Category Archives: DDoS Vendors

Anonymous takes aim at World Cup sponsors

Hactivist group Anonymous has announced plans to launch a DDoS attack on the sponsors of the football World Cup, which opens in Brazil later this month. Reuters – interviewing Che Commodore, a masked member of Anonymous – says that preparations for the distributed denial of service attack are now under way. “We have a plan of attack. We have already conducted late-night tests to see which of the sites are more vulnerable – this time we are targeting the sponsors of the World Cup,” he said. The main sponsors of the World Cup include Adidas, Budweiser, Coca Cola and Emirates Airlines. Reuters quotes Che Commodore as claiming that a test attack earlier this week allowed Anonymous to break into the Brazilian Foreign Ministry’s server and access dozens of confidential documents, as well as steal several email accounts. The newswire adds that in response to the claims, a Foreign Ministry official told Reuters that 55 email accounts were accessed and the only documents that were obtained were attached to emails and those from the ministry’s internal document archive. Can Anonymous carry out its threat? Tim Keanini, CTO with Lancope, says that, regardless of threat profile, an event of this magnitude must have a heightened level of readiness to a physical or cyber security related event. “By the time a group like this makes a public announcement, much of the infiltration phase has already been done. These threat actors are smart and they don’t start to show their cards until they are well into the operational phase of their campaign,” he explained. Keanini said that events like the World Cup require hundreds of interconnected businesses and every one of those businesses need to be prepared. “If your business is connected to the Internet you should be prepared for cyber security events because it is likely to have already happened, you just don’t have the tools and technique to detect it,” he noted. Sean Power, security operations manager with DOSarrest, meanwhile, said that Anonymous is a face that any hacktivist can masquerade behind. “The composition of a team from one OP to the next will vary greatly – with a predictable effect on the sophistication of the attack. That being said, under normal operation any event as much in the public eye should be wary of DoS attacks, if threats have already been levied, that concern should be increased, not dismissed out of hand,” he explained. Ryan Dewhurst, a senior engineer and web security specialist with RandomStorm, told SCMagazineUK.com that Anonymous has already stated that they used targeted phishing emails to install malware on victim’s machines and gain access to government documents. “I believe they will use a mixture of both sophisticated and non-sophisticated attacks. However, they have also stated that they will be carrying out Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the World Cup sponsors,” he said. “Anonymous’ DDoS attacks, in the past, have worked by getting many Anonymous members to run software, most likely their infamous Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) tool, which attempts to flood their target with an overwhelming amount of traffic. The LOIC tool is most likely being run by the majority of the group members who have less technical skill, whereas the more sophisticated attacks are most likely carried out by the most skilled members of the group which would be fewer in number,” he added. Dewhurst says that Anonymous – if indeed it is this group and not another group of hacktivists using its name – are always going to go for the easiest targets, as these are also the least risky for them to attack, while still achieving their goals. “If their less risky methods are unsuccessful they will begin to increase the sophistication of the attack, however this also increases the risk of them eventually being caught,” he explained. David Howorth, Alert Logic’s vice president, say there are lessons that can be learned from Anonymous’ latest campaign, which means that companies should review their security practices assuming an attack could take place. IT security professionals, he advises, must be vigilant and ensure that all employees are aware of the company’s internal security policy and best practices, practice good password security, as well as making sure that all systems and applications are up-to-date and patched. “Make sure you have expertise that can monitor, correlate and analyse the security threats to your network and applications across your on-premise and cloud infrastructure 24×7 for continuous protection – this should be done now, as the hackers are already testing the vulnerabilities in the infrastructure in preparation for their attacks,” he went on to say. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/anonymous-takes-aim-at-world-cup-sponsors/article/349934/

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Anonymous takes aim at World Cup sponsors

Feds charge 30-year-old suspect alleged to be lord of Gameover botnet

Arrest warrant out as recommended clean-up site staggers under demand A US indictment has been unsealed against an alleged cybercrime mastermind following an FBI-led takedown operation that disrupted the internet infrastructure upon which the Gameover ZeuS botnet and the CryptoLocker ransomware had been running.…

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Feds charge 30-year-old suspect alleged to be lord of Gameover botnet

Hacktivist Warns World Cup Sponsors Anonymous DDoS Attack is Coming

Che Commodore claims groups have already tested which are the most vulnerable sites. A hacktivist claiming to be affiliated with infamous online collective Anonymous has said the group is planning to DDoS various high profile sponsors of the forthcoming FIFA World Cup this month. The hacker, who goes under the name “Che Commodore”, told Reuters in a Skype interview from Brazil that Anonymous had already begun planning the campaign, designed to protest the vast sums of money being thrown at the event when the country still suffers severe social inequality. “We have already conducted late-night tests to see which of the sites are more vulnerable,” he said. “We have a plan of attack.” The targeted firms on the Anonymous shortlist apparently include Budweiser, Adidas, Emirates and Coca-Cola – all major sponsors of the tournament, the biggest single-event sporting competition in the world. If it goes ahead, the DDoS campaign will be the second major attack by Anonymous in the region in recent days. Another hacktivist, known as AnonManifest, used a phishing attack to penetrate the Foreign Ministry’s network last week and exfiltrate over 300 confidential documents which were later posted online, the report claimed. The ministry’s email system was apparently taken down as a result and 3,000 account holders told to change their passwords. Civil unrest directed mainly at the Brazilian government has marred the build-up to a World Cup which has already cost £9 billion – money they think would be better spent on improving things like social welfare and public services. In June 2013, over one million people took to the streets of more than 100 cities in violent protests against the spiralling costs of the tournament. David Howorth, VP at Alert Logic, said that the threat of attack during a major tournament like the World Cup is heightened due to the global exposure it gives hacktivists. He urged high profile sponsors to work with their network vendors to plan a DDoS prevention strategy; ensure all apps are up-to-date and patched; and that firewall, IDS and web application firewalls are configured correctly. “Make sure you have expertise that can monitor, correlate and analyse the security threats to your network and applications across your on-premise and cloud infrastructure 24×7 for continuous protection – this should be done now as the hackers are already testing the vulnerabilities in the infrastructure in preparation of their attacks,” he added. “Finally, remember that hackers are creative – don’t just focus on one attack vector as the attacker will try multiple ways to cause damage.” Source: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/38657/hacktivist-warns-world-cup-sponsors-anonymous-ddos-attack-is-coming/

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Hacktivist Warns World Cup Sponsors Anonymous DDoS Attack is Coming

International action against Gameover Zeus botnet and CyptoLocker ransomware

On Friday, 30 May 2014, law enforcement agencies from across the world, supported by the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol, joined forces in a coordinated action led by the FBI which ensured…

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International action against Gameover Zeus botnet and CyptoLocker ransomware

HOSTING Partners With DOSarrest Internet Security to Offer DDoS Protection Services

DOSarrest Internet Security, an industry leading DDoS protection provider, has announced a partnership agreement to offer its full suite of DDoS products to HOSTING, the leading cloud service provider in the market today. Products include DDoS protection for client websites, Layer 7 cloud based Load balancing, WAF, vulnerability testing and optimization as well as DEMS, D OSarrest E xternal M onitoring S ervice. “We are excited to add HOSTING to our growing list of service provider partners. DDoS protection has become a necessity to ensure a customer has a stable website environment and more clients are beginning to realize this and are requesting this protection service from their hosting provider,” said Brian Mohammed, DOSarrest Director of Sales and Marketing. “It’s a fact of modern business that organizations must deploy comprehensive, multilayered security to best protect themselves from DDoS attacks,” said Bill Santos, President of HOSTING’s Advanced Solutions. “DOSarrest’s DDoS protection products offer the sophistication, reliability and service that HOSTING customers have come to rely upon, and we are eager to introduce their offerings.” “A single DDoS attack puts a heavy strain on Network Operations Center resources, often for hours,” said Jag Bains, CTO of DOSarrest Internet Security., “This partnership helps to alleviate the strain on HOSTING’s support team, who can remain focused on providing the highest level of support and monitoring for their customers.” About HOSTING: HOSTING helps organizations design, build, migrate, manage and protect their cloud-based environments. Leveraging enterprise-class networking and connectivity technologies, HOSTING provides the highest levels of compliance, availability, recovery, security and performance. HOSTING owns and operates six geographically dispersed data centers under an ITIL-based control environment validated for compliance against HIPAA, PCI DSS and SOC (formerly SAS 70) frameworks. HOSTING’s cloud-enabled solutions were recently recognized by Gartner Group, placing in the Top 10 in the Managed Hosting Magic Quadrant in both “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” – in both 2012 and 2013. More information at www.hosting.com About DOSarrest Internet Security: DOSarrest founded in 2007 in Vancouver, BC, Canada is one of only a couple of companies worldwide to specialize in only cloud based DDoS protection services. Their global client base includes mission critical ecommerce websites in a wide range of business segments including financial, health, media, education and government. Other cloud based services include, Load balancing, WAF, External Website monitoring and Vulnerability Testing. More information at www.DOSarrest.com Source: http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/-1915044.htm

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HOSTING Partners With DOSarrest Internet Security to Offer DDoS Protection Services

Detecting Constant Low-Frequency Appilication Layer Ddos Attacks Using Collaborative Algorithms

Abstract: — A DDoS (i.e., Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a large scale distributed attempt by malicious attackers to fill the users’ network with a massive number of packets. This exhausts resources like bandwidth, computing power, etc.; User can’t provide services to its clients and network performance get destroyed. The methods like hop count filtering; rate limiting and statistical filtering are used for recovery. In this paper, we explored two new information metrics which have generalized information about entropy metric and distance metric .They can detect low-rate of Distributed Denial of Service i.e., DDoS attacks by measuring difference  between the legitimate traffic and the attack traffic. The generalized entropy metric information can detect the attacks on several hops before than the traditional Shannon metric. The proposed information about the distance metric outperforms the popular Kullback–Leibler divergence approach as it has the ability to perfectly enlarge the adjudication distance and gets the optimal detection sensitivity. Further the IP trace back algorithm can find all attackers as well as their attacks through local area networks (LANs) and will delete the attack traffic. Index Terms— Attack detection, information metrics, IP trace back, low-rate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. I. INTRODUCTION Present in networking we have to provide security to information while accessing and transmitting. Lots of hacking tools are available for getting the information that was transmitted in the network. A standard security mechanism is in need to overcome this thing. The information in the network have to be out of range to intruders. It impacts bandwidth, processing capacity, or memory of a network. It has huge occupying nature on wired and wireless networks. DDoS attack is an intelligent attack and considered as low rate attack. The attacker is capable of sending multiple numbers of attack  packets to the user which is out bound to elude detection. Mostly combination of large-scale DDoS attacks and multiple Low-rate attacks are making user uncomfortable in the networking process. So it is becoming difficult to detect and getting solutions to such attacks. Nowadays, several Distributed Denial of Service attacking detection methods of metrics are in use, they are mainly separated into the following categories: i) the signature-based metric, and ii) anomaly-based metric. The signature-based method of metric depends on a technology that deploys a predefined set of attack-signatures like patterns or strings as signatures to match the incoming  packets. This anomaly-based detection method of metric typically models the normal network (traffic) behavior and  deploys it to compare the differences to incoming network  behavior. Anomaly-based method of detection has many limitations: i) Attackers can train detection systems to gradually accept anomaly network behavior as normal . ii) The rate at which the false positives use the anomaly- based detection metric is generally higher than those using the signature-based detection metric. It is difficult to set a threshold that helps us to balance the rate of false positives and the false negatives. iii) Precisely the extraction of the features like normal and anomalous network behaviors is very difficult. An anomaly- based detection method of metric uses a  predefined as well as specific threshold for example, an abnormal deviation of parameters related to some statistical characteristics that are considered from normal network traffic, to identify abnormal traffic amongst all normal traffic. Hence, it is important to utilize and to be decisive while choosing the statistical methods and tools respectively. It is an acceptable fact that the fractional Gaussian noise function and the Poisson distribution function can be used to simulate the can be used to simulate real network traffic in aggregation and the DDoS attack traffic in aggregation respectively. Many information theory based metrics have  been proposed to overcome the above limitations. In information theory, information entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable. Information distance (or divergence) is a measure of the difference  between different probability distributions. Shannon’s entropy and Kullback–Leibler’s divergence methods have  both been regarded as effective methods based on IP address-distribution statistics for detecting the abnormal traffic. Time taken for detection as well as detection accuracy of DDoS attacks are the two most important criteria for rating a defense system. Through this paper, we make you aware of two new and effective anomaly-based detection method of metrics that not only identify attacks quickly, but also they reduce the rate of false positives as compared to the traditional Shannon’s entropy method and the Kullback–Leibler divergence method. Contributions Some of the main contributions made in this paper are as follows: 1) It highlights the advantages and also it analyses the generalized entropy and information distance compared with Shannon entropy and Kullback–Leibler distance, respectively. 2) It proposes a better technique to the generalized entropy and information distance metrics to perform better than the traditional Shannon entropy and Kullback–Leibler distance method of metrics at low-rate DDoS attack detection in terms of quick detection, low rate of false positives and stabilities. 3) It proposes an effective IP trace back scheme that is based on an information distance method of metric that can trace all the attacks made by local area networks (LANs) and drive them back in a short time. ALGORITHMS FOR DETECTION AND IP TRACEBACK ANALYSIS In this section, we propose and analyze two effective detection algorithms and an IP traceback scheme. In this  paper, we make the following reasonable assumptions: 1) We will have full control of all the routers; 2) We will have extracted an effective feature of network traffic to sample its probability distribution; 3) We will have obtained and stored the average traffic of the normal, as well as the local thresholds and routers on their own in advance; 4) On all routers, the attack traffic obeys Poisson distribution and the normal traffic obeys Gaussian noise distribution. Our algorithm can not only detect DDoS attacks at router via single-point detection, but can also detect  the attacks that are made using a collaborative detection at routers. Fig. 2 shows the processing flowchart of the collaborative detection algorithm. Compared with single- point detection, we can detect attacks even before by using a collaborative detection approaches if the traffic can be analyzed before them. The divergence and distance are increasing simultaneously. By increasing the divergence  between legitimate traffic and attack traffic we can distinguish DDoS attacks easily and earlier. Therefore, in DDoS attack detection; we can take full advantage of the additive and increasing properties in of the information divergence and the information distance to enlarge the distance or gap between legitimate traffic and attack traffic. This means we can find and raise alarms for DDoS attacks quickly and accurately with a lower rate of false positives in upper stream routers instead of the victim’s router. In information theory, we know that both information divergence and information distance are nonnegative values and the sum of the divergences or distances is always greater C. IP Trace back Analysis IP trace back is the ability to find the source of an IP  packet without relying on the source IP field in the packet, which is often spoofed. We combine our DDoS attacks detection metric with IP trace back algorithm and filtering technology together to form an effective collaborative defense mechanism against network security threats in Internet. In hop-by-hop IP tracing, the more hops the more tracing processes, thus the longer time will be taken. Listing 1. A collaborative DDoS attack detection algorithm 1. Set the sampling frequency as f , the sampling as T, and the collaborative detection threshold as 0. 2. In routers R1 and R2 of Fig. 1, sampling the network tra ?ic comes from the upstream routers R3, R4 , R5, R6 and LAN1, LAN; in parallel. 3. Calculate in parallel the numbers of packet which have various recognizable characteristics (e.g., the source IP address or the packet’s size, etc.) in each sampling time interval ‘r(‘r = 1/ f) within T. 4. Calculate the probability distributions of the network tra ?ic come from R3, R4, LAN 1 and R5, R6, LAN2 in parallel. 5. Calculate their distances on router R1 and R2, respectively, using the formula Da(Ps Q) = Da(PllQ) + D¢-(Q||P)- 6. Sum the distances. 7. If the summed distance is more than the collaborative detection threshold 0, then the system detects the DDoS attack, and begins to raise an alarm and discards the attack packets; otherwise the routers forward the packets to the downstream routers. In order to convenience for IP trace back algorithm analysis, we classify two types of traffic in Figs. 1 and 3 as local traffic and forward traffic, respectively. The local traffic of is the traffic generated from its LAN, the forward traffic of is the sum of its local traffic and the traffic forwarded from its immediate upstream routers. In this paper, we propose an IP trace back algorithm that can trace the source (zombies) of the attack up to its local administrative network; Listing 2 illustrates this algorithm. Listing 2. An IP traceback algorithm in DDoS attacks detection The proposed IP trace back algorithm based on a sample scenario of low-rate DDoS attacks on a victim. When the  proposed attacks detection system detects an attack on a victim, the proposed IP traceback algorithm will be launched immediately. On router , the proposed traceback algorithm calculates information distances based on variations of its local traffic and the forward traffic from its immediate upstream routers; in this paper, we set LAN of router include the victim. If the information distance based on its local  traffic is more than the specific detection threshold, the  proposed detection system detects an attack in its LAN IP_Traceback_Algorithm () while(true) call Check_ForwardTraf ?c(0)//check attacks on router R0 (or victim) Check_ForwardTra ?ic (i) calculate infommtion distance D I-( R,-) i1°D:(Ri> > arm) call Check_LocalTra ?c for j = 1 to n k = the ID of the jth immediate upstream router of router Ri call Check_ForwardTra ?ic (Ic) end for end if I Check_LocalTra ?ic (xi) calculate infomlation distance D1,- if Du > 01¢ stop forwarding the attack tra ?c to downstream routers (or destination), label the zombie end if This means that the detected attack is an internal attack. If the information distances based on the forward traffic from its immediate upstream routers and are both more than the specific detection threshold and, respectively, the proposed detection system has detected attacks in routers and , then on and the proposed trace back algorithm calculates information distances based on variations of their local traffic and the forward traffic from their immediate upstream routers, and Will find that there are no attacks in LAN and LAN and ; therefore, on routers , and the proposed algorithm calculates continually information distances based on variations of their local traffic and the forward traffic from their immediate upstream routers, then can find there is an attack (zombie) in LAN so the router will stop forwarding the traffic from the zombie immediately. RELATED WORK The metrics of an anomaly-based detection have been the focusing on the intense study years together in an attempt to detect the intrusions and attacks done on the Internet. Recently, this information theory is being used as one of the statistical metrics that are being increasingly used for anomaly detection. Feinstein et al present methods to identify DDoS attacks by computing entropy and frequency-sorted of selected packet attributes. These Distributed Denial of Service attacks show their characteristics of the selected packet attributes to its anomalies, and its detection accuracy and performance can  be analyzed with the help of live traffic traces among a variety of network environments. However,  because of the proposed detector and responder there will  be a coordination lack with each other, then the impact of its responses on legitimate traffic and expenses for computational analysis may increase. Yu and Zhou applied a special technique for information theory parameter to discriminate the Distributed Denial of Service attack against the surge legitimate accessing. That technique is  based on the shared regularities along with different Distributed Denial of Service attack traffic, which differentiates it from real surging accessing over a short  period of time. However, the proposed detection algorithm will be helpful to us in predicting a single directions or a limited number of directions but the real problem comes when these attackers adopt a multiple attack package generation function in one attack to fool us. Lee and Xiang used various information-theoretic measures like entropy, conditional entropy, relative conditional entropy, information gain, and information cost for anomaly detection, etc. yes it is true that for some extent measures like mentioned above can be used to evaluate the quality of anomaly detection methods and to build the appropriate anomaly detection models but we find a tough time to  build an adaptive model that can dynamically adjust itself to different sequence lengths or time windows that are  based on run-time information. A low-rate Distributed Denial of Service attack is substantially different from a high-rate Distributed Denial of Service attack which is considered to be the traditional type of Distributed Denial of Service attack. A few number of researchers have proposed several detection schemes against Distributed Denial of Service type of attack. Sun et al. proposed a distributed detection mechanism that is used as a dynamic time warping method for identifying the presence of the low-rate attacks, then a fair resource for the allocation mechanism will be used to minimize the affected flows in number. However, this method can lose the legitimate traffic to some extent Shevtekar et al. gave a light-weight data structure to store the necessary flow history at edge routers to detect the low-rate TCP DoS attacks. Although this method can detect any  periodic pattern in the flows, it may not be scalable and can  be deceived by the IP address spoofing. Chen et al. Present a collaborative detection of DDoS attacks. While focusing on detection rate, it is difficult for this scheme to differentiate the normal flash crowds and real attacks. As it heavily relies on the normal operation of participating routers, the false  positives will increase if the routers are compromised. Zhang et al. propose to use self-similarity to detect low-rate DDoS attacks. While the approach is claimed to be effective, the  paper does not use real scenario data to evaluate it.Kullback– Leibler divergence, as a well-known information divergence, has been used by researchers to detect abnormal traffic such as DDoS attacks. The difference between previous work and our research is that we are the first to propose using information divergence for DDoS attack detection. Information divergence, as the generalized divergence, can deduce many concrete divergence forms according to different values of order. For example, when, it can decipher the Kullback–Leibler divergence. It is very important and significant that we can obtain the optimal value of divergence between the attack traffic and the legitimate traffic in a DDoS detection system  by adjusting the value of order of information n divergence. In addition to this, we also study the properties of Kullback– Leibler divergence and information divergence in theory and overcome their asymmetric property when used in real measurement. We successfully convert the information divergence into an effective metric in DDoS attack (including both low-rate and high-rate) detection. V. CONCLUSION In this paper we described different techniques which are for the prevention of the denial of service attacks. A new methodology along with the existing packet marking technique was proposed. The information contains the lifetime of the packet. The traceback process an accurate one. As the proposed metrics can increase the information distance among attack traffic and legitimate traffic. Those lead to detect low-rate DDoS attacks fast and reduce the false positive rate accurately. This information distance metric overcomes the properties of asymmetric of both Kullback-Leibler and information divergences. IP traceback scheme based on information metrics can effectively trace all attacks including LANs (zombies). Our  proposed information metrics improve the performance of low-rate DDoS attacks detection and IP traceback over the traditional approaches. Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/226717154/Detecting-Constant-Low-Frequency-Appilication-Layer-Ddos-Attacks-Using-Collaborative-Algorithms

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Detecting Constant Low-Frequency Appilication Layer Ddos Attacks Using Collaborative Algorithms

Tens of thousands of pirate gamers enslaved by Bitcoin botnet

‘Watch Dogs’ players targeted for access to their juicy GPUs Tens of thousands of pirate gamers have been enslaved in a BitCoin botnet after downloading a leaked copy of popular game Watch Dogs.…

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Tens of thousands of pirate gamers enslaved by Bitcoin botnet

Tens of thousands of ‘Watch Dogs’ pirates gamers ENSLAVED by Bitcoin botmaster

Watch Dogs fans targeted for access to their juicy GPUs Tens of thousands of pirate gamers have been enslaved in a Bitcoin botnet after downloading a cracked copy of popular game Watch Dogs .…

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Tens of thousands of ‘Watch Dogs’ pirates gamers ENSLAVED by Bitcoin botmaster

DDoS attacks using SNMP amplification on the rise

Attackers are increasingly abusing devices configured to publicly respond to SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) requests over the Internet to amplify distributed denial-of-service attacks. This amplification technique, which is also known as reflection, can theoretically work with any protocol that is vulnerable to IP (Internet Protocol) address spoofing and can generate large responses to significantly smaller queries. Attackers can craft requests that appear to originate from the IP address of their intended victim in order to trick servers that accept requests over such protocols from the Internet to flood the victim with data. Many DDoS attacks in the past year have used misconfigured DNS (Domain Name System) and NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers for amplification. However, devices that support SNMP, a protocol designed to allow the monitoring of network-attached devices by querying information about their configuration, can also be abused if the SNMP service is directly exposed to the Internet. SNMP-enabled devices with such configurations can be found both in home and business environments and include printers, switches, firewalls and routers. Since April 11, the Prolexic Security Engineering Response Team (PLXsert), which is now part of Akamai Technologies, has identified 14 separate DDoS campaigns that used SNMP reflection. Almost half of the malicious SNMP reflected traffic came from IP addresses in the U.S. and 18 percent from China, PLXsert said in a threat advisory published Thursday. “The attacks targeted clients in the following industry verticals: consumer goods, gaming, hosting, non-profits and software-as-a-service (SaaS).” One of the tools used to launch the recent attacks was created in 2011 by a hacker group called Team Poison and can send spoofed SNMP GetBulk requests to publicly accessible SNMP-enabled devices to trigger responses that can be more than 1,700 times larger than the requests, the Prolexic team said. The attackers crafted their requests to have a source port of 80—usually assigned to HTTP—so that vulnerable devices return their SNMP responses to the victims on the same port, flooding their HTTP services. “Until approximately three years ago, SNMP devices were manufactured using SNMP version 2 and were commonly delivered with the SNMP protocol openly accessible to the public by default,” PLXsert said. “Devices using SNMP v3 are more secure. To stop these older devices from participating in attacks, network administrators need to check for the presence of this protocol and turn off public access.” Information over SNMP is controlled by a so-called community string, which in the case of SNMP v2c is “public” by default, PLXsert said. SNMP amplification attacks are not really new, said Sean Power, security operations manager at DDoS protection vendor DOSarrest Internet Security, Friday via email. “Legitimate SNMP traffic has no need to leave your network and should be prevented from doing so. This attack exists because many organizations fail to prevent this.” It’s important for network owners to lock down services that can be used for DDoS reflection and amplification like DNS, SNMP, NTP and voice over IP. This “is part of being a good citizen of the Internet,” said Tom Cross, director of security research for network security and performance monitoring vendor Lancope, via email. Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2159060/ddos-attacks-using-snmp-amplification-on-the-rise.html

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DDoS attacks using SNMP amplification on the rise

SNMP DDoS Attacks Spike

No botnet necessary: Yet another flavor of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that doesn’t require infecting PCs is on the rise. Akamai’s Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) today issued a threat advisory warning of a spike in DDoS attacks abusing the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface in network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, and printers. PLXsert has spotted 14 SNMP DDoS attack campaigns over the past month, targeting various industries including consumer products, gaming, hosting, nonprofits, and software-as-a-service, mainly in the US (49.9%) and China (18.49%). The attackers used a tool that’s available online and was developed by the infamous hacker group Team Poison. This latest wave of attacks targets devices running an older version of SNMP, version 2, which by default is open to the public Internet unless that feature is manually disabled. SNMP version 3 is a more secure version of the management protocol, which is used to store device information such as IP address or even the type of toner used on a printer. “Through the use of GetBulk requests against SNMP v2, malicious actors can cause a large number of networked devices to send their stored data all at once to a target in an attempt to overwhelm the resources of the target,” PLXsert says in the advisory. “This kind of DDoS attack, called a distributed reflection and amplification (DrDoS) attack, allows attackers to use a relatively small amount of their own resources to create a massive amount of malicious traffic.” The attacks are using the Team Poison-built tool to automate the “GetBulk” requests. They then use the IP address of the organization they are targeting as the spoofed source of the requests. The attacker then sets off a bulk request for SNMP devices. “These actions will lead to a flood of SNMP GetResponse data sent from the reflectors to the target. The target will see this inflow of data as coming from the victim devices queried by the attacker,” the advisory says, and the attacker’s actual IP address is hidden. David Fernandez, director of the PLXsert team, says this reflection technique, as with NTP reflection attacks, is popular because it’s a way to maximize connections without a botnet, and it’s cheaper to perform. “They can perform campaigns without infections,” Fernandez says. “Unfortunately, the attackers are victims,” such as the duped devices responding to the targeted organization’s network. “These are pretty massive attacks,” he says. “SNMP has a high amplification factor.” The attacks are more than mayhem: Increasingly, DDoS attacks such as these are being used as a smokescreen to divert from a real more deadly attack, he says. Fernandez declined to speculate on the motivation behind these specific attacks. “The use of specific types of protocol reflection attacks such as SNMP surge from time to time,” said Stuart Scholly, senior vice president and general manager of Akamai’s Security Business Unit, in a statement. “Newly available SNMP reflection tools have fueled these attacks.” Source: http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/snmp-ddos-attacks-spike/d/d-id/1269149

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SNMP DDoS Attacks Spike