Tag Archives: ddos-defense

New DDoS attack uses smartphone browsers to flood site with 4.5bn requests

Researchers have found that smartphone browsers can deliver a powerful flooding attack. Researchers suspect a mobile advertising network has been used to point hundreds of thousands of smartphone browsers at a website with the aim of knocking it offline. According to distributed denial-of-service protection service CloudFlare, one customer’s site recently came under fire from 4.5 billion page requests during a few hours, mostly from smartphone browsers on Chinese IP addresses. As CloudFlare’s Marek Majkowski notes, browser-based ‘Layer 7? flood attacks have been viewed as a theoretical threat for several years, but haven’t become a reality due to difficulties in efficiently distributing malicious JavaScript to force a large number of browsers to make HTTP requests to a targeted site. Security researchers have previously suggested web ads as an efficient way to distribute malicious JavaScript. Analysing the log files, Majkowski found the smartphone browser attack peaked at over 275,000 HTTP requests per second, with 80 percent coming from mobile devices and 98 percent from a Chinese IP address. The logs also reveal mobile versions of Safari, Chrome, Xiaomi’s MIUI browser, and Tencent’s QQBrowser. “Strings like ‘iThunder’ might indicate the request came from a mobile app. Others like ‘MetaSr’, ‘F1Browser’, ‘QQBrowser’, ‘2345Explorer’, and ‘UCBrowser’ point towards browsers or browser apps popular in China,” Majkowski said. Majkowski speculates that the attack was made possible by an ad network, and believes the reason so many mobile browsers visited the attack page hosting the malicious JavaScript was due to ads shown in iframes, either in mobile apps or mobile browsers. Here’s how the attack works: when a user opens an app or browses the web, they are served an iframe with an ad whose content was requested from an ad network. The ad network then forwards the request to a third-party that successfully bids for that inventory and then forwards the user to an attack page. “The user was served an attack page containing a malicious JavaScript which launched a flood of XHR requests against CloudFlare servers,” explained Majkowski. The attack site itself hosting the malicious JavaScript included instructions to launch an XHR in a loop. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/new-ddos-attack-uses-smartphone-browsers-to-flood-site-with-4-5bn-requests/

Hacker Exfocus Blamed For Knocking Rutgers University Offline With DDoS Attack, Even After Expensive Upgrade

Someone is tormenting Rutgers University. The New Jersey school announced Monday it was fending off a distributed denial-of-service attack that crippled its Internet and Wi-Fi access. The latest cyberattack on a major U.S. research institution comes after a number of similar hacks against Rutgers, a school of approximately 65,000 undergraduate students. “We are currently experiencing a denial-of-service event affecting Internet connectivity and Wi-Fi access,” Rutgers said on its Facebook page. “OIT is working to resolve the issue, and we will inform the Rutgers community as soon as we have more information.” The outage also affected Sakai and eCollege, two online learning tools used to administer homework, tests and other communication, according to student complaints on social media. A previous outage limited the school’s ability to accept credit cards. It appears to be the first attack on Rutgers since the university invested $3 million to better protect its computer networks after at least four attacks during the past school year. That upgrade was the primary reason Rutgers raised tuition and fees by 2.3 percent for the 2015-16 school year, NJ.com reported in August, with a hacker known as Exfocus claiming responsibility for the problems. “Honestly, I am sitting here dumbfounded at the amount of incompetence displayed once again by the Rutgers IT department,” Exfocus wrote in a post on Pastebin in April. “I could run circles around all of you with my eyes closed, and one leg amputated.” A DDoS attack occurs when a hacker takes control of thousands (or millions) of computers and aims them at a single server, overwhelming that network with traffic and ultimately knocking it offline. Similar methods have been used by the Chinese government and the Anonymous hacking collective. Exfocus tweeted: “Did you miss me?” before deleting the message Monday. Student chatter on the anonymous Yik Yak social network also said Exfocus had been bragging there, though the most anyone seems to know about Exfocus came in an interview where he said he was being paid in bitcoin by someone with a grudge against the school. “When I stop getting paid — I’ll stop DDoSing lol. I’m hoping that RU will sign on some DDoS mitigation provider. I get paid extra if that happens,” Exfocus told APollonsky.me before being asked if he wished to share anything else with the Rutgers community. “I’m a fan of Taylor Swift.” Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/hacker-exfocus-blamed-knocking-rutgers-university-offline-ddos-attack-even-after-2117247

Hackers Used Imgur to Launch DDoS Attacks on 4chan

A Reddit user has uncovered a covert method of carrying DDoS attacks on 4chan’s infrastructure using images hosted on Imgur, via Reddit. According to Reddit user rt4nyp, who discovered the vulnerability, every time an Imgur image was loaded on the /r/4chan sub-reddit, over 500 other images were also loaded in the background, images hosted on 4chan’s CDN. Since traffic on 4chan is quite huge as is, getting some extra connections from Reddit pushed 4chan’s servers over the edge, crashing them several times during the day. Additionally, 8chan, a smaller 4chan spin-off, was also affected and suffered some downtime as well. Malicious code was being loaded with Imgur images Reddit user rt4ny was alerted that something was amiss when he noticed that Imgur images on Reddit were loaded as inlined base64 data. Taking a closer look at the base64 code, he observed that a small piece of JavaScript code was added at the end, which had no business being there. This code secretly stored the “axni” variable in the browser’s localStorage, which was set to load another JavaScript file from “4cdns.org/pm.js.” This is not 4chan’s official CDN, but a domain registered to closely resemble the real deal, which was taken down in the meantime. When refreshing the original image that loaded the “axni” variable, the malicious code would not be loaded again, a measure taken to avoid detection. Additionally, also to avoid detection, the JS file stored on “4cdns.org/pm.js” could not be loaded directly in the browser. Loading 500+ 4chan images inside a hidden iframe Analyzing the pm.js file, rt4ny found that it loaded an iframe outside the user’s view with the help of some clever CSS off-screen positioning tricks, inside which the hundreds of 4chan images were being loaded, along with a 142 KB SWF file. Imgur was contacted about this issue, and fixed it on the same day. “Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered that made it possible to inject malicious code into an image link on Imgur,” said the Imgur team. “From our team’s analysis, it appears the exploit was targeted specifically to users of 4chan and 8chan via images shared to a specific sub-reddit on Reddit.com using Imgur’s image hosting and sharing tools.” It’s a sad day for humanity when we see hackers combine the three best sites on the Internet to find cat GIFs into such wicked and immoral ways. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/hackers-used-imgur-to-launch-ddos-attacks-on-4chan-492433.shtml

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Hackers Used Imgur to Launch DDoS Attacks on 4chan

BitTorrent patches reflective DDoS attack security vulnerability

A vulnerability which could divert traffic to launch cyberattacks has been mitigated two weeks after public disclosure. BitTorrent has taken rapid steps to mitigate a flaw which could divert user traffic to launch reflective DDoS attacks. The flaw, reported by Florian Adamsky at the USENIX conference in Washington, D.C., affects popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent, Mainline and Vuze, which were known to be vulnerable to distributed reflective denial-of-service (DRDoS) attacks. According to the researchers from City University London, BitTorrent protocols could be exploited to reflect and amplify traffic from other users within the ecosystem — which could then be harnessed to launch DRDoS attacks powered up to 120 times the size of the original data request. Successful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and DRDoS attacks launched against websites flood domains with traffic, often leaving systems unable to cope with the influx and resulting in legitimate traffic being denied access to Web resources. The team said in a paper (.PDF) documenting the vulnerability that BitTorrent protocols Micro Transport Protocol (uTP), Distributed Hash Table (DHT), Message Stream Encryption (MSE) and BitTorrent Sync (BTSync) are exploitable. On Thursday, Vice President of Communications at BitTorrent Christian Averill said in a blog post no attack using this method has been observed in the wild and as the researchers informed the BitTorrent team of the vulnerability ahead of public disclosure, this has given BitTorrent the opportunity to “mitigate the possibility of such an attack.” Francisco De La Cruz, a software engineer from the uTorrent and BitTorrent team, wrote a detailed analysis of the attack and the steps the company has taken to reduce the risk of this vulnerability. The vulnerability lies within libµTP, a commonly used tool which can detect network congestion and automatically throttle itself — a useful feature when BitTorrent clients are being used on home networks. However, the way libµTP handles incoming connections allows reflectors to accept any acknowledgement number when receiving a data packet, which opens the doorway to traffic abuse. The success of a DRDoS relies on how much traffic an attacker can direct towards a victim, known as the Bandwidth Amplification Factor (BAF). The higher the BAF, the more successful the attack. In order to reduce the BAF ratio and mitigate the security issue, BitTorrent engineers have ensured a unique acknowledgement number is required when a target is receiving traffic. While this can still be guessed, it would be difficult and time-consuming to do so for a wide pool of victims. De La Cruz said: “As of August 4th, 2015 uTorrent, BitTorrent and BitTorrent Sync clients using libµTP will now only transition into a connection state if they receive valid acknowledgments from the connection initiators. This means that any packets falling outside of an allowed window will be dropped by a reflector and will never make it to a victim. Since the mitigation occurs at the libµTP level, other company protocols that can run over libµTP like Message Stream Encryption (MSE) are also serviced by the mitigation.” Regarding BTSync, BitTorrent says the severity of the vulnerability — even before recent updates were applied to the protocol — mitigated the risk of this vulnerability. In order to exploit the security weakness, an attacker would have to know the Sync user, identifiers would have to be made public, and the protocol’s design ensures that peers in a share are limited — keeping the potential attack scale down. According to the BitTorrent executive, the protocol therefore would “not serve as an effective source to mount large-scale attacks.” Averill commented: “This is a serious issue and as with all security issues, we take it very seriously. We thank Florian for his work and will continue to both improve the security of these protocols and share information on these updates through our blog channels and forums.” Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/bittorrent-patches-reflective-ddos-attack-security-vulnerability/

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BitTorrent patches reflective DDoS attack security vulnerability

DARPA wants to take the sting out of DDoS attacks

While posing a minor inconvenience compared to other more malicious cyberattacks, distributed denial of service attacks post enough of a threat that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency nonetheless is looking for innovative approaches to mitigate their effects. The Extreme DDoS Defense (XD3) program is looking to the private sector for “fundamentally new DDoS defenses that afford far greater resilience to these attacks, across a broader range of contexts, than existing approaches or evolutionary extensions,” according to a recent broad agency announcement. While this BAA does not include detection and mitigation of DDoS-related malware on hosts or networked devices, DARPA listed five technical areas for which contractors can submit responses that focus on lessening the effect of DDoS attacks and improving recovery time. For example, the solicitation seeks proposals to: Devise and demonstrate new architectures that physically and logically disperse these capabilities while retaining (or even exceeding) the performance of traditional centralized approaches. Develop new cyber agility and defensive maneuver techniques that improve resilience against DDoS attacks by overcoming limitations of preconceived maneuver plans that cannot adapt to circumstances and exploring deceptive approaches to establish a false reality for adversaries. Produce a response time of 10 seconds or less from attacks and at least a 90 percent recovery in application performance compared with hosts that do not have XD3 capabilities. DARPA believes XD3 concepts can be leveraged by the military, commercial network service providers, cloud computing and storage service providers and enterprises of all sizes. Given the threat and array of targets DDoS attacks pose, XD3 BAA responses will consider a wide range of network and service contexts, such as enterprise networks, wide?area networks, wireless networks, cloud computing and software-defined networks, to name a few. The response date is Oct. 13, 2015, and the proposers day will be held on Sept. 2, 2015. Source: http://gcn.com/articles/2015/08/26/darpa-xd3-ddos.aspx

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DARPA wants to take the sting out of DDoS attacks

The UK’s 12 worst DDoS attacks Summarized – hacktivism, extortion and plain malice

DDoS attacks are often seen as a global phenomenon that affects ISPs and large datacentres. But the daily damage is done by much smaller attacks on vulnerable, sometimes poorly defended resources such as websites belonging to well-known organisations. The UK has had more than its fair share of such attacks with hacktivism and occasionally extortion the main motivations. Here we chart some of the worst attacks that have affected UK organisations in recent years. DoS attack on CMP Media (UBM) – 1998 Proof that simple denial of service (DoS) attacks (if not DDoS) are far from new, a disgruntled magazine subscriber decided to barrage the email server and fax machines of the UK tech publisher CMP Media (later sold to UBM) with enough traffic to cut the company off from the world for most of two days. The ISP identified the likely culprit but in 1998 denial of service attacks were a civil rather than criminal matter and remained so until 2006. LulzSec ‘”Tango down” DDoS attacks – 2011 The group that gave the Anonymous movement its UK brand, the small collection of mainly British youths that hid behind the LulzSec moniker loved their DDoS. Several big UK organisations were targeted but the attack that downed the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) website in June 2011 was probably the last straw. Alleged UK GCHQ DoS attack on Anonymous – 2011 In 2014 Britain hater and anti-NSA campaigning journalist Glenn Greenwald alleged that GCHQ Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) unit launched DDoS attacks to disrupt chatrooms used by hacktivists from Anonymous and LulzSec. It was pointed out that this was really a targeted DoS attack and not an indiscriminate DDoS. Attack on the BBC by Iran – 2012 Downplayed at the time but what hit the Beeb on 2 March 2012 was anything but for those on the receiving end. Downed the BBC’s email server for a while, disrupted its Persian Service (hence the blame being attributed to Iran, which hates the Service’s output) and even overloaded its exchange with large numbers of phone calls. DDoS attack on Oxford and Cambridge universities – 2012 A single 20-year old individual – later imprisoned for a range of cybercrimes – was blamed for the DDoS attacks on Oxford and Cambridge University that disrupted their websites for a period of days in 2011 and 2012. It was never clear why the named man attacked the universities but the ease with which one person could cause so much trouble for large institutions was noted at the time. DDoS on 123-reg domain registrar – 2012 A sign that DDoS attacks could take on even big Internet-facing businesses, in May 2012 the UK’s largest domain registrar was hit with enough traffic to take its site down for a reported 15 minutes with further problems throughout the day. Rivals were also targeted as crybercriminals tested their latest techniques against well-defended businesses. Spamhaus 325Gbps super-DDoS – 2012 The massive 325Gbps DDoS attack on UK anti-spam organisation Spamhaus remains probably the second or third largest of all time and was even ridiculously said to have ‘slowed the Internet’. Later blamed on Dutch national Sven Kamphuis, the Spamhaus attack was the first to use a technique called DNS amplification to such sensational effect. Julian Assange hacktivists turn on MI5 – 2012 Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange was briefly a focus for anti-corporate rage, and his pursuit by the UK, the US and Sweden over rape allegations promoted a series of hacktivist DDoS attacks in late 2012. Predictable they might have been but also surprisingly successful – MI5’s public website was put out of action for several hours. Manchester casino extortion attack – 2013 A rare publicised example of DDoS in the service of extortion, the attack on a Manchester-based online casino came after the business refused to pay the owner refused to hand over half the business to Polish nationals Piotr Smirnow and Patryk Surmacki. The pair were eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport tying to leave the country and later jailed. Raspberry Pi Foundation DDoS – 2013 Not everyone likes the Raspberry Pi people it seems including a “lone sociopath” with issues. The individual concerned launched a flurry of bizarre grudge DDoS attacks on its website, with some success. The attacker even targeted a group of teens working on a 48-hour Python hackathon using RaspBerry Pis. The Foundation beat the attacks with the help of an understanding ISP. Carphone Warehouse data breach DDoS – 2015 In July 2015, major UK smartphone retailer Carphone Warehouse suffered a serious data breach which, it later transpired, might have been aided using a DDoS ‘distraction’ attack. Up to one in five DDoS incidents are later found to be part of a data theft snatch in which IT staff are occupied fending off the DDoS, giving attackers more opportunity to sneak in and out. Mumsnet DDoS attack by @DadSecurity – 2015 Who would attack a site as apparently innocuous as Mumsnet? In what must rank as the oddest ideological attack of recent times, a campaign group called ‘@DadSecurity’ is suspected of doing just that as part of a wider campaign of nuisance that included having an armed police team dispatched to the house of founder Justine Roberts. Came after earlier data breach in 2014. Source: http://www.techworld.com/picture-gallery/security/uks-12-worst-ddos-attacks-hacktivism-extortion-plain-malice-3623767/#12

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The UK’s 12 worst DDoS attacks Summarized – hacktivism, extortion and plain malice

Teen nabbed after attacks on UK government and FBI sites

His lawyers claim that their client was only on the “periphery” of a conspiracy to take down UK government and FBI sites, but a UK teen who didn’t mind boasting online about those crimes now faces the possibility of jail time. Charlton Floate, 19, of Solihull, England, already admitted to three counts of computer misuse under the Computer Misuse Act and three counts of possessing prohibited images at Birmingham Crown Court. The attacks took place in January 2013, when Floate and a team of other cyber criminals crippled government sites with deluges of digital traffic sent from malware-infected computers. Such computers are often called zombie computers, and they’re widely used in botnets to gang up on sites with what’s known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The gang managed to knock out the UK’s Home Office site – a heavily used site that provides information on passports and immigration among other things – for 83 minutes. The group also took down an FBI site – that allowed users to report crime – for over five hours. The prosecutor, Kevin Barry, reportedly said that in November 2012, Floate carried out two test runs, remotely attacking the computers of two men in the US. Floate uploaded a sexually explicit video to YouTube to “mock and shame” one of his victims, and he “taunted” the other victim about having control of his computer. Modest, he was not – Floate also reportedly bragged about the government site attacks on Twitter and on a forum frequented by hackers. Judicial officer John Steel QC rejected Floate’s legal team’s contention that he was on the “periphery” of the cyber gang, saying that evidence pointed to his actually being central to the crimes, including organizing the attacks. He said Floate was “clearly a highly intelligent young man”, who had become an expert in computer marketing, had written a book on the subject, and succeeded in taking down an FBI.gov website – what he called the “Holy Grail” of computer crime: A successful attack on the FBI.gov website is regarded by hackers as the Holy Grail of hacking. It was this which he attempted and, indeed, achieved. He was the person who instituted such attacks and assembled the tools and personnel for doing so. The Holy Grail it may be but in this case I beg to differ about how successful Floate was in getting his hands on it. A DDoS attack isn’t a form of sophisticated lock picking, it’s just a noisy way to board the door shut from the outside. Floate may well be bright but he stumbled once, and that’s all that investigators needed. Namely, he used his own IP address – he worked out of his mother’s home – to check up on how the attacks had gone. Police traced the address to Floate’s mother’s home, where they seized Floate’s computer and mobile phone. They also found evidence that he’d tried to recruit others into the gang and that he’d discussed possible weaknesses in certain websites as well as potential future targets – including the CIA and The White House. Sentencing was adjourned until 16 October, pending a psychiatric report. Floate is currently remanded on conditional bail. Steel said he hadn’t yet made up his mind about sentencing but added there’s “clearly potential for an immediate custodial sentence” and that Floate “should be mentally prepared for it.’ Source: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/08/24/teen-nabbed-after-attacks-on-uk-government-and-fbi-sites/

RPC Portmapper Abused for DDoS Attack Reflection, Amplification

Malicious actors have started abusing the Portmapper service to amplify their distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and hide their origin, Colorado-based telecommunications company Level 3 Communications has warned. RPC Portmapper, also referred to as rpcbind and portmap, is an Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call (ONC RPC) service designed to map RPC service numbers to network port numbers. When RPC clients want to make a call to the Internet, Portmapper tells them which TCP or UDP port to use. When Portmapper is queried, the size of the response varies depending on the RPC services present on the host. In their experiments, Level 3 researchers obtained responses of between 486 bytes (amplification factor of 7.1) and 1,930 bytes (amplification factor of 28.4) for a 68 byte query. The average amplification size obtained by Level 3 in tests conducted across its network was 1,241 bytes (18.3 amplification factor), while in the actual DDoS attacks seen by the company the value was 1,348 (19.8x amplification). Malicious actors can use Portmapper requests for DDoS attacks because the service runs on TCP or UDP port 111. Since UDP allows IP spoofing, attackers can send small requests to Portmapper using the target’s IP address and the server sends a larger response to the victim. Level 3 has observed an increasing number of DDoS attacks leveraging this vector over the summer, with the largest attacks taking place in August 10-12. The attacks were mainly aimed at the gaming, hosting, and Internet infrastructure sectors. Organizations are advised to keep an eye out for potentially malicious Portmapper requests, but Level 3 has pointed out that for the time being the global volume of Portmapper-based traffic is still small compared to other UDP services abused in DDoS attacks, such as DNS, NTP and SSDP. “Portmapper is so small it barely registers as the red line at the bottom of the graph. This shows, despite its recent growth, it is a great time to begin filtering requests and removing reflection hosts from the Internet before the attack popularity grows larger and causes more damage,” Level 3 said in a blog post. “We recommend disabling Portmapper along with NFS, NIS and all other RPC services across the open Internet as a primary option. In situations where the services must remain live, firewalling which IP addresses can reach said services and, subsequently, switching to TCP-only are mitigations to avoid becoming an unknowing participant in DDoS attacks in the future,” experts advised. There are several services that malicious actors can abuse for DDoS attack reflection and amplification. Researchers revealed at the USENIX conference last week that vulnerable BitTorrent protocols can also be leveraged for DDoS attacks. Source: http://www.securityweek.com/rpc-portmapper-abused-ddos-attack-reflection-amplification

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RPC Portmapper Abused for DDoS Attack Reflection, Amplification

Mumsnet founder targeted in ‘Swatting attack’

A group callings itself @Dadsecurity claims it was responsible for the cyber and swatting attacks on the Mumsnet site Internet trolls have targeted the founder of the Mumsnet website launching a so-called ‘Swatting attack’, which resulted in armed police being called to her home. Justine Roberts, who set up the hugely influential parenting forum in 2000, claimed the site had to be temporarily shut down last week after a group calling itself @DadSecurity unleashed a cyberattack which overloaded its server. But then in a more sinister twist she said those responsible had made a malicious report to the Metropolitan Police, claiming an armed man had been seen prowling outside her home. As a result she claimed an armed police unit was scrambled to her address in the early hours of August 12. She alleged that the same thing had also happened to another Mumsnet user in which police were told gunshots had been fired at her home. Swatting attacks have become common in the United States, and take their name from the militarised Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units called to deal with armed incidents. The Metropolitan Police said it was unable to provide details of the resources deployed in the incidents, but Ms Roberts, who is married to the Newsnight editor, Ian Katz, said it had left those on the receiving end “shaken up”. The group that claimed responsibility for the cyberattack used the Twitter account @DadSecurity, to brag about its actions, but the user has since been suspended. Describing what happened Ms Roberts wrote on the Mumsnet site: “On the night of Tuesday 11 August, Mumsnet came under attack from what’s known as a denial of service (DDoS) attack. “Our servers were bombarded with requests, which required our Internet service provider to massively increase server capacity to cope. “We were able to restore the site at 10am on Wednesday 12 August. Meanwhile a Twitter account, @DadSecurity, claimed responsibility, saying in various tweets, ‘Now is the start of something wonderful’, ‘RIP Mumsnet’, ‘Nothing will be normal anymore’ and ‘Our DDoS attacks are keeping you offline’.” But she said later that night they appeared to have taken one step further by making a malicious call to the police. She wrote: “An armed response team turned up at my house last week in the middle of the night, after reports of a gunman prowling around.” She explained that another Mumsnet user who challenged @DadSecurity on Twitter was warned to ‘prepare to be swatted by the best’ in a tweet that included a picture of a SWAT team. Ms Roberts wrote: “Police arrived at her house late at night following a report of gunshots. Needless to say, she and her young family were pretty shaken up. “It’s worth saying that we don’t believe these addresses were gained directly from any Mumsnet hack, as we don’t collect addresses. The police are investigating both instances.” Mumsnet is currently reviewing its online security and is asking all users to change their passwords in order to reduce the risk of any other hacks. Mumsnet has come in from criticism in the past from father’s groups, including Fathers4Justice, which claim it has an “anti-male agenda”. In 2012 Fathers4Justice launched a campaign which included a naked protest at companies that advertised with the website. Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11810790/Mumsnet-founder-targeted-in-Swatting-attack.html

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Mumsnet founder targeted in ‘Swatting attack’

The Pentagon Wants To Wage War on DDoS Cyber Attacks

By next spring, researchers are expected to unveil new tools enabling organizations like the Defense Department a rapid response to distributed denial-of-service attacks. The Pentagon has in mind a three-pronged counterattack against a decades-old form of cyber assault that continues to paralyze government and industry networks, despite its low cost of sometimes $10 a hit. Beginning next spring, military-funded researchers are scheduled to produce new tools that would quickly enable organizations to bounce back from so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks. A recovery rate of at most 10 seconds is the goal, according to the Defense Department. Today, attackers have a relatively easy time aiming bogus traffic at computer servers to knock them offline. One reason is that computer systems often are consolidated, making for a wide target area. Another weakness is the predictable behavior of systems that support Web services. And finally, certain types of DDoS attacks that evince little malicious traffic go undetected. Researchers chosen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will attempt to deny attackers such openings through a three-year program called Extreme DDoS Defense, according to Pentagon officials. The tentative start date is April 1, 2016. The stability of agency operations, banking, online gaming and many other daily activities are at stake here. A DDoS attack against Estonia in 2007 allegedly orchestrated by Russian-backed hackers downed government and industry Internet access nationwide for two weeks. More recently, crooks have begun offering Luddites DDoS-for-hire services at subscription rates of $10-$300 a month, according to journalist Brian Krebs. Lizard Squad, a major provider, allegedly was behind several persistent attacks on online gaming services Xbox and PlayStation. A string of 2011 cyber assaults against Wall Street banks, including Capital One and SunTrust Banks, was attributed to Iranian hackers. Just this month, at the annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Trend Micro researchers said they observed attackers trying to overpower systems in Washington that monitor the physical security ofgas pumps. Luckily, the devices were fake “honeypot” traps. “Responses to DDoS attacks are too slow and manually driven, with diagnosis and formulation of filtering rules often taking hours to formulate and instantiate. In contrast, military communication often demands that disruptions be limited to minutes or less,” DARPA officials said in an Aug. 14 announcement about the new program. The funding level for the project was not disclosed but multiple grants are expected to be awarded. Interested researchers must submit proposals by noon Oct. 13. XD3 will endeavor to thwart DDoS attacks by “dispersing cyber assets” in facilities and on networks, officials said. Currently, the problem is that cloud computing arrangements and other critical infrastructure systems “rely heavily on highly shared, centralized servers and data centers,” they added. The new tools also will try “disguising the characteristics and behaviors of those assets” to complicate the planning of DDoS launches, officials said. The trick with so-called “low-volume” DDoS attacks is they do not look like traffic overloads. The external computer messages seem benign but are actually exhausting a system’s memory or processors. One workaround here might be sharing information among systems that then can “decide collectively whether attacks have occurred, and/or to determine what mitigations might be most effective,” officials said. One group of XD3 researchers will be assigned to inspect the designs for unintended security holes. Anyone wanting to be a reviewer must hold a top-secret clearance, according to the contract rules. “The objective of design reviews is the proactive identification of weaknesses and vulnerabilities that would reduce the effectiveness of DDoS attack detection or mitigation,” officials said. The idea also is to “apprise performers of potential DDoS attack methods or features that they might not have considered.” Source: http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/08/pentagon-wants-wage-war-denial-service-cyber-attacks/119196/