Prolexic Technologies shared an analysis of nearly a dozen global DDoS attacks that indicates cyber attackers are using DDoS attacks in an attempt to influence market values and interfere with exchang…
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DDoS attacks used to influence stock prices
A growing number of data center outages are caused by distributed denial of service attacks. On a technical level, DDoS campaigns are much more complicated to address than other leading causes such as human error or IT equipment failure. Accordingly, they often cost hundred of thousands of dollars to resolve. Throughout 2013, credit unions were increasingly targeted by DDoS attacks that overwhelmed their websites with traffic and sometimes created distractions so that other threats could bypass IT security. Going into 2014, mitigating risk from DDoS through software and backup solutions will be the key to reducing the costs and consequences of IT outages. Report finds that DDoS, equipment failure among the leading causes of outages According to one think tank’s research, DDoS attacks accounted for only 2 percent of outages at 67 U.S. data centers in 2010. By 2013, the share had risen to 18 percent. Perpetrators have benefited from ongoing increases in network speeds and the growing complexity of IT infrastructure, both of which have made it much easier to generate massive amounts of fraudulent traffic. The resulting server and equipment failures have footed IT departments with some steep bills. Outages caused by DDoS attacks typically ran $822,000 apiece, far outpacing the $380,000 price tag for incidents attributable to human error. Equipment issues were the most expensive cause, with each event costing slightly under $1 million. While the length of data center outage has gone down over the past few years, related expenses have risen. The average 2013 incident lasted 86 minutes, but cost $690,204, or 37 percent more than in 2010. Credit unions have felt the impact of more frequent DDoS attacks The rise of DDoS attacks has affected IT operations at credit unions, which were targeted by several prominent campaigns in 2013. A $4 billion credit union in Pleasanton, Calif., and a $1.6 billion one in Austin, Texas, had online services knocked out for hours at a time in the wake of DDoS attacks. More specifically, cybercriminals have honed tactics that put financial institution computers through the motions until they become exhausted. For example, a DDoS attack may ask a site for password resets on thousands of spurious accounts, forcing the system to go through each request. Some DDoS incidents may be distractions that facilitate wire theft, but others are politically motivated. Credit unions may need better preparation against DDoS risk, especially since some simply rely on online banking providers or ISPs to protect data. Restore on reboot software can be easily deployed by IT administrators as part of an imaging solution, and it provides fine-tuned management of all office endpoints. Organizations can ensure that kiosks and cash dispensing services remain active even in the event of a crash or attack. Source: http://www.faronics.com/news/blog/credit-unions-among-industries-that-suffered-more-ddos-attacks-in-2013/
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Credit unions among industries that suffered more DDoS attacks in 2013
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against mobile networks and data centers are increasing significantly: mobile DDoS attacks alone have more than doubled last year, with nearly a quarter of respondents in a new study indicating that they have seen attacks impacting their mobile Internet infrastructure. In addition, more than 70% operating data centers reported DDoS attacks over the last year, up dramatically from the year before. According to Arbor Networks’ 9th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR), more than a third of responding data centers experienced attacks that exceeded total available internet connectivity, nearly double from the previous year. Staggeringly, about 10% saw more than 100 attacks per month. The report also found that DNS infrastructure remains vulnerable. Just over one-third experienced customer-impacting DDoS attacks on DNS infrastructure – an increase of a quarter over the previous year. “Despite a really high-profile year for DNS amplification attacks, including the largest attack ever monitored (Spamhaus), there are still a significant number of open DNS resolvers out there within the survey base,” said Andrew Cockburn, consulting engineer for Arbor’s carrier group, in a blog. “Fully 20% of our respondents do not restrict recursive lookups, which when extrapolated to the entire base of DNS resolvers, makes for rich pickings among those that are interested in launching this kind of attack.” He added that after the Spamhaus attack, which was very well-publicized, Arbor saw a large number of copycat attacks in the months following. “And despite this, the number of open resolvers stayed pretty consistent with last year’s survey,” he said. “I think that the increase in lack of internal organizations with specific responsibility for DNS infrastructure is partly to blame. Without a targeted and holistic approach to security, such organizations have no way to connect the dots between their decisions to leave a resolver open, and the associated security risks.” The report found that more than a quarter of respondents indicated that there is no security group within their organizations with formal responsibility for DNS security, up 19% from the previous report. Also, there’s been a dramatic rise in DDoS attack size in general. In all previous years of the survey, the largest reported attack was 100Gbps. This year, attacks peaked at 309Gbps, and multiple respondents reported attacks larger than 100Gbps. “Last year we saw eight times the number of attacks over 20Gbps when compared to 2012,” said Darren Anstee, solutions architect for EMEA at Arbor. “In short, attackers seem to have re-focused on utilizing large volumetric attacks to achieve their goals and this illustrates why layered DDoS defense is such an important message. “ Meanwhile, internal network, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and ubiquitous application-layer attacks continue to be everyday reality for IT departments too. The proportion of respondents seeing APTs on their networks has increased from 22% to 30% year over year – and respondents ranked botted hosts as their No. 1 concern. “The other key aspect of the results this year, from my perspective, relates to internal network threats,” Anstee said. “Over half of respondents this year indicated that they had seen botted/compromised hosts and or APTs on their internal networks during the survey period. This clearly shows that threats are getting inside networks, either around or through perimeter defenses. Organizations need to augment their security postures so that they can identify suspicious or malicious activities wherever they might occur on their networks.” The report also found that application-layer attacks are now common, with nearly all respondents indicating they have seen them during this survey period. There has also been continued strong growth in application-layer attacks targeting encrypted web services (HTTPS): these are up 17% over the previous year’s report. Source: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/36687/ddos-surges-in-mobile-and-data-centers/
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DDoS Surges in Mobile and Data Centers
Major US financial firms JP Morgan Chase and the Bank of America have been targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, according to one hacktivist group. The European Cyber Army has claimed it waged the attack that disrupted online services for customers of the companies between 10:30am and 2:30pm on Tuesday (28 January). It is the latest in a long line of DDoS attacks that the group has admitted to, with the federal court system one organisation recently impacted. Reports suggest the group have also been responsible for disruptive online attacks in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Both the Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase has refused to comment on the attack, but customers took to Twitter to complain about the outage to online services. Several executives at organisations that track DDoS activity confirm they saw indications two leading US banks were hit on Tuesday. The news of the DDoS attacks comes as Aleksandr Panin, the Russian programmer who created the SpyEye bank hacking tool, was successfully prosected in the US. Source: http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2014/Jan/30/jp-morgan-chase-and-bank-of-america-targets-for-ddos-attacks.html
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JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America targets for DDoS attacks
The education sector is the fastest growing segment in taking up distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, according to DDoS protection services firm DOSarrest. The firm’s CTO Jag Bains told Computing that many companies -not just e-commerce firms – are deploying DDoS protection. “If their website goes down as a result of an attack, they can lose their SEO ranking or it could have an effect on their brand, there is a lot at stake aside from revenues,” he said. And despite there not being a particular industry that looks at DDoS protection as a must, DOSarrest’s general manager, Mark Teolis claimed that the education sector is one area which has grown significantly. “Our fastest growing segment in the last six months is the education sector believe it or not,” he said. Teolis explained that the firm was getting business from “schools from the UK, the US and international universities” but said he couldn’t identify a specific reason as to why the sector has shown a sudden interest. Bains believes that it may be as a result of educational institutes guarding themselves against their own students. “Students have easy access to DDoS tools, so they may want to try it against their own [school or university]. They could be motivated because they’re failing in something, and there are enough smart kids around to access tools – it is easy to Google them anyway,” he said. But Teolis said that the tools have been available on the internet for a long time, so questioned why there was a sudden surge in interest from educational institutes. Bains suggested that it could be because the school and university websites have become an integral part of the education system. “We’ve been talking about e-commerce and gaming [as being key industries for DDoS protection], but web presence itself is very important and schools and universities need to make their websites accessible. They need a website to give out grades, information and schedules – five years ago they weren’t really using the web page apart from explaining where the school is located,” he said. But while the education sector may be taking a keen interest, Teolis claims that there is not one segment that is “taking up 30 per cent of the market”. He said that “10 or 15 per cent of the market is as good as it gets”. As for a particular industry that has not taken DDoS as seriously as others, Teolis believes many e-commerce firms haven’t contemplated being the victim of a DDoS attack. “There are still the odd e-commerce guys out there [who haven’t taken it as seriously]. Money is rolling in and they’re just focused on that; DDoS for them is somebody else’s problem. A lot of it is ‘my ISP will deal with it’, the fact of the matter is, it is difficult to stop all of the attacks,” he said. Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2325009/education-sector-is-fastest-growing-for-ddos-mitigation-dosarrest
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Education sector is fastest growing for DDoS mitigation
Scheiße! Überprüfen Sie Ihre Angaben in neuen Datenbank Officials in Germany have warned that large networks of hijacked, hacker-controlled PCs – aka botnets – have harvested 16 million email address and password combinations for websites and other online services.…
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Botnet PC armies gulp down 16 MILLION logins from around the web: Find out if you’re a victim
Popular attack method could be stopped with a config tweak Security researchers have responded to recent denial of service attacks against gaming websites and service providers that rely on insecure Network Time Protocol servers by drawing up a list of vulnerable systems.…
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Don’t be a DDoS dummy: Patch your NTP servers, plead infosec bods
Sanral’s e-toll Web site suffered a denial of service (DoS) attack on Friday, according to the agency. “Some users complained of slow site performance, and our service provider traced the problem to a denial of service attack of international origin,” said Sanral spokesman Vusi Mona. No further details of the attack were available, but Alex van Niekerk, project manager for the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, said the site has come under repeated attack since going live, but suffered only minor performance degradation. DoS attacks, particularly distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, are a popular technique used to knock sites offline, overwhelming them with traffic until they are unable to service their clients. Activist group Anonymous frequently uses DDoS to attack targets, using its wide base of supporters to generate traffic. Botnets often launch DDoS attacks from their installed base of zombie PCs. And last year, anti-spam service Spamhaus suffered one of the largest DDoS attacks in history, with incoming traffic peaking at 300Gbps, launched by a Dutch Web host known for harbouring spammers. Sanral’s Web site has been the target of several attacks lately, including a hack which may have leaked personal information, a flaw which allowed motorists to be tracked in real-time, and a session fixation attack which allowed login sessions to be hijacked. Source: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70192:e-toll-site-weathers-denial-of-service-attack
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E-toll site weathers denial of service (DDoS) attack
The cyber crime networks that refuse to die
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DDoS attacks still plague businesses worldwide, and cyber criminals are increasingly using mobile devices to launch attacks The threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against enterprise users from mobile applications is increasing as more users go mobile, according to DDoS security company Prolexic. Cyber criminals are finding mobile devices can make for a powerful attack tool – and surprisingly easy to use. “Mobile devices add another layer of complexity,” said Stuart Scholly, Prolexic President, in a press statement. “Because mobile networks use super proxies, you cannot simply use a hardware appliance to block source IP addresses as it will also block legitimate traffic. Effective DDoS mitigation requires an additional level of fingerprinting and human expertise so specific blocking signatures can be developed on-the-fly and applied in real-time.” DDoS attacks can lead to website and server downtime, interruption in day-to-day business operations, and lead to lost revenue and wasted manpower. Prolexic discovered a 26 percent increase in DDoS attacks from Q4 2012 to Q4 2013, with a significant number of advanced DDoS attack weapons. Source: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34862/mobile-devices-increasingly-used-to-launch-sophisticated-ddos-attacks/index.html
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Mobile devices increasingly used to launch sophisticated DDoS attacks