Category Archives: DDoS Vendors

Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attacks: The Zemra Bot

Symantec has become aware of a new Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) crimeware bot known as “Zemra” and detected by Symantec as Backdoor.Zemra. Lately, this threat has been observed performing denial-of-service attacks against organizations with the purpose of extortion. Zemra first appeared on underground forums in May 2012 at a cost of €100. This crimeware pack is similar to other crime packs, such as Zeus and SpyEye, in that is has a command-and-control panel hosted on a remote server. This allows it to issue commands to compromised computers and act as the gateway to record the number of infections and bots at the attacker’s disposal. Similar to other crimeware kits, the functionality of Zemra is extensive: 256-bit DES encryption/decryption for communication between server and client DDoS attacks Device monitoring Download and execution of binary files Installation and persistence in checking to ensure infection Propagation through USB Self update Self uninstall System information collection However, the main functionality is the ability to perform a DDoS attack on a remote target computer of the user’s choosing. Initially, when a computer becomes infected, Backdoor.Zemra dials home through HTTP (port 80) and performs a POST request sending hardware ID, current user agent, privilege indication (administrator or not), and the version of the OS. This POST request gets parsed by gate.php, which splits out the information and stores it in an SQL database. It then keeps track of which compromised computers are online and ready to receive commands. Inspection of the leaked code allowed us to identify two types of DDoS attacks that have been implemented into this bot: HTTP flood SYN flood The first type, HTTP flood, opens a raw socket connection, but has special options to close the socket gracefully without waiting for a response (e.g. SocketOptionName.DontLinger). It then closes the socket on the client side and launches a new connection with a sleep interval. This is similar to a SYN flood, whereby a number of connection requests are made by sending multiple SYNs. No ACK is sent back upon receiving the SYN-ACK as the socket has been closed. This leaves the server-side Transmission Control Blocks (TCBs) in a SYN-RECEIVED state. The second type, SYN flood, is a simple SYN flood attack whereby multiple connects() are called, causing multiple SYN packets to be sent to the target computer. This is done in an effort to create a backlog of TCB creation requests, thereby exhausting the server and denying access to real requests. Symantec added detection for this threat under the name Backdoor.Zemra, which became active on June 25, 2012. To reduce the possibility of being infected by this Trojan, Symantec advises users to ensure that they are using the latest Symantec protection technologies with the latest antivirus definitions installed. Source: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/ddos-attacks-zemra-bot

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Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attacks: The Zemra Bot

LulzSec Members Confess To Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attacks to SOCA, Sony and etc

Four alleged members of the LulzSec hacktivist group had their day in British court Monday. Two of the people charged–Ryan Cleary, 20, and Jake Leslie Davis, 19–appeared at Southwark Crown Court in England to enter guilty pleas against some of the charges against them, including hacking the public-facing websites of the CIA and Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA). All told, Cleary, who’s from England, pleaded guilty to six of the eight charges lodged against him, including unauthorized access to Pentagon computers controlled by the U.S. Air Force. Meanwhile, Davis–who hails from Scotland’s Shetland Islands–pleaded guilty to two of the four charges made against him. The pair pleaded not guilty to two charges of violating the U.K.’s Serious Crime Act by having posted “unlawfully obtained confidential computer data” to numerous public websites–including LulzSec.com, PasteBin, and the Pirate Bay–to encourage or assist in further offenses, including “supplying articles for use in fraud.” They did, however, confess to launching numerous botnet-driven distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks under the banners of Anonymous, Internet Feds, and LulzSec. According to authorities, the pair targeted websites owned by the Arizona State Police, the Fox Broadcasting Company, News International, Nintendo, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The pair have also been charged with targeting, amongst other organizations, HBGary, HBGary Federal, the Atlanta chapter of Infragard, Britain’s National Health Service, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and Westboro Baptist church. [ Learn about another hacker indictment. See Feds Bust Hacker For Selling Government Supercomputer Access. ] The two other alleged LulzSec members charged Monday are England-based Ryan Mark Ackroyd, 25, as well as a 17-year-old London student who hasn’t been named by authorities since he’s a minor. Both also appeared at Southwark Crown Court and pleaded not guilty to four charges made against them, including participating in DDoS attacks, as well as “encouraging or assisting an offense.” All four of the LulzSec accused are due to stand trial on the charges leveled against them–for offenses that allegedly took place between February and September 2011–on April 8, 2013. According to news reports, the court heard Monday that reviewing all of the evidence just for the charges facing Cleary will require 3,000 hours. Three of the accused have been released on bail. Cleary was not released; he had been released on conditional bail in June 2011, but violated his bail conditions by attempting to contact the LulzSec leader known as Sabu at Christmastime. LulzSec–at least in its original incarnation–was a small, focused spinoff from Anonymous, which itself sprang from the free-wheeling 4chan image boards. LulzSec was short for Lulz Security, with “lulz” (the plural of LOL or laugh out loud) generally referring to laughs gained at others’ expense. According to U.S. authorities, Davis often operated online using the handles topiary and atopiary, while Ackroyd was known online as lol, lolspoon, as well as a female hacker and botnet aficionado dubbed Kayla. What might be read into Ackroyd allegedly posing as a female hacker? According to Parmy Olson’s recently released book, We Are Anonymous, such behavior isn’t unusual in hacking forums, given the scarcity of actual women involved. “Females were a rare sight on image boards and hacking forums; hence the online catchphrase ‘There are no girls on the Internet,’ and why posing as a girl has been a popular tactic for Internet trolls for years,” wrote Olson. “But this didn’t spell an upper hand for genuine females. If they revealed their sex on an image board … they were often met with misogynistic comments.” In related LulzSec prosecution news, Cleary last week was also indicted by a Los Angeles federal grand jury on charges that overlap with some of the ones filed by British prosecutors. At least so far, however, U.S. prosecutors have signaled that they won’t be seeking Cleary’s extradition, leaving him to face charges in the United Kingdom. The shuttering of LulzSec both in the United States and Great Britain was facilitated by the efforts of SOCA, as well as the FBI, which first arrested Anonymous and LulzSec leader Sabu–real name, Hector Xavier Monsegur–in June 2011, then turned him into a confidential government informant before arresting him again, earlier this year, on a 12-count indictment. As revealed in a leaked conference call earlier this year, British and American authorities were working closely together to time their busts of alleged LulzSec and Anonymous operators on both sides of the Atlantic, apparently using evidence gathered by Monsegur. Source: informationweek

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LulzSec Members Confess To Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ Attacks to SOCA, Sony and etc

Legalization of Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDDoS’ attacks as a form of protest

Dutch opposition party D66 has proposed the legalization of DDoS attacks as a form of protest. Activists would have to warn of their action in advance, giving websites time to prepare for their attack. ­Kees Verhoeven, the campaign’s leader, argues that it is strange that the fundamental right to demonstrate doesn’t extend to the online realm. The coming years would bring more instances of hacktivism, and it would be reasonable to introduce legislation to regulate, not ban it, he says. Verhoeven proposes that DDoS attacks be legalized so long as the protesters say when they will start their action. That way, a website would have time to prepare for the attack, just like an office building has time to get ready for a rally next to it. The proposal also includes restrictions on transmitting information about a website’s visitors, as well as stricter rules against e-mail spying, and other measures to bolster online privacy. DDoS attacks, popular with hacktivist groups such as Anonymous, would therefore become a legal means to express dissatisfaction with a company or a government. One DDoS attack per year would cost over $10,000 for a financial services company that makes 25 per cent of its sales online, according to Internet traffic management firm NeuStar UltraDNS. If the brand reputation of the company heavily depends on the performance of the website, one DDoS attack a year could end up costing over $20,500. However, DDoS attacks are relatively innocuous compared to other forms of hacking, such as phishing and virus infections, which can cost companies and individuals millions of dollars. Nevertheless, DDoS attacks are so far equated to hacking and are illegal in the Netherlands, as well as many other countries. Source: http://www.rt.com/news/dutch-party-d66-ddos-legalized-protest-541/

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Legalization of Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDDoS’ attacks as a form of protest

Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ becoming more ‘sophisticated’, damaging

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) have matured with hackers blending different attack techniques and becoming more damaging, observers note. They add that defenses need to evolve to complement infrastructure security that has already been commoditized.” DDoS attacks, where multiple compromised systems usually infected with a Trojan virus, are used to target a single system have been getting more “sophisticated” over the years, Vic Mankotia, security vice president of CA Technologies Asia-Pacific and Japan, noted. Today, there are DDoS attacks coming from automated systems, payloads delivered from USB sticks and protocols such as Bluetooth and magnetic strips of cards, he observed. In the past, DDoS attacks primarily targeted networks using low-level protocol or volumetric attacks, Eric Chan, regional technical director of Fortinet Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, remarked. However, hackers today use a combination of volumetric and application-layer attacking techniques, he noted. An application-layer DDoS targets the application service by using legitimate requests to overload the server, and rather than flood a network with traffic or session, they target specific applications and slowly exhaust resources at the application layer, Chan explained. They can be very “effective” at low traffic rates, which makes them harder to detect, he added. The Sony Playstation breach for example, had been a result of application-layer DDoS attacks, able to camouflage a data breach of over 77 million customer records, he cited. Evolved with IT trends, hackers intent On a basic level, denial-of-service (DoS) has evolved from “taking a pair of wire cutters outside the organization and snipping those wires” 20 years ago, to becoming distributed DoS where “hundreds and thousands of” traffic making computers into botnets to shut down systems, Andrew Valentine, managing principal of investigative response at Verizon observed. Strong connectivity, data centers and cloud, have given mobility center-stage, paved way for the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend making the security parameters “disappear”, Mankotia explained. While mobile devices may not store the target information, but they do allow the DDoS attackers access to the information they seek, he noted. Laptops and devices also have a lot more computing power compared to those in the past, Claudio Scarabello, global security product manager of Verizon added. As such, hardware have a lot more power to flood systems, and can be much more “damaging”, he warned. Another way it has evolved is through the intent, Valentine added. In the past, DDoS had stemmed from “bragging rights”–showing off one’s ability to hack into the server, as well as financial intents, he explained. Today, it is used for political intents, commonly known as hacktivism, and DDoS and data breaches have become “synonymous”, he added, citing the Verizon 2012 data breach investigation report which found a rise in hacktivism against large organizations. “As such, DDoS today is associated with political intent, and making a statement, and not about script kiddies showing off anymore,” he said. Security system with visibility, multi-layered defense needed What is needed is a different type of security to complement the infrastructure security that has already been commoditized–a security system which enables the knowledge of where and who is sharing the data, Mankotia pointed out. DDoS attacks are heavily customized with a signature to get specific information, and security has to evolve as all information is not equal, and all identities, access and system must be in one ecosystem, where content-aware identity and access management are applied and advanced authentication is at its core, he explained. As botnets can send huge amounts of legitimate connections and requests from each compromised machine, and determining whether such connections are valid or not will be crucial, enterprises will need security solutions with “sufficient visibility and context”, Chan added. “These systems should have sufficient visibility and context to detect a wide range of attack types without slowing the flow, and processing of legitimate traffic, and is then able to conduct mitigation in the most effective manner,” he said. Above of, a multi-layer defense strategy is also essential, and the defense strategy must cover both network-layer and application-layer attacks, Chan surmised. In need of protection click here DDoS protection . Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/ddos-becoming-more-sophisticated-damaging-62305134.htm

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Distributed Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ becoming more ‘sophisticated’, damaging

Azerbaijani and Turkish hackers hit Armenian websites with Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attacks

Last night Azerbaijani hackers attacked BlogNews.am, Armenpress.am websites, and Turkish hackers attacked Beeline.am website. Information security specialist Samvel Martirosyan informed about this. Armenpress.am and Beeline.am websites aren’t functioning at present. According to the information circulated by BlogNews.am, a significant part of the information on the website was deleted because of the hackers’ actions. At this moment, the website’s administration is trying to recover the deleted information. Source: http://www.yerkirmedia.am/?act=news&lan=en&id=7791

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Azerbaijani and Turkish hackers hit Armenian websites with Denial of Service ‘DDoS’ attacks

Mascow protest against President Vladimir Putin led to indeptendent Russian websites hit with distributed denial-of-service ‘DDoS’ attack

More than 100,000 protesters on Tuesday joined a march against President Vladimir Putin in central Moscow, organizer and radical left-wing activist Sergei Udaltsov told AFP news agency. “There are more than 100,000 people,” Udaltsov said at the rally, called the March of Millions, which police said had drawn 18,000 people. City authorities allowed up to 50,000 to take part in Tuesday’s event, which coincides with the patriotic Russia Day holiday marking the country’s 1990 declaration of independence from Soviet rule. Moscow police said they were sending 12,000 riot officers and interior ministry troops onto the streets of the capital to keep order. The march will take protesters down Moscow’s Boulevard Ring toward Sakharov Avenue, scene of a dramatic demonstration last December against the outcome of disputed parliamentary elections that month. Meanwhile, independent Russian news websites went offline on Tuesday in a suspected attack by pro-government groups, as protesters gathered in Moscow for a march against President Vladimir Putin’s third Kremlin term. The site of the Moscow Echo radio station went down about a half hour before protesters started to gather on central Pushkin Square. The Dozhd (Rain) TV website and that of the prominent opposition Novaya Gazeta twice-weekly newspaper also could not be accessed as the event officially got under way at 0800 GMT. But the websites of Russia’s main media sources ? including Kremlin-allied papers and state-controlled television stations ? were all accessible and operating without delay. A Dozhd newscaster said their station’s website was the victim of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack of unknown origin. Opposition leaders have been previously blamed attacks on Russian independent media sources on pro-Putin youth groups. A similar attack, which included the inaccessibility of the same websites during the disputed December parliamentary election, was reported but no one claimed responsibility for that attack, AFP reported. The United States on Monday voiced concern after Russian police raided the homes of top protest leaders ahead of the planned mass rally in Moscow. “The United States is deeply concerned by the apparent harassment of Russian political opposition figures on the eve of the planned demonstrations on June 12,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters. Police armed with assault rifles carried out a coordinated sweep of the homes of young Russian politicians, who analysts believe represent the biggest threat to ex-KGB spy Putin’s 12-year rule. Nuland also criticized a new law in Russia that imposes “disproportionate penalties” for violating rules on public demonstrations. Russian police were calling in opposition leaders for questioning one hour prior to the planned rally time on Tuesday in a move “clearly designed to take them off the streets during the demonstration,” she said. “Taken together, these measures raise serious questions about the arbitrary use of law enforcement to stifle free speech and free assembly,” she said. Source: http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/06/12/220172.html

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Mascow protest against President Vladimir Putin led to indeptendent Russian websites hit with distributed denial-of-service ‘DDoS’ attack

Anonymous’ open letter to Indian govt claims DDoS attack on sites are legal

Last night hacktivist group Anonymous sent out an open letter to the government of India criticizing the government and ISP companies for blocking torrent and video sharing websites. While doing so, the group clarified the definition of a DDoS attack, a type of online attack the group has been ravaging against government websites. Less of a threatening letter and more of a Hacking 101 course book for the government and mainstream media alike, Anonymous clarified that a DDoS attack is not a hack, which is legally defined as unauthorized access to a network. In fact, a DDoS attack is overflowing the server capacity by an excess of user traffic, or in simpler terms a traffic jam of sorts occurs at website server due to the enormous traffic attracted, in this case the large influx of anonymous group members. Anonymous believes this is a peaceful way to protest the government blocks and also states how websites were blocked when there was no court order asking for specific sites to be blocked like the Air India employee Facebook protest pages. The group has made its intentions clear to go after the government and its supporters, the ISPs that are blocking access to torrents and some other sites like Vimeo. It is also urging Indians to participate in peaceful demonstrations across the country on June 9. In meantime read the whole letter below. Source: http://www.bgr.in/news/anonymous-open-letter-to-indian-govt-claims-ddos-attack-on-sites-are-legal/

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Anonymous’ open letter to Indian govt claims DDoS attack on sites are legal

Counting the cost of a DDoS attack

In the past month, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the Leveson inquiry website, Visa and Virgin Media have all been hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Much had been made of the motives for such attacks, and the methods that attackers use, but what impact do they have on the victim’s finances? John Pescatore, analyst at research firm Gartner, told Computing that there were three main costs associated with attacks. “There is the cost of the outage, as it means that a business’s customers cannot reach them through the internet. Then there is the cost of making the attack stop – and, often, a third cost in the form of a potential extortion fee,” he said. Obviously losses vary, depending on how much revenue is generated directly from a company’s web presence. John Roberts, head of managed services at MSP Redstone, said: “If a betting organisation trades £600m a year – or £2m a day in revenue terms – and 50 per cent of that comes from the web, then they are losing £1m a day.” Any web-dependent organisation within the global 1,000 might incur similar losses, he added. But there are some less obvious victims of these blunt-instrument attacks. “A Scottish football club who were playing in a European match had its website taken down by the opposing teams’ fans with a DDoS attack. The club was not able to generate significant revenue, because a number of its customers were signed up to stream live games on a monthly fee basis. So an organisation as innocuous as a football club can lose hundreds of thousands of pounds as well,” Roberts said. Public-sector bodies can also suffer substantial financial damage through loss of productivity. “There is a cost implication for local government as people will be looking to procure services over the internet. If those services are unavailable, public-sector staff will receive a lot more incoming phone calls,” he said. Other repercussions are harder to assess and quantify. For example, businesses can suffer reputational damage from DDoS attacks, said Andrew Kellett, analyst at research firm Ovum. “With [the attack on] the Serious Organised Crime Authority [SOCA], the issue was that this was not the first time it had been exposed to a DDoS attack. You would have thought that enough resilience would have been built after the first attack to deal with something similar a year later,” he said. But Gartner’s Pescatore said that reputational damage is often less severe than many organisations fear; customers are used to websites not working for any number of other reasons that are not related to DDoS attacks. “There is reputational damage if the website is defaced or if the website is attacked and customers’ financial information is disclosed, but DDoS generally does not have much of a reputational impact,” he argued. Kellett disagreed and emphasised that reputational damage can itself cause financial loss to enterprises, as their customers opt for an alternative service from a similar provider. He warned that DDoS attacks could also be used as cover for a simultaneous assault on the targeted business. “The noise around  DDoS attacks can be used to hide another backdoor-style assault, such as data being stolen from within the organisation. “There is an example of clerical records, including credit card information, being stolen from an organisation when a DDoS attack was taking place. It was a hacktivist attack where the credit card details were used to make donations to a charity. For any organisation protecting those details it would be both embarrassing and expensive, as they could lose customers and have to repay anyone who has had money taken from their accounts,” he said. Pescatore said that, of the three costs typically associated with DDoS attacks, extortion attempts have reduced significantly. “In the last two years, businesses have not paid off extortion attempts and are focusing on putting in place services to mitigate DDoS attacks. Several years ago there were incidents where it was deemed less expensive to pay off the attackers as they would only be asking for €5,000,” he said. Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/2181680/analysis-counting-cost-ddos-attack

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Counting the cost of a DDoS attack

WHMCS under renewed DDoS blitz after patching systems

‘Undesirable people’ are all over us WHMCS, the UK-based billing and customer support tech supplier, has once again come under denial of service attacks, on this occasion following an upgrade of its systems to defend against a SQL injection vulnerability.…

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WHMCS under renewed DDoS blitz after patching systems

Man arrested for hacking into billing provider

The FBI has arrested hacker “Cosmo”, according to a report by Eduard Kovacs of Softpedia. Cosmo is alleged to be the leader of four-man hacktivist group UGNazi, which took control of the web site of major payment services provider WHMCS just over a week ago. Previously, UGNazi had been known primarily for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks carried out using its own botnet. Earlier this month, for example, it briefly took down the US Department of Education web site. UGNazi received even more attention when, on 21 May, it hacked into servers belonging to UK billing company WHMCS and copied private internal information, which it posted online two days later. The stolen data included a MySQL dump of the company’s customer database containing nearly 130,000 records, and data from the main server. The hackers gained access to WHMCS’ Twitter account and infiltrated the user forum. The group also carried out DDoS attacks to take down the WHMCS domain for several hours. The UGNazi hackers reportedly used basic social engineering techniques to gain access to the WHMCS domain. One of the hackers, probably Cosmo, phoned WHMCS’s hosting company claiming to be the company’s CEO and correctly answered the security question. They were then given full access to the company’s main server. WHMCS provides payment systems for small to medium-sized web sites. At the time of the intrusion, the customer database contained just under 13,000 credit card numbers, which were encrypted using a symmetrical AES algorithm. Passwords were salted, which should have made them harder to decrypt – but since the salt was recorded directly after the password, not impossible. Following the attack, the hackers spent several days taunting WHMCS. They posted tweets in the name of the company and rewrote some company blog and forum postings. In a statement on PasteBin, UGNazi stated that its motivation for the hack was simply to open the eyes of WHMCS users. The group’s US-based web site is now offline – having been, according to a tweet by Cosmo, seized by the FBI. Members of the group have told Kovacs that they are confident that the FBI will not be able to prove anything in relation to Cosmo. A fifth member left the group shortly before the attack on WHMCS. According to Softpedia, another member of the group hasn’t been online “for the past couple of days”. WHMCS has now reset all passwords for its customer area and warned its customers to be vigilant for ongoing consequences of the hack. Yesterday the company was forced to inform its customers of a further security concern, when a programmer informed WHMCS of a vulnerability in its payment processing system, for which the company released an immediate patch. Source: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Man-arrested-for-hacking-into-billing-provider-1587517.html

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Man arrested for hacking into billing provider