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DDoS attack on BBC may have been biggest in history

Last week’s distributed denial of service attack against the BBC website may have been the largest in history. A group calling itself New World Hacking said that the attack reached 602Gbps. If accurate, that would put it at almost twice the size of the previous record of 334Gbps, recorded by Arbor Networks last year. “Some of this information still needs to be confirmed,” said Paul Nicholson, director of product marketing at A10 Networks, a security vendor that helps protect companies against DDoS attacks. “If it’s proven, it would be the largest attack on record. But it depends on whether it’s actually confirmed, because it’s still a relatively recent attack.” According to Nicholson, it sometimes happens that people who step forward and take credit for attacks turn out to be exaggerating. New World Hacking also said that the attack, which came on New Year’s Eve, was “only a test.” “We didn’t exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours,” the group told the BBC. New World Hacking also hit Donald Trump’s campaign website the same day, and said its main focus was to take down ISIS-affiliated websites. It’s common for hackers to go after high-profile media websites, but attacks against political websites are increasingly likely to be in the spotlight this year because of the U.S. election cycle, according to Raytheon|Websense CEO John McCormack. “The U.S. elections cycle will drive significant themed attacks,” he said. “This is just the beginning and it will get worse — and more personal — as candidates see their campaign apps hacked, Twitter feeds hijacked, and voters are targeted with very specific phishing attacks based on public data such as voter registration, Facebook and LinkedIn.” One possible reason to conduct a DDoS attack against a high-profile target such as the BBC or Donald Trump is marketing, said A10 Networks’ Nicholson. It seems that New World Hacking may be affiliated with an online DDoS tool called BangStresser, which delivers attacks as a service. Last year, a similar group, the Lizard Squad, conducted a marketing campaign for their DDoS service, the Lizard Stressor. “There are a lot of parallels here,” said A10 Networks’ product marketing manager Rene Paap. These services typically leverage botnets or use stolen payment cards to rent cloud-based servers, he said. Typically, the rented servers are used to run command and control servers. What’s unusual about New World Hacking is that they’re claiming to be using Amazon servers to generate actual attack bandwidth. “That is something new,” said Paap. “But it hasn’t been confirmed or denied yet.” Not all DDoS attack services are illegal, said Nicholson. “Some are offered as useful services to websites, to see if they can handle the load,” he said. Others fall squarely into the gray area, allowing cyber-terrorists, extortionists and digital vandals to launch attacks for a few hundred dollars each. “Some of them are quite inexpensive and configurable,” Nicholson said. “for example, you can have different attacks at different times, so that it’s harder to defend against them.” To protect themselves, Nicholson recommends that companies deploy a combination of on-premises and cloud-based solutions to handle attacks of varying types and sizes. “You need to be able to detect what’s going on, that there’s actually an attack,” he said. “And once you detect an attack, you need to be able to mitigate it as long as possible.” According to security vendor Netcraft, service to the BBC network was restored by using the Akamai content delivery network. Akamai declined to comment about this particular case. “As policy, the company isn’t commenting on specific situations,” said a spokesperson. Source: http://www.csoonline.com/article/3020292/cyber-attacks-espionage/ddos-attack-on-bbc-may-have-been-biggest-in-history.html

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DDoS attack on BBC may have been biggest in history

Linode Resets Customer Passwords After Breach, DDoS Attack

Cloud-based webhost Linode absorbed another body blow on Tuesday when it said it was resetting customer passwords after a suspected breach. The development compounded the company’s existing woes as it continues to battle a distributed denial-of-service attack that began on Christmas. A Linode representative said late Tuesday its executives were unavailable for comment and that an investigation was ongoing. The password breach was announced after the company said three accounts were accessed without permission and it discovered two Linode.com user credentials on an “external machine.” “This implies user credentials could have been read from our database, either offline or on, at some point,” Linode said in an advisory to customers. “The user table contains usernames, email addresses, securely hashed passwords and encrypted two-factor seeds. The resetting of your password will invalidate the old credentials.” Linode said it notified the customers whose credentials were found on outside machines and said there was no evidence of further intrusion into host or virtual machines. Linode markets its services toward developers and offers quick, scalable solid state driver server deployments. As of this morning, portions of the Linode website were still inaccessible, and the company said it has not been able to determine whether the DDoS attack and the password breach are related attacks. In the past, experts have warned that criminals will use easy-to-mount DDoS attacks against a target in order to distract IT and security staff away from the real target. “The entire Linode team has been working around the clock to address both this issue and the ongoing DDoS attacks. We’ve retained a well-known third-party security firm to aid in our investigation. Multiple Federal law enforcement authorities are also investigating and have cases open for both issues. When the thorough investigation is complete, we will share an update on the findings,” Linode said. “You may be wondering if the same person or group is behind these malicious acts. We are wondering the same thing. At this point we have no information about who is behind either issue. We have not been contacted by anyone taking accountability or making demands. The acts may be related and they may not be.” Linode was relatively quiet about the DDoS attack until a New Year’s Eve blogpost from network engineer Alex Forster. Forster said that a criminal gang was using a botnet to fire bad traffic at Linode’s authoritative nameservers causing DNS outages. All public-facing websites and web and application servers were also targeted, taking down Linode Manager. The attackers also sent traffic at Linode’s colocation provider’s upstream routers and its internal network infrastructure causing packet loss. In all, Forster said there were more than 30 attacks carried out in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Source: https://threatpost.com/linode-resets-customer-passwords-after-breach-ddos-attack/115790/#sthash.PPbMALPg.dpuf

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Linode Resets Customer Passwords After Breach, DDoS Attack

Bitcoin exchange BTCC stands firm against DDoS ransom hacker and wins

Bitcoin exchange BTCC Technology Ltd. had an interesting time over the new year when it was targeted by a Bitcoin-for-DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, but in a great story we don’t see often enough, the company held steady and won, complete with a hilarious ending. The company first came under DDoS attack on December 31 when they received an email from an unknown source demanding they pay 1 Bitcoin ($430) in ransom or the attacks would escalate. Having ignored the demand, on New Years Day BTCC was targeted with a 10 Gbps DDoS attack, the strength of which was not expected by the company’s DDoS mitigation service. According to a post on Reddit, the DDoS protection provider said something along the lines of “This thing is huge! You guys aren’t paying us enough for this!” so BTCC paid them more, and the site stayed up. Naturally, as these things go, the second attack was followed by a new ransom demand by the hacker, who was now asking for a payment of 10 Bitcoin ($4300) to prevent a further attack. Instead of paying, BTCC just battened down the hatches waiting for the next attack. Another, more intense DDoS attack of several hours then followed, causing BTCC’s servers to experience some performance issues, including a partial loss of functionality. BTCC still refused to pay the ransom and instead upgraded their servers to cope even better with the increasing attacks. Another ransom email demand was received, with demand for payment of 30 Bitcoins ($12924) with the hacker adding ““We will keep these attacks up until you pay!…. You had better pay up before you go bankrupt! Mwa ha ha!” BTCC once again ignored the demand, and the attacks recommenced, complete with more demands for Bitcoin. At this point BTCC had ramped up their mitigation efforts so much that no matter how much traffic the hacker sent it didn’t affect their service at all, to the point that the company stopped noticing many of the attacks as they usually failed to disrupt their networks for more than a few minutes after the upgrades they rolled out. Winning Around this point, despite his or hers best efforts and multiple demands, the hacker gave up trying to take the site down, but not before sending one last, hilarious plea to BTCC. “Hey, guys, look, I’m really a nice person. I don’t want to put you all out of business. What do you say we just make it 0.5 BTC and call it even?” This email was, like those before it, ignored by BTCC, which resulted in one final email from the now disgruntled, losing hacker: “Do you even speak English?” and that was that. Although DDoS attacks are serious business and not every company has the capacity to put into place defensive measures, sometimes a story just makes you want to smile. BTCC 1 vs hacker 0. Source: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/01/06/great-story-bitcoin-exchange-btcc-stands-firm-against-ddos-ransom-hacker-and-wins/

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Bitcoin exchange BTCC stands firm against DDoS ransom hacker and wins

DDoS gang takes down BBC websites, Donald Trump’s campaign site over holiday weekend

A group of computer criminals used two separate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to bring down all of the BBC’s websites and Donald Trump’s main campaign site over this past holiday weekend. The story begins on New Year’s Eve, when all BBC sites, including its iPlayer service, went dark for three hours. At the time, the UK-based news organization reported that the outage was the result of a “technical issue”. It later stated that a group calling themselves the “New World Hackers” had claimed credit for launching a DDoS attack against the broadcaster, as a “test of its capabilities” Since then, one of the group’s members who identified himself as “Ownz” took the opportunity to send a screenshot to ZDNet of the web interface that was used to attack the BBC. If the screenshot is legitimate, the group allegedly employed their own tool called BangStresser to launch an attack of up to 602 Gbps – a volume of traffic that well-surpasses the largest attack on record at 334 Gbps, as documented by Arbor Networks in the middle of year. Not untypically, BangStresser is itself protected from DDoS attacks by CloudFlare – one of the popular DDoS mitigation services often deployed by websites keen to protect themselves from attackers. The attack apparently made use of two Amazon Web Services servers, but managed to skirt around the company’s automated misuse detection systems as Ownz explained in an interview with ZDNet : “We have our ways of bypassing Amazon. The best way to describe it is we tap into a few administrative services that Amazon is use to using. The [sic] simply set our bandwidth limit as unlimited and program our own scripts to hide it.” No other information has yet been provided about the attack. But whatever else transpired, the group was sufficiently pleased that they decided to use BangStresser to launch a DDoS against Donald Trump’s official campaign website, donaldjtrump.com, just a few days later. According to Softpedia , Trump’s website went down immediately on Saturday, January 2 and remained dark for several hours until DDoS mitigation solutions were put in place. The attacks, however, remained ongoing throughout the day against mail.trump.com domain, the Trump Organization’s Webmail service. Trump’s camp has yet to officially address the incident. A statement posted on Saturday by Trump’s campaign advisers (and redistributed via HackRead ) attributed the downage to “an unusually high volume of traffic” only. On Monday, Real Forums sat down with members of the group to inquire about their New Year’s exploits. Here’s what they had to say: “Our reasons behind the BBC attack was just a test of our capabilities. Although, the Trump site was the target. He can be very racist. We didn’t mean to cause as much damage as we did to BBC, but for Trump, Yes.” The group goes on to state that it plans to launch additional DDoS attacks against Trump and other large organizations like the BBC . The group also specifically mentions ISIS and the Ku Klux Klan as future targets. We’re not a week into 2016, and we’ve already witnessed DDoS attacks that have succeeded in taking down the websites of major news organizations and U.S. political candidates. It just goes to show that while malware is on the rise, DDoS attacks are not going anywhere in the New Year. As we all get back to work, we should therefore take the time to make sure our enterprises have the necessary DDoS mitigation technologies in place. Source: https://www.grahamcluley.com/2016/01/ddos-gang-takes-bbc-websites-donald-trumps-campaign-site-holiday-weekend/

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DDoS gang takes down BBC websites, Donald Trump’s campaign site over holiday weekend

Valve Reveals Details About Christmas Issues, Personal Info Was Shown, DDoS Attack Involved

Christmas is usually a very busy time for Valve because of the major sales that the company has a habit of running on the Steam digital distribution system, and this year the company had to deal with a set of problems linked to the service and with the way the user base perceived them as an attack that had the potential to affect their personal data. In a new official site article, the studio delivers more information about what happened on December 25, saying that between 11:50 and 13:20 Pacific Standard Time store page requests for around 34,000 users, containing personal information, were seen by others. Valve admits, “The content of these requests varied by page, but some pages included a Steam user’s billing address, the last four digits of their Steam Guard phone number, their purchase history, the last two digits of their credit card number, and/or their email address. These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.” The company also delivers an apology to all those affected by the Christmas problem . Despite the fact that some sensitive information was shared with others, the company makes it clear that users have to take no further action because the Steam system does not allow for it. This means that even if there are plans to work with a third-party company and contact those affected once they have been identified, no action on their part is required to make sure that the accounts are safe. Valve also explains that the problem was created because of a DDoS attack that combined with increased Winter Sale traffic to affect the caching of pages and forced the company to take down the store and deal with the problem. The company makes it clear that such attacks have not managed to break its security and are routinely dealt with. Steam continues to dominate PC digital distribution Valve needs to maintain its services as secure as possible to keep it in the lead on the PC and to continue offering players a wide variety of video games and some spectacular price cuts on special occasions. The Winter Sale is running at the moment, with more than 10,000 video games offered at reduced prices each day and a set of special trading cards that gamers can earn and use to tweak their profile. In late 2015 Valve also introduced the Steam machines, created in collaboration with a wide variety of partners, and the special controller, which offers plenty of new options for PC gamers who want to stay away from their monitors or share a couch with friends. In 2016, the company is planning to also enter the virtual reality space with Vive, which is created in partnership with HTC and does not yet have an official launch date or an attached price. The device was expected to arrive before the end of 2015, but Valve decided to delay it because of a major tech-related breakthrough that’s supposed to improve the user experience once the headset is commercially available. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/valve-reveals-details-about-christmas-issues-personal-info-was-shown-ddos-attack-involved-498289.shtml

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Valve Reveals Details About Christmas Issues, Personal Info Was Shown, DDoS Attack Involved

BBC reports on BBC tweet about BBC websites DDoS

The BBC’s website and iPlayer service went down on Thursday morning following a cyber attack causing widespread panic on social media A BBC Technology journalist later posted an article on their website saying a “large web attack” had “knocked” their websites offline. Sources within the BBC said the sites were down “thanks to what is knows as a ‘distributed denial of service’ attack”. A National Crime Agency spokesperson said: “DDOS is a blunt form of attack which takes volume and not skill. It’s a very basic attack tool. One analogy is too many people trying to get through a revolving door at the same time so that the door gets stuck.” Social media reaction to the trouble was swift. Many urged the BBC to get the site back up quickly and lamented how long it was taking to fix the technical trouble. Among the Twitter users to pass comment was Stephen Fry. Professor Tim Watson, Director of Cyber Security at the University of Warwick, said: “The BBC site will expect lots of traffic and they are a high profile target so you would expect them to have all kind of protection against a DDos attack. “They will be used to having lots of visitors but usually people visit the site at different times and are not repeatedly asking for lots of information. “The way a DDos attack works is by having control of thousands or millions of computers on a ‘botnet’ – so as people get their computers compromised by visiting websites or clicking on malicious links in emails, they can be remotely controlled and then coordinated to all visit a website at the same time. “So you can have millions of computers all making repeated visits to the same page over and over again and that is how you flood a website to the point where legitimate users can’t get access.” Professor Watson said there are a number of ways big corporations can protect against these kind of attacks but they are expensive. One way of protecting a site is to have something called “fat pipes” – very large data cables capable of dealing with incredibly high amounts of traffic – combined with really fast computers which can filter out anything like DDos traffic and re-route legitimate traffic back to the main website. But Professor Watson asked: “Is it a good used of licence payers’ money to have fatter pipes just on the off chance that one day someone might want to take down the BBC website with a DDos attack?” Cyver security expert Professor Alan Woodward, from the University of Surrey, said an attack like this needs a “degree of coordination”. He said: “I would have thought this could have been so-called hacktivists. The bbc has a large and sophisticated structure themselves and I know they have systems in place to mitigate it so it might have been slightly more than the usual DDoS attack. I cant see why a cyber criminal would do this, they do this for money, the only people who do this to make a point are hacktivists. “You have these groups who are doing this to make a point. Nation states often have the capability to do it. The motives tend to be where you have some group like these active hacker squad, phantom squad and lizard squad who do it.” An official BBC spokesperson said the corporation “are not discussing the causes” of the shutdown “or going into any further detail”. The BBC’s main website is the 89th biggest in the world, according to web analytics firm Alexa, and is the seventh-ranked site in the UK. Twitter goes into meltdown As BBC technicians frantically attempted to work out how to get their website back up and running, Twitter users had a lot of fun as #BBCDown began trending. The corporation apologised for the inconvenience on a number of Twitter feeds, blaming the website and its iPlayer services going down for over an hour on a “technical issue”. It later emerged the corporation had suffered a DDoS – a distributed denial of service – attack. Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/12075679/BBC-website-crashes-and-Twitter-goes-into-meltdown.html

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BBC reports on BBC tweet about BBC websites DDoS

Linode Hit by DDoS Attacks

Cloud hosting company Linode has suffered a series of service interruptions due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks launched against its infrastructure over the past few days. The campaign started on December 26 when the company reported that DDoS attacks had disrupted the Linode Manager and its website. On the same day, the attackers also targeted Linode’s DNS infrastructure, and the company’s data centers in Dallas, Atlanta, London and Newark. It took roughly 2-3 hours for Linode’s systems and network engineering teams and the company’s upstream providers to mitigate the attacks. On December 27, DDoS attacks were reported at the data centers in Atlanta, Newark, and London. Linode’s service status page shows that it took the company nearly four hours to mitigate the attack against the London datacenter, while network connectivity was restored in one hour, respectively two hours, in Atlanta and Newark. The attacks against various components of Linode’s infrastructure continued on Monday and Tuesday. In the early hours of Wednesday, shortly after announcing that a DDoS attack affecting Linode’s website had been mitigated, the company reported seeing continued attacks disrupting access to its web services. The latest update indicates that the Dallas data center was again targeted recently, causing packet loss. Kaspersky Lab reported in November that in the third quarter of 2015, Linux-based botnets accounted for nearly half of the total number of DDoS attacks. The most notable was the XOR botnet, which malicious actors leveraged to launch attacks that peaked at more than 150 Gbps. A Kaspersky report released in December showed that almost half of the organizations hit by DDoS attacks actually claimed to know the identity of the attackers. The study is based on information from more than 5,500 companies across 26 countries. Source: http://www.securityweek.com/linode-hit-ddos-attacks

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Linode Hit by DDoS Attacks

Rutgers University Suffers Sixth DDoS Attack This Year

Three cyber-security firms could not handle the attack Rutgers University’s IT department has managed to restore all services after a large-scale DDoS attack kept some of its systems down for four days between December 24 and December 28. This is not the first time Rutgers University has been hit with a DDoS attack, having already reported on a similar incident back at the end of September . Earlier this year, at the end of March and start of May, university staff also suffered four similar attacks, with the longest one lasting for five full days. Sixth time this year, nobody has claimed responsibility yet The first five attacks were claimed by a hacker that went by the name of Exfocus, who admitted in an interview that he was hired via an underground forum to carry out the DDoS bombardment, and later paid in Bitcoin. Unlike in the case of the first five attacks, Exfocus has not come forward to claim responsibility. The Rutgers IT staff said the attack targeted the sakai.rutgers.edu URL, the University’s Sakai portal. Sakai is an open source, self-hosted Java-based course learning environment used primarily by academic institutions. The DDoS attack did not affect student activities since students are away for Christmas break, which started on December 24 and will end on January 5. A $3 million investment in IT security systems did not help at all Last August, Rutgers management spent $3 million / €2.67 million on security measures to bolster their online platform. According to NJ.com, the University hired three cyber-security firms. The unplanned investment was motivated by the March and May attacks. Despite this, the University’s DDoS mitigation provider has failed to live up to its job, both in September and in this most recent four-day-long attack. In his interview, Exfocus said that he controlled a botnet of 85,000 machines, and was able to launch DDoS attacks of around 25 Gbps, which is considered to be of a medium scale. The proper law enforcement agencies have been notified of the attack. Softpedia has reached out to Exfocus on Twitter. We’ll update the article if we uncover any new information. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/rutgers-university-suffers-sixth-ddos-attack-this-year-498229.shtml

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Rutgers University Suffers Sixth DDoS Attack This Year

2016 will see the rise of DDoS-as-a-service

We’ve already seen a big increase in DDoS attacks in the past year and according to the latest predictions these are set to continue and become more sinister in nature as we move into 2016. Security specialist Corero foresees a rise in ‘Dark DDoS’ attacks used as various smokescreens to distract victims while other attacks infiltrate corporate networks to steal sensitive data. Dave Larson, COO at Corero Network Security, says, “The highly sophisticated, adaptive and powerful Dark DDoS attack will grow exponentially next year as criminals build on their previous successes of using DDoS attacks as a distraction technique. The Carphone Warehouse attack in August was interesting because it was one of the first publicly reported cases of Dark DDoS in the public domain. This is a new frontier for DDoS attacks and a growing threat for any Internet-connected business that is housing sensitive data, such as credit card details or other personally identifiable information”. It also predicts a rise in DDoS-as-a-service cyber crime business models, where it’s possible to pay to have victims hit for as little as $6.00 per month. This means less sophisticated cyber crime actors can readily become DDoS adversaries. During October 2015, 10 percent of Corero’s customer base was faced with extortion attempts, which threatened to take down or to continue an attack on their websites unless a ransom demand was paid. If the volume of DDoS attacks continues to grow at the current rate of 32 percent per quarter, according to Corero’s latest Trends and Analysis Report, the volume of Bitcoin ransom demands could triple to 30 percent by the same time next year. Corero also anticipates 2016 will see ISPs come under pressure to provide DDoS mitigation services to their customers. In a survey conducted this autumn, Corero revealed that three quarters of enterprise customers would like their ISP to provide additional security services to eliminate DDoS traffic from entering their networks. “The current status quo allows malicious traffic carrying DDoS threats to flow freely over most provider networks,” says Larson. “As a result, most customers end up paying their provider for bandwidth that delivers potentially dangerous Internet content. But the technology exists for ISPs to turn this problem into a business opportunity. By providing DDoS mitigation tools as a service, deployed at the Internet edge, they can defeat this problem before it enters their customers’ networks”. Source: http://betanews.com/2015/12/28/2016-will-see-the-rise-of-ddos-as-a-service/

Massive DDoS Attacks of Over 1 Million Queries Per Second Threaten Root Servers That Support The Global Internet

Today, we share a blog post from Looking Glass’ Director of Product Management, Patrick Lynch, as he discusses distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on DNS root servers. On Nov 30 and again on Dec. 1, massive DDoS attacks against several Internet based DNS root servers with volumes of over 1 million queries per second threatened the global Internet. There is speculation that the attack was initiated by ISIS (here). Not only is this a risk to the Internet as a whole, but also impacts the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that are the unfortunate middle link in the attack and whom the majority of Internet access depends on. Although the target was the DNS root servers, the intermediate ISPs probably were more severely impacted by the sudden spike in the traffic load due to the relationship between DNS authoritative and recursive servers. Verisign provided additional information showing why the source IPs were spoofed, and the root servers’ users group also published some information. Arstechnica also has a description of the event. There are a number of actions that are available to an ISP that mitigate both the attacks on the DNS root servers, and on the ISP itself: Ingress filtering by source IP address – Routers can enforce BCP38 that only allows traffic to originate with source IP addresses that are valid for that ISP. This will also prevent source and destination addresses from being the same. If Ingress filtering is not practical, then having a DNS firewall will provide similar capabilities to ingress filtering as well as additional capabilities such as: Only allow queries from allowed IP ranges Rate limit queries by source IP or destination IP to prevent volumetric attacks Rules that prevent DNS responses (as opposed to queries) going to the root servers When an upstream DNS server is busy (as in a DDOS attack), automatically generate a server unavailable error and do not add to the DDOS attack Securing DNS is challenging given the nature of the protocol and the fact that the DNS ports must be left open to ensure continuous delivery of DNS services to Internet attached devices. Source: https://lgscout.com/massive-ddos-attacks-of-over-1-million-queries-per-second-threaten-root-servers-that-support-the-global-internet/