Tag Archives: arbor-networks

Surge in memcached-based reflected DDoS attacks is due to misconfigured servers

Massive memcached-based reflection DDoS attacks with an unprecedented amplification factor have been ongoing for the last few days, by taking advantage of memcached servers exposed to the Internet. What is memcached? Memcached is a distributed memory caching system and is used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites and Internet-facing services by caching data and objects in RAM. It is often deployed in data center, cloud, and IaaS networks. According to both Rapid7 and SANS ISC, … More ?

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Surge in memcached-based reflected DDoS attacks is due to misconfigured servers

Monitoring scanning activities that could lead to IoT compromises

IoT devices are ideal targets for attackers looking to build DDoS botnets because they have limited or non-existent security features. Some IoT devices utilize hard-coded default passwords. Many devices have unnecessary services running that can be exploited, and others have unprotected management interfaces. Most important for DDoS attackers, IoT devices offer high-speed connections that are always on, which allows for a large, predictable amount of attack traffic volume per compromised device. Monitoring login attempts Looking … More ?

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Monitoring scanning activities that could lead to IoT compromises

How to Identify a DDoS Attack

DDoS stands for Distributed-Denial-of-Service. It basically means that a surge of information cuts you off from your network i.e. your server or your web host, disallowing access to web services. In recent times, a series of DDoS attacks have taken place, which is proven but the statistics put together by Arbor Networks’ 12th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR). The report indicates that incidences of DDoS attacks have risen 44% compared to last year. In fact, 53% of the service providers that were surveyed mentioned that 53 percent they are seeing more than 21 DDoS attacks per month, up from 44 percent last year. It is important to know if your network is under an attack, and take the necessary correction steps. Especially if you are an online business, a DDoS attack can wreak havoc, stopping your operations completely. An attack is initiated by sending a flood of traffic to your server or web host, thereby, eating into your available bandwidth and server resources. In effect, the original user, which is you, are left without access to web services. In extreme situations, the server may crash too. In fact, the attack is not launched from one source, making it difficult to track down a single IP in computer and data logs. The attacker generally infects user networks, including personal computers, mobiles, and IoT devices and so on, through his or her malware-infected machines. That is where the complexity of identifying a DDoS attack arises- it can quickly spiral into large proportions. Also, a DDoS attack can strike without warning, most hackers do not believe in sending threats before carrying out the hack. It may look like your website server or hosting domain is down, while in reality it may be a DDoS attack. Even elaborate server tests may just indicate a high traffic, which may appear normal. Hence it is important to be on the vigil and consider that you may indeed, be under a DDoS attack: Here are the key clues to look out for: An IP address makes x requests over y seconds, many times consistently, or IP addresses may repeat frequently: If you spot this behaviour for specific IPs, you can direct traffic from those IPs to specific NULL routes. This will bypass your servers. At the same time, make it a point to whitelist some of the valid IPs. Your server responds with a 503 error citing a service outage: Windows allows you to schedule alerts when a specific event happens in Event Viewer. Allocate a task to an event (such as errors or warnings). Similarly, allocate a task to a 503 event by opening Event Viewer, right clicking on the event, and set up a configuration to send an email to an administrator or to a team of people. Loggly can help you with this in case of multiple servers. Ping requests time out: Move beyond manually pinging servers to test response. A number of web pinging services are available, such as, UpTimeRobot, Pingdom, Mon.itor.us, InternetSeer, Uptrends and others. You can configure the frequency at which you want your site to ping from world-over. If a time out occurs, it is reported back to you or your team. Logs show a huge spike in traffic: Loggly can be used as a lookout for DDoS attacks. It not only shows traffic spikes but also their occurrence date and time, their originating servers and user errors. The logs and alerts can be designed to be more specific, for example, base your alerts on a combination of events and traffic spikes, so as to do away with false alerts. It is not practically possible for any human to keep looking out for these signs. One must automate notification systems. Loggly is a useful tool that can send these alerts to external messaging platforms too, such as Slack, or Hipchat. Of course, it is important that you learn how to perfectly configure an alert, to catch the right indicators, at the same time avoiding an overload of alerts. Source: http://www.readitquik.com/articles/networking-2/a-guide-to-identify-ddos-attack/

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How to Identify a DDoS Attack

Global concern over distributed denial-of-service attacks

Arbor Networks has released its 12th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR). The report covers a range of issues from threat detection and incident response to managed services, staffing and budgets. But the main focus is on the operational challenges internet operators face daily from network-based threats and the strategies adopted to address and mitigate them. The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack reported this year was 800 Gbps, a 60% increase over 2015’s largest attack of 500 Gbps. According to Arbor, DDoS attacks are not only getting larger, but they are also becoming more frequent and complex. Darren Anstee, chief security technologist with Arbor Networks, says survey respondents have grown accustomed to a constantly evolving threat environment with steady increases in attack size and complexity over the past decade. “However, IoT botnets are a game changer because of the numbers involved – there are billions of these devices deployed and they are being easily weaponised to launch massive attacks,” he says. “Increasing concern over the threat environment is reflected in the survey results, which show significant improvements in the deployment of best practice technologies and response processes. The report also found that the emergence of botnets that exploit inherent security weaknesses in IoT devices and the release of the Mirai botnet source code have increased attacker ability to launch extremely large attacks. According to the company, the massive growth in attack size has been driven by increased attack activity on all reflection/amplification protocols, and by the weaponisation of IoT devices and the emergence of IoT botnets. Because of this, Arbor say the consequences of DDoD attacks are becoming clear – DDoS attacks they have successfully made many leading web properties unreachable – costing thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars in revenue. However, the company does point out that this year’s survey results indicate a better understanding of the brand damage and operational expense of successful DDoS attacks. Source: https://securitybrief.asia/story/global-concern-over-distributed-denial-service-attacks/

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Global concern over distributed denial-of-service attacks

Building the IoT monster

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she imagined the misguided doctor assembling his creature from dead body parts, who instead of elevating science, created something dark and terrible. A modern day Mary might well imagine the monster being assembled, not from arms and legs, from nanny-cams, door locks, and DVRs. It would be hard to miss the events of the past few weeks. In September, security reporter Brian Krebs was hit by a massive DDoS attack. … More ?

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Building the IoT monster

Business still ill-prepared to handle modern DDoS attacks

In September 1996, New York City’s original ISP, Panix, was hit by a SYN flood denial of service attack that took them offline for several days. At a time when only 20 million Americans were online, this was one of the first high profile examples of the growing importance of network and service availability. It also demonstrated how fragile internet infrastructure was at the time. According to an advisory from Carnegie Melon’s CERT, “There is, … More ?

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Business still ill-prepared to handle modern DDoS attacks

MIT Faced 35 DDoS Attacks in the First Six Months of 2016

Attackers targeted the servers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 35 times in the first six months of the year, according to a threat advisory released by Akamai, a content delivery network and cloud services provider headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The biggest of these incidents was a DDoS attack that lasted a day, starting on June 7, that peaked at 295 Gbps and 58.6 million packets per second, combining different vectors such as DNS reflection, SYN flood, UDP fragment, PUSH flood, TCP flood, and UDP flood. Compared to other attacks recorded globally in the first six months, according to Arbor Networks, this MIT DDoS attack is one of the 46 such attacks that went over the 200 Gbps limit, with the absolute record being 597 Gbps . Kaiten botnet behind massive 295 Gbps attack Akamai believes that this attack took place at the hands of a botnet powered by the Kaiten malware. Prior to the 295 Gbps DDoS attack, MIT suffered an 89.35 Gbps attack as well. Attackers targeted multiple IPs in MIT’s network and used a combination of 14 different DDoS flood types. Akamai says that 43 percent of these attacks used protocols susceptible to DDoS reflection flaws that amplified the attacker’s traffic. The company detected 18,825 different sources of reflected traffic, with the most located in China. China’s presence on any DDoS source list should not be a surprise by now to anyone since the country is the source of much of today’s vulnerable equipment that gets connected online, a source ready for the taking for any determined hacker. DDoS attacks are on the rise The same Arbor Networks reports cites an overall increase in terms of DDoS attacks globally, a trend which has continued in July as well. Just this week, we reported on DDoS attacks against WikiLeaks , after announcing it would release emails from Turkey’s main political party; against the Rio de Janeiro court that banned WhatsApp in Brazil; Steemit social network ; the Philippines government websites ; Pokemon GO servers ; the HSBC bank ; and against the US Congress , US Library of Congress, and the US Copyright Office. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/mit-faced-35-ddos-attacks-in-the-first-six-months-of-2016-506542.shtml

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MIT Faced 35 DDoS Attacks in the First Six Months of 2016

It's official: The average DDoS attack size is increasing

New global DDoS attack data from Arbor Networks shows strong growth in the average size of DDoS attacks, from both a bits-per-second and packets-per-second perspective. The largest attack monitor…

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It's official: The average DDoS attack size is increasing

100+ DDoS events over 100GB/sec reported this year

Arbor Networks released global DDoS attack data derived from its ATLAS threat monitoring infrastructure. The data shows an unparalleled number of volumetric attacks in the first half of 2014 with over…