Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aimed at disruption remain a massive problem for businesses big and small, despite the shutdown of the Webstresser DDoS-for-hire service. Attackers are also increasingly striking outside of normal business hours, researchers have found. A new report shows attack volumes rose 50% to an average 3.3 Gbps during May, June and July 2018, from 2.2 Gbps in Q1. Despite a 36% decrease in the overall number of attacks – likely as a result of DDoS-as-a-service website Webstresser being shuttered in an international police operation – attack volumes increased. 46% of incidents used two or more vectors in Q2, with a total of 9,325 attacks recorded during the quarter. That’s 102 per day, on average. A 50% increase in hyper-scale attacks (80 Gbps+) was also recorded, while the most complex attacks used 13 vectors in total, researchers found. Broadly speaking, DDoS attacks can be divided into three main categories, which point to the attack vectors employed by bad actors: Volume Based Attacks – bad actors saturate the bandwidth of the attacked site (measured in bits per second / Bps) Protocol Attacks – attackers consume actual server resources (measured in packets per second / Pps). Application Layer Attacks – hackers seek to crash the web server (measured in requests per second / Rps) High-volume attacks were assisted by Memcached reflection, SSDP reflection and CLDAP. The highest attack bandwidth was recorded at 156 Gbps (gigabits per second), while the total duration of attacks during the quarter was 1,221 hours. Attackers used two vectors 17% of the time, and three vectors 16% of the time. The most-frequently observed attacks were UDP floods (59.7%), TCP SYN floods (3.3%) and ICMP floods (0.9%). 773 attacks used the Memcached reflection amplification technique, while the SSDP reflection technique generated the greatest proportion of DDoS packets. New data from a similar study, by Nexusguard, recently showed that the number of unguarded Memcached servers is dropping, yet many remain vulnerable to attacks. The same research uncovered that DNS amplification attacks have increased 700% worldwide since 2016 and, in the first quarter of 2018, 55 DNS amplification attacks relied on vulnerable Memcached servers to amplify their DDoS efficiency by a factor of 51,000. Source: https://securityboulevard.com/2018/08/ddos-attack-volume-rose-50-in-q2-2018/

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DDoS Attack Volume Rose 50% in Q2 2018

Democratic lawmakers want to know why the agency didn’t inform consumers of the falsity of its claim sooner A group of House democrats want to know when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai knew that the agency’s claims of a DDoS attack were false. Last week, the FCC’s Office of Inspector General released a report that found no evidence to support the claims of DDoS attacks in May of 2017. The agency had previously blamed multiple DDoS attacks for temporarily taking down a comment section of its website following a segment of Last Week Tonight, in which comedian John Oliver asked viewers to submit comments to the FCC and speak out in support of net neutrality. However, viewers were unable to voice their opinion on the proposed rollback of net neutrality because the comment submission section wasn’t available at the time. Now that it has come to light that the agency’s claims of a DDoS attack were false, a handful of Democratic lawmakers want to know when Pai became aware that there was no DDoS attack and why the agency didn’t correct its public statements alleging a DDoS attack before now. Misrepresented facts “We want to know when you and your staff first learned that the information the Commission shared about the alleged cyberattack was false,” Democratic lawmakers wrote in a letter to Pai. “It is troubling that you allowed the public myth created by the FCC to persist and your misrepresentations to remain uncorrected for over a year,” they wrote. The letter was signed by Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. (NJ), Mike Doyle (PA), Jerry McNerney (CA) and Debbie Dingell (MI). The results of the investigation concluded that FCC officials deliberately misrepresented facts in responses to Congressional inquiries. “Given the significant media, public and Congressional attention this alleged cyberattack received for over a year, it is hard to believe that the release of the IG’s report was the first time that you and your staff realized that no cyberattack occurred,” wrote the lawmakers. “Such ignorance would signify a dereliction of your duty as the head of the FCC, particularly due to the severity of the allegations and the blatant lack of evidence.” The Democratic lawmakers have asked Pai for complete written responses to their questions by August 28. Pai is also scheduled to appear before a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee oversight hearing on Thursday where he is expected to face questions about the results of the investigation. Source: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/lawmakers-want-to-know-when-ajit-pai-knew-fccs-cyberattack-claim-was-false-081518.html

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Lawmakers want to know when Ajit Pai knew FCC’s cyberattack claim was false