Category Archives: DDoS Criminals

DDoS often used as a diversion tactic

While businesses are preoccupied solving DDoS attacks, hackers go in the back door to do some looting. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks make a lot of noise, and according to a new Kaspersky Lab report, that’s exactly what hackers are using them for. As businesses are preoccupied solving DDoS attacks, hackers use the opportunity for another, more targeted and more deadly type of attack. Basically, DDoS is nothing more than a smokescreen. The conclusion comes in Kaspersky Lab’s report which polled businesses about their cybersecurity experiences, and more than half (56 per cent) say DDoS is being used as a smokescreen.   In more than a quarter (29 per cent) of attacks, DDoS has been part of the tactics. Another quarter (26 per cent) said when they lost data due to a targeted attack, they were also hit by DDoS.   “DDoS prevents a company from continuing its normal activities by putting either public or internal services on hold,” said Kirill Ilganaev, Head of Kaspersky DDoS Protection.   “This is a real problem to businesses and it is often ‘all hands on deck’ in the IT team to try and fix the problem quickly so the business can carry on as before. DDoS can therefore be used not only as an easy way to stop the activity of a company, but also as a decoy to distract IT staff from another intrusion taking place through other channels.”  The usual tactics include exploiting mobile devices, phishing scams, or even malicious activity from insiders. “The research shows us that DDoS attacks are often aligned with other threats. Businesses therefore need to be aware of the full threat landscape and prepared to deal with multiple types of criminal activity at any one time,” Ilganaev continued.  “Failure to do this could increase the collateral damage, on top of already significant losses caused by downtime and the resulting impact on reputation. Businesses need to use a reliable DDoS protection service to reduce the risk of DDoS and help staff concentrate their efforts on protecting the business from any threats that can be hidden as a result.”     Source: http://www.itproportal.com/news/ddos-often-used-as-a-diversion-tactic/

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DDoS often used as a diversion tactic

Six key principles for efficient cyber investigations

Many organizations today are not equipped to defend against traditional cyberattacks, as demonstrated by the ever-increasing numbers of successful breaches reported daily – the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse’s latest number is 900,875,242 records breached in 5,165 attacks over the past decade – and that’s U.S. only. Even the largest companies appear to be less equipped to deal with more sophisticated cyberattacks, like the latest IoT-based Mirai DDoS attack or the attacks detected months or years after … More ?

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Six key principles for efficient cyber investigations

DDoS protection quiz-based training course

The DDoS Protection Bootcamp is the first online portal to provide in-depth technical training in the field of DDoS protection. This comprehensive quiz-based training course, available at both the Basic and Advanced levels, is comprised of eight sections on topics ranging from DDoS attack types to business risks and mitigation techniques. The course is both challenging and fun—packed with technical descriptions as well as real-world simulations to help you build skills. Each section is followed … More ?

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DDoS protection quiz-based training course

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?

New DDoS attack method called BlackNurse lets hackers take down firewalls and servers from a single laptop

Security researchers have discovered a new attack technique that requires less effort to launch large-scale attacks. A new DDoS attack method called BlackNurse has been discovered by security researchers, which allows hackers to launch large-scale attacks with less effort than is required for traditional DDoS attacks. BlackNurse also provides attackers with the ability to take down severs and firewalls with just a single laptop. According to researchers at TDC SOC (Security Operations Centre of the Danish telecom operator TDC), BlackNurse leverages low-volume ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol)-based attacks to launch attacks capable of overloading firewalls and shutting them down. BlackNurse targets vulnerable firewalls made by Cisco, PaloAlto and others, in a “ping flood attack” reminiscent of those popular in the 1990s. TDC researchers said: “The BlackNurse attack attracted our attention, because in our anti-DDoS solution we experienced that even though traffic speed and packets per second were very low, this attack could keep our customers’ operations down. This even applied to customers with large internet uplinks and large enterprise firewalls in place. We had expected that professional firewall equipment would be able to handle the attack. “Based on our test, we know that a reasonable sized laptop can produce approx a 180 Mbit/s DoS attack with these commands.” Researchers at security firm Netresec, clarified how and why the new technique was dubbed BlackNurse, which according to the firm has caused “some confusion/amusement/discussion”. Netresec also cautioned about googling the term, which they claimed “might not be 100% safe-for-work, since you risk getting search results with inappropriate videos that have nothing to do with this attack”. Netresec said: “The term ‘BlackNurse’, which has been used within the TDC SOC for some time to denote the ‘ICMP 3,3? attack, is actually referring to the two guys at the SOC who noticed how surprisingly effective this attack was. One of these guys is a former blacksmith and the other a nurse, which was why a colleague of theirs jokingly came up with the name ‘BlackNurse’. However, although it was first intended as a joke, the team decided to call the attack ‘BlackNurse’ even when going public about it.” How does BlackNurse work? DDoS attacks ideally require a large volume of traffic to successfully cripple targets. Traditionally, large-scale attacks involve hoards of devices and numerous IP addresses working collectively to bombard a targeted server with massive volumes of traffic, in efforts to stop it from functioning. However, BlackNurse does not need an army of compromised devices; neither does it require high volumes of traffic. Instead, BlackNurse issues out low volume ICMP error messages to servers and firewalls, which can fairly easily overload the main processors, rendering them useless. ESET security researcher Mark James told  IBTimes UK:  “BlackNurse uses ICMP flooding to achieve its goal. ICMP is also known as Ping and is predominantly used to test the connectivity between two computers. An ICMP (ping) echo request is sent from one machine and awaits an ICMP echo reply from the receiving machine. “The time of the round trip is measured which would normally indicate how good the connection route is based on errors and or packet loss. If you take that same technology and send lots of requests without waiting for any replies, it’s possible to overload the destination server. It works two-fold, as often the receiving server will attempt to reply to the incoming requests and try to send replies thus increasing its activity and helping the initial attack. Also BlackNurse uses a different technique that is slower than traditional ICMP flood attacks utilising some firewall vulnerabilities or misconfiguration.” Mitigation for such an attack is possible. “Disabling ICMP Type 3 Code 3 on the WAN interface can mitigate the attack quite easily,” the TDC researchers said. “This is the best mitigation we know of so far.” Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/new-ddos-attack-method-called-blacknurse-lets-hackers-take-down-firewalls-servers-single-laptop-1592214

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New DDoS attack method called BlackNurse lets hackers take down firewalls and servers from a single laptop

BlackNurse Attack Lets Lone Computers Take Down Whole Networks

DDoS attacks generally rely on big numbers to get results. Hundreds of thousands of devices, millions of IP addresses all unleashing coordinated blasts of data at another device to bring it to its knees. A BlackNurse denial-of-service attack doesn’t need a massive army of zombies to be effective. The BlackNurse attack is much more efficient than the DDoS attacks that crippled security researcher Brian Krebs’ website and the DNS servers at Dyn. Some recent DDoS attacks have seen traffic peak at more than 1 Tbps. A BlackNurse attack has the ability to disrupt by sending just a fraction of that volume. As little as 21 Mbps can be enough to take down a firewall, according to security firm Netresec. What’s different about BlackNurse that allows it to inflict so much damage with so little effort? It’s the type of traffic it utilizes. BlackNurse directs Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets, which have been used in other DDoS attacks in the past. BlackNurse uses a specific type — ICMP type 3 code 3. An attack from a single laptop could, theoretically, knock an entire business offline, though it’s not likely to be a very  large  business. In their blog post, Netresec calls out firewalls made by Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Sonicwall, and Zyxel as being at risk. Most of the devices Netresec reports as being vulnerable to a BlackNurse attack (like the Cisco ASA 5506 and Zyxel Zywall USG50) were designed for small office or home office use. That said, TDC, a Denmark-based company that offers DDoS protection services to businesses, has seen enterprise-grade gear impacted. “We had expected that professional firewall equipment would be able to handle the attack,” they wrote, adding that they’ve seen around 100 of these attacks launched against their customers. TDC also notes that BlackNurse has the potential to create a lot of havoc. In Denmark’s IP space alone they discovered 1.7 million devices that respond to the ICMP requests that the BlackNurse attack leverages. If even a small percentage of those 1.7 million devices are vulnerable, the effects of a coordinated, large-scale attack could be disastrous. And that’s just Denmark. Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2016/11/14/blacknurse-attack-lets-lone-computers-take-down-whole-networks/#6d27bd961999

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BlackNurse Attack Lets Lone Computers Take Down Whole Networks

5 major Russian banks repel massive DDoS attack

At least five Russian major banks came under a continuous hacker attack, although online client services were not disrupted. The attack came from a wide-scale botnet involving at least 24,000 computers, located in 30 countries. The attack began Tuesday afternoon, and continued for two days straight, according to a source close to Russia’s Central Bank quoted by RIA Novosti. Sberbank confirmed the DDoS attack on its online services. “The attacks are conducted from botnets, consisting of tens of thousands computers, which are located in tens of countries,”  Sberbank’s press service told RIA. The initial attack was rather massive and its power intensified over the course of the day. “We registered a first attack early in the morning … the next attack in the evening involved several waves, each of them was twice as powerful as the previous one. Bank’s cybersecurity noticed and located the attack in time. There have been no problems in client online services,”  Sberbank representative said. Alfabank has also confirmed the fact of the attack, but called it a  “weak”  one. “There was an attack, but it was relatively weak. It did not affect Alfabank’s business systems in any way,”  the bank told RIA Novosti. According to Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab, more than a half of the botnet devices were situated in the US, India, Taiwan and Israel, while the attack came from 30 countries. Each wave of attack lasted for at least one hour, while the longest one went on for 12 hours straight. The power of the attacks peaked at 660 thousands of requests per second. Some of the banks were attacked repeatedly. “Such attacks are complex, and almost cannot be repelled by standard means used by internet providers,”  the news agency quoted Kaspersky Lab’s statement as saying. According to a source in Central Bank, the botnet behind the attack consists not only of computers, but also of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Computer security experts note, that various devices ranging from CCTV cameras to microwaves, are prone to hacking and pose a significant threat when assembled into a botnet. Owners of such devices underestimate the risks and often do not even bother to change a default password. A massive botnet, able to send more than 1.5Tbps and consisting of almost 150 thousands of CCTV cameras has been reportedly uncovered in September. According to Kaspersky Lab, it was the first massive attack on Russian banks this year. The previous attack of such a scale came in October 2015, when eight major banks were affected. Source: https://www.rt.com/news/366172-russian-banks-ddos-attack/

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5 major Russian banks repel massive DDoS attack

How to avoid DDoSing yourself

Google engineers offer guidance to keep application developers from shooting themselves in the foot. In the wake of the last month’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Dyn, a DNS management service, Google engineers want to remind application developers that self-harm represents a more realistic risk.…

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How to avoid DDoSing yourself