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Could a DDoS wipe out Black Friday online sales?

Don’t miss out on Black Friday sales: why retailers must prepare for DDoS threat to online shopping. The recent spate of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks should be a call to action for online retailers to prepare their defences in the run-up to Black Friday. DDoS attacks flood a target website with redundant traffic and take it offline. This is bad news for any company with an online presence; it can damage the company’s image in the eyes of potential customers if they attempt to access support services, for example, and find that the site is not operational. But with retail, the threat is an existential one and in the case of Black Friday could make the difference between success and bankruptcy. An example of an existential DDoS was seen earlier this month when the website of bookmaker William Hill was attacked and taken offline for around 24 hours. The threat is not new to the betting industry; in 2004, the online betting industry was hit with DDoS attacks during the Cheltenham horse races. The technical team for the website worked tirelessly to restore service, but estimates of the company’s losses are in the millions of pounds. These seem significant, but one can only imagine the losses on a peak day (not to denigrate the importance of the KAA Gent vs Shakhtar Donetsk fixture that took place during the attack). Imagine if attackers had hit the betting site during a major tournament such as the World Cup or the Olympics. Black Friday is perhaps the retail equivalent of the World Cup. In 2015, consumers in the UK spent £3.3 billion during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. According to Rubikloud, a machine intelligence platform for enterprise retailers which analysed Black Friday sales in 2015, retailers acquire 40 percent more customers on Black Friday than the average shopping day. In this context, a DDoS could be lethal to a vendor. As Martin McKeay, Akamai’s Senior Security Advocate, says, “if retailers have a DDoS hit it could mean the difference between making or failing to make their figures for the year.” The Akamai Q3 2016 State of the Internet/Security report found that DDoS capacities are increasing. In the quarter Akamai found a 58 percent year-on-year increase in attacks of over 100 Gbps. Even without a DDoS, the traffic increase to a site will be huge anyway and the chances of a website crashing are there. Analysis by cloud and CDN provider Tibus suggests that websites including those of Boots, Boohoo, John Lewis and Argos suffered service outages during last year’s Black Friday. So what is to be done if retailers are to protect the November cash cow? The first step is to evaluate what a DDoS would do to an organisation, says McKeay. “Understand your exposure and what it will cost you. If you are a merchant you can’t take the chance of being knocked offline.” Visibility is the key foundation for DDoS mitigation. Having a view of the actual volume of traffic hitting your site allows decisions to be made on policy. In terms of the architecture of a DDoS prevention solution, there are three lines of defence: the basic mitigation in network equipment, dedicated customer premises equipment (CPE) devices and finally, cloud integration. A DDoS mitigation provider will be all too happy to talk a customer through the technological aspects of DDoS mitigation, but there are also important management decisions to be made. Crucially, think about the outcome you want. “Is it better for most of the people to have some service or all of them to have none? It’s about keeping the service available, because their goal is to not have it available,” Steve Mulhearn, Fortinet’s Director of Enhanced Technologies UKI & DACH, told CBR in a recent interview. Nowhere is that more true than in retail, where a vast array of factors come into play when a customer is making a transaction. Research, including a study by Baymard in July 2016, continues to show low conversion rates for online shopping: sometimes languishing around the 25 percent mark. Retailers will need to use their own data and experience of their own site to learn how to allocate resources. For example, focus on keeping online the parts of the site enabling the actual transaction rather than auxiliary services. Black Friday should be an opportunity for retailers, not a threat – which is why a DDoS prevention strategy should be on every online vendor’s shopping list. Source: http://www.cbronline.com/news/cybersecurity/breaches/ddos-wipe-black-friday-online-sales/

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Could a DDoS wipe out Black Friday online sales?

Historic DDoS attack likely waged by ‘non-state actor’: Intel director

The nation’s top intelligence official on Tuesday said state-sponsored hackers likely weren’t behind the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that disrupted internet access across the United States last week. Weighing in on the outages during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., National Intelligence Director James Clapper said investigators believe a “non-state actor” was likely responsible for the DDoS attacks that made it difficult to access some of the world’s most popular websites Friday. “That appears to be preliminarily the case,” Mr. Clapper said, The Hill reported. “But I wouldn’t want to be conclusively definitive about that, specifically whether a nation state may have been behind that or not.”  “The investigation’s still going on,” he added. “There’s a lot of data going on here.” Beyond the Beltway, private sector security researchers like those employed by Flashpoint, a business risk intelligence firm that’s analyzed the attacks, hold a similar opinion. “Despite public speculation, Flashpoint assesses with a moderate degree of confidence that the perpetrators behind this attack are most likely not politically motivated, and most likely not nation-state actors,” its researchers wrote Tuesday. In fact, Flashpoint said its investigation revealed that the same infrastructure used to disrupt access to websites like Twitter and Netflix was also used to attack a well-known video game company — an indication that the culprits of the crippling DDoS weren’t necessarily waging assault on behalf of a foreign power. “While there does not appear to have been any disruption of service, the targeting of a video game company is less indicative of hacktivists, state-actors or social justice communities, and aligns more with the hackers that frequent online hacking forums,” Flashpoint’s researchers wrote. “These hackers exist in their own tier, sometimes called ‘script kiddies,’ and are separate and distinct from hacktivists, organized crime, state-actors, and terrorist groups. They can be motivated by financial gain, but just as often will execute attacks such as these to show off, or to cause disruption and chaos for sport.” “I think they are right,” agreed Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for security firm F-Secure. “I don’t believe the Friday attackers were financially or politically motivated. It was such an untargeted attack, it’s hard to find a good motive for it. So: kids,” he told TechCrunch. As authorities attempt to identify the culprits responsible for waging last week’s DDoS attacks, investigators have at least found out how the hackers were able to disrupt internet access North America and Europe. Researchers say the outage occurred after hackers compromised millions of internet-connected household devices like video recorders and digital cameras, then used those products to overload a widely used Domain Name System (DNS) — an online directory that enables web users to navigate from site to site. The director of the Department of Homeland Security said Monday that DHS has “been working to develop a set of strategic principles for securing the Internet of Things, which we plan to release in the coming weeks.” Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/26/historic-ddos-attack-likely-waged-by-non-state-act/

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Historic DDoS attack likely waged by ‘non-state actor’: Intel director

High volume DDoS attacks still persistent

Arbor Networks released global DDoS attack data that shows a continuation of extremely high volume attacks. In Q1 2015, there were 25 attacks larger than 100Gbps globally. In the past year, Arbor h…

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High volume DDoS attacks still persistent

Half of companies under DDoS attack have critical data stolen

Neustar surveyed IT professionals from across EMEA to understand the impact of DDoS attacks. 40 percent of companies estimate hourly losses of over £100,000 at peak times during a DDoS outage,…

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Half of companies under DDoS attack have critical data stolen

New Gameover Zeus variant steadily rebuilds downed botnet

It's already widely known that the Gameover Zeus gang, whose activity has been temporarily foiled by a successful multi-national law enforcement takedown in June, is trying to regain lost ground. …

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New Gameover Zeus variant steadily rebuilds downed botnet

ZeroLocker ransomware "helps" you get your files back

In early June, the FBI has lead a rather successful multi-national effort to disrupt the GameOver Zeus botnet which was also responsible for delivering Cryptolocker. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean t…

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ZeroLocker ransomware "helps" you get your files back

Spike in DDoS attack size driven by NTP misuse

The beginning of 2014 saw 1.5 times the number of attacks over 20GB/sec, compared to the rest of 2013, according to new stats released by Arbor Networks today. At the Infosecurity Europe 2014, t…

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Spike in DDoS attack size driven by NTP misuse

Attackers use reflection techniques for larger DDoS attacks

Akamai announced a new global DDoS attack report, which shows that in Q1, DDoS attackers relied less upon traditional botnet infection in favor of reflection and amplification techniques. “Instea…

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Attackers use reflection techniques for larger DDoS attacks