent focus being the Internet of Things (IoT). In 2016, compromised cameras, printers, DVRs and other IoT appliances were used in a large attack on Dyn that took down major websites including Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Etsy and Spotify. Inside Distributed Denial-of-Service Threats Although these large attacks dominate the headlines, they’re not what most enterprises will deal with day to day. The most common attacks are in the range of 20 to 30 Gbps or less, while larger attacks have been reported at 1.2 tbps. Creating DDoS Defense Security technology is becoming more sophisticated, but so are hackers, which means attacks can be much more difficult to mitigate now than in the past. Enterprises must be knowledgeable and prepared with mitigation techniques as the attacks continue to evolve. DDoS mitigation comes in three models: Scrubbing Centers The most common DDoS mitigation option for enterprises is to buy access to a scrubbing center service. During an attack, traffic is redirected to the security provider’s network, where the bad traffic is “scrubbed out” and only good traffic is returned to the customer. This option is good for multi-ISP environments and can be used to counter both volumetric and application-based attacks. For added protection, some providers can actually place a device in your data center, but this is not as cost-effective as the cloud-based option. ISP- Clean Pipes Approach With the rise of DDoS attacks, many ISPs have started their own scrubbing centers internally, and for a premium will monitor and mitigate attacks on their customers’ websites. In this scenario, ISPs operate as a one-stop-shop for bandwidth, hosting and DDoS mitigation. But some ISPs are more experienced at this than others, so customers must be sure to thoroughly test and research the quality of the service offered by their ISPs. Content Delivery Network Approach The distributed nature of content delivery networks (CDNs) means that websites live globally on multiple servers versus one origin server, making them difficult to take down. Large CDNs may have over 100,000 servers distributing or caching web content all over the world. However, CDN-based mitigation is really only a good option for enterprises that require core CDN functionality, as porting content to a CDN can be a time-intensive project. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gartnergroup/2017/08/28/3-ways-to-defeat-ddos-attacks/#dda62aada78f

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3 Ways to Defeat DDoS Attacks

DreamHost, web hosting company, blames powerful DDoS attack for online outages

DreamHost, one of the world’s largest web hosting companies, said a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) caused significant outages Thursday affecting customers of its web and email services. The Los Angeles-based hosting provider said that “internet vigilantes” conducted an attack against part of its online infrastructure resulting in connectivity issues affecting several aspects of its operations, ranging from its online customer support features to the hosting service used by over 1.5 million websites. The attack targeted DreamHost’s Domain Name Servers (DNS) – digital directories that allow internet users to access specific websites without remembering their lengthy, numeric IP addresses – and was remedied about four hours after first being detected, according to the company. DDoS attacks involve knocking websites offline by overloading their servers with illegitimate traffic and effectively rendering them inaccessible. Low-level attacks are capable of briefly disabling websites lacking DDoS protection, but wide-scale attacks like the one conducted last year against Dyn, an American DNS provider, caused unprecedented outages affecting some of the world’s most popular websites, including Amazon and Netflix. DreamHost customers, including the Cambridge Seventh-day Adventist Church in England and the Tale of Two Wastelands video gaming project, were among those who said their websites were unavailable Thursday due to the powerful DDoS attack. The DDoS attack was confirmed by DreamHost as two of the company’s customers made headlines in their own right over their unrelated efforts to survive scrutiny: DisruptJ20, an anti-Trump protest site, and The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website that remerged online this week with the help of DreamHost after being all but driven off the internet. A federal judge earlier Thursday ordered DreamHost to provide information sought by federal prosectors investigating the riots that erupted in Washington, D.C. during President Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20. The Daily Stormer, meanwhile, relaunched on a DreamHost website Thursday after previously being banned from the internet’s biggest domain registrars and hosting providers, including GoDaddy, Google and Cloudflare. The Daily Stormer had quietly registered the new domain using an automated signup form and was subsequently booted several hours later, , DreamHot said Thursday evening. “Unfortunately, determined internet vigilantes weren’t willing to wait for us to take that action,” DreamHost said in a statement to Ars Technica. “They instead launched a DDoS attack against all of DreamHost this morning. We were ultimately able to declaw that attack, but the end result was that most of our customers experienced intermittent connectivity issues to their sites today.” Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/24/dreamhost-web-hosting-company-blames-powerful-ddos/

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DreamHost, web hosting company, blames powerful DDoS attack for online outages

90% of Companies Get Attacked with Three-Year-Old Vulnerabilities

A Fortinet report released this week highlights the importance of keeping secure systems up to date, or at least a few cycles off the main release, albeit this is not recommended, but better than leaving systems unpatched for years. According to the Fortinet Q2 2017 Global Threat Landscape, 90% of organizations the company protects have experienced cyber-attacks during which intruders tried to exploit vulnerabilities that were three years or older. In addition, 60% of organizations were attacked with exploits ten years or older. Organizations that did a relatively good job at keeping systems patched would have been able to block the attacks. Nonetheless, it is always recommended that companies keep systems up to date at all times. This has been shown in the past year. First last year with a Joomla flaw that saw exploit attempts days after being disclosed, then again at the start of January when attackers started scanning for a recently disclosed WordPress flaw hours after the official announcement. The focus on older exploits is simple to explain. Not all hackers are on the same skill level of nation-state cyber-espionage units, and most rely on open-sourced exploits. The older the vulnerability, the better the chances of finding a working exploit on one of the many exploit-sharing sites currently available online. Weekend warriors Furthermore, the Fortinet includes an interesting chart that shows attackers launching attacks mostly over the weekend. There are a few simple explanations for these. First, there are no SIRT (Security Incident Response Team) responders at most businesses over the weekend. Second, most hackers have jobs as well, and the weekend is when most are free for “side activities.” Number of DDoS attacks grew after Mirai source code release Also this week, Akamai released the State of the Internet/Security Report for Q2 2017. The report contains statistics on a wide variety of web attacks that took place via the company’s infrastructure in April, May, and June. The report’s main finding is the rise in the number of DDoS attacks during the first half of 2017 after DDoS attacks went down during the second half of 2016. According to Akamai, the release of the Mirai DDoS malware source code in September 2016 helped breathe new life into a declining DDoS booter market. Since then, a large number of different botnets built on the Mirai source code have been spotted, many of which were offered as DDoS-for-hire services. In a separate research presented at the USENIX security conference last week, researchers from Cisco, Akamai, Google, and three US universities revealed that despite having a reputation of being able to take down some of the largest online companies around, most Mirai botnets were mainly used to target online gaming servers. Besides Mirai, another very active strain of DDoS-capable malware was the PBos trojan, also targeting Linux-based devices. Some of these attacks even reached the massive size of 75 Gbps. Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/90-percent-of-companies-get-attacked-with-three-year-old-vulnerabilities/

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90% of Companies Get Attacked with Three-Year-Old Vulnerabilities

DDoS attacks down in second quarter

Attacks designed to overwhelm servers with internet traffic — known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks — were less frequent this spring than last, according to Akamai’s second quarter report. Akamai is a major seller of services to fight DDoS attacks. According to the company’s report, attacks declined by 18 percent between the beginning of April and end of June from the same period last year. DDoS attacks use hacked computers and internet-connected devices to send abnormal levels of traffic to a target, forcing it to slow or crash. A DDoS attack knocked out a critical internet switchboard known as Dyn, a domain name system provider, in October that rendered Twitter, Netflix and The New York Times unreachable. In May, the FCC reported a DDoS attack slammed its commenting system, though critics have questioned whether this was an attack or just a flood of commenters weighing in on the contentious issue of net neutrality. The report notes that while attacks are down year over year, attacks jumped 28 percent from the first quarter. But, it cautions quarterly data may not be the best measure of trends. It explains many attacks are tied to yearly events: “For most organizations, security events aren’t seasonal, they happen year round, without the ability to anticipate attacks. Unless you’re the security team for a merchant, in which case you need to plan for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, since they are likely to be the high water marks for attack traffic for the year.” While attacks rose from the beginning of the year, attack severity declined. “[F]or the first time in many years” Akamai observed no attacks exceeding 100 gigabits per second. The report speculates one potential cause of lower severity attacks might be international success taking the networks of hijacked computers, known as botnets, offline. Gaming companies were the victim in around 80 percent of attacks observed by Akamai in the second quarter, with one customer seeing more than 550 attacks. At the USENIX conference this year, Akamai researchers, teaming with other industry players and academics, presented research that the Dyn attack was actually intended as an attack on one of Dyn’s clients — the gaming platform PlayStation. According to that presentation, Dyn crashed as it handled requests headed to PlayStation. Source: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/347496-ddos-attacks-down-in-second-quarter

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DDoS attacks down in second quarter

Online Extortion Campaigns Target Users, Companies, Security Researchers

During the past week, there has been a sudden surge in online extortion campaigns, against regular users and security researchers alike. The most devious of these was a campaign detected by Forcepoint security researcher Roland Dela Paz, and which tried to trick users into thinking hackers had gotten their hands on sensitive or sexually explicit images. Attackers wanted payments of $320 to a Bitcoin address or they would have sent the compromising materials to the victim’s friends. Massive spam wave delivered fake threats This attempted blackmail message was the subject of a massive spam campaign that took place between August 11 and 18. Dela Paz says attackers sent out extortion emails to over 33,500 victims. Most of the targets were from Australia and France. The extortion campaign was particularly active in Australia, where it caught the eye of officials at the Australian National University, who issued a safety warning on the topic, alerting students of the emails. The extortion attempt was obviously fake, says Dela Paz. “The scale of this campaign suggests that the threat is ultimately empty,” the expert explained. “If the actors did indeed possess personal details of the recipients, it seems likely they would have included elements (e.g. name, address, or date of birth) in more targeted threat emails in order to increase their credibility.” Dela Paz warns that the campaign is still ongoing. Users can recognize the blackmail attempts by the following subject line formats: “Three random letters: [recipient email] date and time ??n??rning ?ur yest?rday’s ??nv?rs?tion” “Three random letters: [recipient email] date and time I hav? s?m?thing that can m??? y?ur lif? w?rse” “Three random letters: [recipient email] date and time I would not li?e t? start our kn?winga?qu?int?n?? with this” “Three random letters: [recipient email] date and time I’m not h?p?y with y?ur beh?vior lately” “Three random letters: [recipient email] date and time Dont y?u thin? th?t your devi?? w?r?s w?ird?” “Three random letters: [recipient email] date and time I think th?t it is not as funny for you as it is funny for m?” Hackers tried to blackmail Swiss security researcher In addition, during the past week, there were also extortion attempts sent to organizations. A hacker group calling itself ANX-Rans tried to extort a French company. Another group calling itself CyberTeam also tried to extract a ransom payment of 5 Bitcoin (~$20,000) from Abuse.ch, the website of a prominent Swiss security researcher. These DDoS threats in the hope of extracting Bitcoin payments are called DDoS-for-Bitcoin or RDoS (Ransom DDoS) attacks. RDoS attacks have been on the rise since mid-June after a South Korean hosting provider paid a ransom of nearly $1 million after web ransomware encrypted its customer servers. Ever since then, RDoS groups became extremely active hoping for a similar payday. We’ve already covered the active groups at the time in an article here. Group posing as Anonymous targeted US companies Since then, the most prominent RDoS campaign that took place was in mid-July when a group using the name of the Anonymous hacker collective tried to extort payments from US companies under the threat of DDoS attacks. At the time, Bleeping Computer obtained a copy of the ransom email from cyber-security firm Radware, who was investigating the threats. Radware said that despite posing as Anonymous hackers, this was the same group who tried to obtain ransoms of $315,000 from four South Korean banks (for these RDoS extortions the group posed as Armada Collective, another famous hacking crew). “This is not an isolated case. This is a coordinated large-scale RDoS spam campaign that appears to be shifting across regions of the world,” Radware security researcher Daniel Smith told Bleeping Computer via email at the time. “All ransom notes received have the same expiration date,” he added. “In RDoS spam campaigns like this one the actors threaten multiple victims with a 1Tbps attack on the same day.” Most RDoS extortion attempts are empty threats The group also claimed it was in control of a Mirai botnet made up of compromised IoT devices and was capable of launching DDoS attacks of 1 Tbps. No such attacks have been observed following the ransom demands on US companies. In research presented at the USENIX security conference last week, researchers from Cisco, Akamai, Google, and three US universities revealed that despite having a reputation of being able to take down some of the largest online companies around, the most variants of the Mirai botnet were mainly used to target online gaming servers. Most of these DDoS attacks on gaming servers were also relatively small as multiple botnets broke up IoT devices (DDoS resources) among them. In addition to the group posing as Anonymous, Radware also reported on multiple RDoS extortion attempts on gaming providers that also took place in July. “We suggest companies do not pay the ransom,” Smith said at the time, a recommendation still valid today, as this encourages more blackmailers to join in. Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/online-extortion-campaigns-target-users-companies-security-researchers/

PlayStation Network was the Real Target of Mirai Botnet DDoS Attack Last Year

Last year in October Mirai Botnet, a malware strain that can take control of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and use them for large cyber attacks resulting in ‘distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) — rendering the target website/server unreachable to legitimate visitors. According to new study by researchers at Google, CloudFlare, Merit Networks, Akamai and other universities, the Mirai Botnet attack last October on DNS provider Dyn might actually be targeting the PlayStation Network (PSN). The research which was presented at the Usenix Security Symposium, Vancouver, has suggested that the DDoS attack conducted via the Mirai botnet was meant to disable PlayStation Network services as all the IP addresses targeted by the attack were name servers for the PSN. These name servers were used by Dyn to connect users to the correct IP address. The Verge reported that this Mirai botnet attack which was targeted towards bringing down PSN might be the handiwork of angry gamers. “Although the first several attacks in this period solely targeted Dyn’s DNS infrastructure, later attack commands simultaneously targeted Dyn and PlayStation infrastructure, potentially providing clues towards attacker motivation,” the researchers noted. According to the researchers, it’s not only the PlayStation Network that was being targeted by the botnet. They also detected that Xbox Live, Valve Steam, and other gaming servers were attacked during the same period too. “This pattern of behavior suggests that the Dyn attack on October 21, 2016, was not solely aimed at Dyn. The attacker was likely targeting gaming infrastructure that incidentally disrupted service to Dyn’s broader customer base,” the researchers added. The researchers also pointed out that worms like Mirai botnet prosper majorly due to the absence of apt security measures for IoT devices. This results in a ‘fragile environment ripe for abuse’. “As the IoT domain continues to expand and evolve, we hope Mirai serves as a call to arms for industrial, academic, and government stakeholders concerned about the security, privacy, and safety of an IoT-enabled world,” the researchers concluded. The attack conducted using Mirai botnet in October 2016 wasn’t a standalone one. Since after the Mirai worm code was made public, 15,194 attacks were perpetrated on 5,046 victims (4,730 individual IPs, 196 subnets, 120 domain names), across 85 countries. Source: http://www.guidingtech.com/71278/playstation-network-mirai-botnet-ddos/

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PlayStation Network was the Real Target of Mirai Botnet DDoS Attack Last Year

What is Pulse Wave? Hackers devise new DDoS attack technique aimed at boosting scale of assaults

The new attack method allows hackers to shut down targets’ networks for longer periods while simultaneously conducting attacks on multiple targets. Hackers have begun launching a new kind of DDoS attack designed to boost the scale of attacks by targeting soft spots in traditional DDoS mitigation tactics. Dubbed “Pulse Wave”, the new attack technique allows hackers to shut down targeted organisations’ networks for prolonged periods while simultaneously conducting attacks on multiple targets. The new attacks may render traditional DDoS mitigation tactics useless, experts say. Some of the pulse wave DDoS attacks detected lasted for days and “scaled as high as 350 Gbps”, according to security researchers at Imperva, who first spotted the new threat. “Comprised of a series of short-lived pulses occurring in clockwork-like succession, pulse wave assaults accounted for some of the most ferocious DDoS attacks we mitigated in the second quarter of 2017,” Imperva researchers said in a report. The researchers said they believe that the pulse wave technique was “purposefully designed” by “skilled bad actors” to boost hackers’ attack scale and output by taking advantage of “soft spots in hybrid ‘appliance first, cloud second’ mitigation solutions.” Traditional DDoS attacks involve a continuous barrage of assaults against a targeted network, while pulse wave involves short bursts of attacks that have a “highly repetitive pattern, consisting of one or more pulses every 10 minutes”. The new attacks last for at least an hour and can extend to even days. A single pulse is large and powerful enough to completely congest a network. “The most distinguishable aspect of pulse wave assaults is the absence of a ramp-up period — all attack resources are committed at once, resulting in an event that, within the first few seconds, reaches a peak capacity that is maintained over its duration,” the Imperva researchers said. ulse wave takes advantage of appliance-first hybrid mitigation solutions by preying on the “Achilles’ heel of appliance-first mitigation solutions”, – the devices’ incapability of dealing with sudden powerful attack traffic surges. The Imperva researchers said the emergence of pulse wave DDoS attacks indicates a significant shift in the attack landscape. “While pulse wave attacks constitute a new attack method and have a distinct purpose, they haven’t emerged in a vacuum. Instead, they’re a product of the times and should be viewed in the context of a broader shift toward shorter-duration DDoS attacks,” researchers said. The Imperva researchers predicted that such attacks will continue, becoming more persistent and growing, boosted via botnets. Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-pulse-wave-hackers-devise-new-ddos-attack-technique-aimed-boosting-scale-assaults-1635423

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What is Pulse Wave? Hackers devise new DDoS attack technique aimed at boosting scale of assaults

Why DDoS attacks show no signs of slowing down

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks caused substantial damage to organisations across APAC and the world in the past year. According to Neustar’s recent ‘Worldwide DDoS Attacks and Cyber Insights Research Report’, 84 percent organisations surveyed globally were hit by a DDoS attack in the last 12 months, with 86 percent of those organisations were hit multiple times. The code used to cause these large outages was published openly, and soon after all sorts of attacks and variants of the original code were causing havoc around the world. Detection is too slow DDoS attacks are not only occurring more frequently but are also getting more difficult to detect. Within APAC, more than half of organisations on average are taking at least three hours to detect an attack and nearly as many took another three hours to respond once an attack was detected. Alarmingly, slow detection and response can lead to huge damages financially. Around half of all organisations stand to lose an average of $100,000 per hour of peak downtime during an attack. To exacerbate this, 40 percent of organisations hit were notified by their customers of the attacks. Investment is increasing The worrying figures above help explain why 90 percent of organisations are increasing their investments in DDoS defences, compared to the previous 12 months – up from 76 percent last year- despite the fact that 99 percent already have some form of protection in place. The threats faced today, and those anticipated in the future, are clearly forcing organisations to completely reconsider the ways they are currently protecting themselves. Mitigating against DDOS attacks Effectively mitigating DDoS attacks has become crucial for organisations that want to avoid damaging financial and reputational loss. In order to combat attacks, organisations need to adequately understand the threat, quantify the risk and then create a mitigation plan that corresponds to their needs. Whether it’s a large or small scale DDoS attack, to keep up with the growing threat, companies will need newer, adaptable, and scalable defences that include new technology and methodologies. Developing a mitigation plan Paying the cost for a DDoS mitigation that exceeds their requirements is like over insuring your car – you are paying a premium for a service that does not match your level of risk/potential loss. Similarly, implementing a DDoS mitigation that does not cover the risk will likely lead to additional costs, resulting from greater organisational impact and additional emergency response activities. Once the severity of the risk is understood, there are three key critical elements of producing a good mitigation plan that must be enacted: detection, response and rehearsal. Detecting an attack Fortunately, there are several technologies out there that can be used to monitor both the physical and cloud-based environment. An example is how organisations can use Netflow monitoring on border routers to detect a volumetric attack, or provide this data to a third-party for analysis and detection. They can also look at using appliances to conduct automatic detection and response, again managed internally or by a third-party. In a cloud environment, organisations can choose between a vast array of cloud monitoring tools that allow them to identify degradation and performance, CPU utilisation and latency, giving an indication as accurate as possible of when an attack occurs. Responding to an attack The response plan to the attack must be scaled to the organisation’s risk exposure and technology infrastructure. For instance, an organisation operating in the cloud with a moderate risk exposure might decide on a cloud based solution, pay-on-occurrence model. On the other hand, a financial services company that operates its own infrastructure will be exposed to more substantial financial and reputational risk. Such a company would ideally look for a hybrid solution that would provide the best time to mitigate, low latency and near immediate failover to cloud mitigation for large volumetric attacks. Rehearsal of your mitigation plan Regardless of the protection method being deployed, it’s good practice to rehearse it periodically. Periodic testing can not only eliminate gaps or issues in responding to a DDoS attack, but can also prepare the responsible owners to perform their required actions when an actual event occurs. In summary, DDoS attacks aren’t showing any signs of slowing down anytime soon. The threats associated with DDoS attacks cannot be understated or underestimated. Moreover, by quantifying the risk to the organisation and implementing a right-sized mitigation solution, organisations can effectively and efficiently mitigate the risk of DDoS attacks. Source: https://securitybrief.com.au/story/why-ddos-attacks-show-no-signs-slowing-down/

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Why DDoS attacks show no signs of slowing down