Malicious content delivered over SSL/TLS has more than doubled in six months

Threats using SSL encryption are on the rise. An average of 60 percent of the transactions in the Zscaler cloud have been delivered over SSL/TLS. Researchers also found that the Zscaler cloud saw an average of 8.4 million SSL/TLS-based security blocks per day this year. “Hackers are increasingly using SSL to conceal device infections, shroud data exfiltration and hide botnet command and control communications. In fact, our study found that the amount of phishing attempts … More ?

FCC: We could tell you our cybersecurity plan… but we’d have to kill you

Despite Pai on face, US federal regulator keeps digging DDoS BS hole America’s broadband watchdog, the FCC, has continued digging an ever-deeper hole over its claims it was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack.…

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FCC: We could tell you our cybersecurity plan… but we’d have to kill you

FCC says its cybersecurity measures to prevent DDoS attacks must remain secret

The FCC has provided a few — very few — details of the steps it has taken to prevent attacks like the one that briefly took down its comment system in May. The agency has faced criticism over its secrecy regarding the event, and shows no sign of opening up; citing “the ongoing nature of the threats,” to reveal its countermeasures would “undermine our system’s security.” These cryptic comments are the first items of substance in a letter (PDF) sent to the House Energy and Commerce and Government Reform committees. Members thereof had sent letters to the FCC in late June asking what solutions it was implementing to mitigate or prevent future attacks. A cover letter from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai emphasizes the fact that millions of comments have been filed since, including 2 million in the 4 days following the attack. He writes that the Commission’s IT staff “has taken additional steps… to ensure the ongoing integrity and resiliency of the system.” What those steps are, however, he did not feel at liberty to say, except that they involve “commercial cloud providers” and “internet-based solutions.” Since the comment filing system is commercially cloud-hosted, and the system is fundamentally internet-based, neither of these descriptions is particularly revelatory. It’s not the security, it’s the communication The issue, however, isn’t that we are deeply afraid that another hacker will take down the system. After all, basic rate limiting and some analytics seem to have done the job and allowed record numbers of comments immediately after the attack stopped. The FCC was still writing reports and calling experts at the time the system had returned to full operation. The issue is the FCC’s confusing and misleading handling of the entire thing. The nature and extent of the attack is unclear — it’s described in a previous letter to concerned senators as a “non-traditional DDoS attack.” Supposedly the API was being hammered by cloud-based providers. What providers? Don’t they have records? Who was requesting the keys necessary to do this? Very little has been disclosed, and even requests of information circumstantial to the attacks have been denied. What is so sensitive about an analysis of the network activity from that period? Petitioners seeking to see communications pertaining to the attack were told much of the analysis was not written down. Even the most naive internet user would find it hard to believe that in a major agency of a modern bureaucracy, a serious attack on its internet infrastructure, concerning a major internet policy, would fail to be discussed online. The FCC also says it consulted with the FBI and agreed that the attack was not a “significant cyber incident” as such things are defined currently in government. For the curious: A cyber incident that is (or group of related cyber incidents that together are) likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people. Okay, that seems reasonable. So why is it being kept under wraps? Why are the countermeasures, which are probably industry standard, unable to be disclosed? How would disclosing the details of those security countermeasures undermine those systems? If it’s the “ongoing threat,” what is the threat exactly if not the pervasive threat of hacking faced by any public website, service or API? Have there been follow-up attacks we haven’t been informed of? The investigation is also ongoing, but in that case how could it fail to produce written records for FOIA requests like those already submitted? The more the FCC drags its feet and stammers out non-answers to simple questions regarding what it itself has categorized a non-major attack that happened months ago and did not significantly affect its systems, the less we trust what it does say. Concerned senators, representatives and others are not going to stop asking, however. Let’s hope whatever the FCC seems unwilling to share comes out before it ceases to be relevant. It would be a shame, for instance, to receive a full report on hackers bent on supporting one side of the net neutrality argument… the day after the FCC votes on the issue. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/fcc-says-its-cybersecurity-measures-to-prevent-ddos-attacks-must-remain-secret/

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FCC says its cybersecurity measures to prevent DDoS attacks must remain secret

‘Application DDOS’ that target expensive APIs worry Netflix

Attackers can look legit while hitting APIs that make the most work for an app Netflix has identified denial of service threat to microservices architectures that it’s labelled “application DDOS”.…

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‘Application DDOS’ that target expensive APIs worry Netflix

‘App DDoS bombs’ that slam into expensive APIs worry Netflix

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‘App DDoS bombs’ that slam into expensive APIs worry Netflix

DDoS Extortionist Who Posed as Anonymous Hacker Arrested in the US

On Friday, US authorities arrested a man on charges of launching DDoS attacks and making death and bomb threats against several targets including Leagle.com, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Metro News Canada, the official website of the Canadian government, and others. The man’s name is Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, a man born in Iran, who later obtained US citizenship in 1991, and then a permanent residency in Canada in 1995. Following two criminal cases of theft in 2005 and fraud in 2011, Jahanrakhshan was deported from Canada to the US in 2014. Suspect wanted his criminal past erased from the Internet According to court documents obtained by Bleeping Computer, after his deportation, Jahanrakhshan started sending emails to online websites that had written articles or had copies of his past criminal record. The first organization that Jahanrakhshan targeted was Leagle.com, a website that offers copies of court opinions and decisions. In the beginning, Jahanrakhshan contacted the site’s team from his personal email address, asking them nicely to remove copies of past court decisions mentioning his name on the premise that it was tarnishing his reputation and violating his privacy. When the Leagle team refused, the suspect even offered to pay a $100 fee to have the documents removed. When Leagle refused again, Jahanrakhshan — who also used the name “Andrew Rakhshan” — sent them a threatening email saying he made friends with dangerous hackers and they should heed his final warning. Suspect poses as group of Anonymous hackers After Leagle had ignored him again, US authorities say Jahanrakhshan launched a DDoS attack on the site’s servers and sent an email from a Yahoo account posing as a member of the Anonymous hacker collective. Copy of the message the suspect sent Leagle US authorities say they found evidence linking Jahanrakhshan to this email account, but also to others emails linked to other DDoS extortions. Because they couldn’t handle the DDoS attack, Leagle eventually removed a decision that Jahanrakhshan had asked. The DDoS attacks stopped after. Initial success leads to more DDoS extortions The FBI says that after having forced Leagle to remove a damaging report on his past criminal record, Jahanrakhshan moved on to other targets. During 2015 and 2016, Jahanrakhshan would allegedly engage in a similar behavior and take aim at other online publications that had written articles on his past crimes, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Metro News Canada, and the official website of the Canadian government. To put extra pressure on his targets to remove damaging articles, authorities say he also launched DDoS attacks on the websites of customers advertising on CBC and Canada.com — Postmedia and the Inspiration Foundation. Seeing that all this failed and none of his targets removed the incriminating articles, Jahanrakhshan also moved on to sending bomb threats at the offices of targeted organizations and death threats on family members of employees working for the targeted organizations. He was arrested this week and arraigned in court on Friday. The suspect, if found guilty, could face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. The damaging articles Jahanrakhshan was trying to take down described how he used fake credit cards to buy a fleet of luxury cars and a boat Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ddos-extortionist-who-posed-as-anonymous-hacker-arrested-in-the-us/

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DDoS Extortionist Who Posed as Anonymous Hacker Arrested in the US

Don’t ban the bots

I do a lot of DDoS related research online, which results in a lot of DDoS protection related spam/offers. A trend I have seen gaining popularity lately is “ ban the bots” . These emails contain a lot of emotionally charged language trying to persuade the reader that bots are destroying the internet, wasting your bandwidth and pillaging your website (and how for a modest monthly fee they can keep the digital invaders at bay). I couldn’t disagree more. For the most part I like bots. Bots save me a ton of work and allow me to the focus on tasks that are meaningful to me. The only reason that search engines, hotel booking sites, and social media sites operate so successfully (or at all) is because of bots. These advertisements do acknowledge there are some good bots out there, while stressing the need to block the bad bots. I thought I’d pull some numbers from traffic running through our system. I was pleasantly surprised, as a DDoS protection service I was expecting to see more malicious bots than legitimate but what I found was 85% of the bot traffic is classified as good : SES (which stands for Search Engine Spiders, but is a general list of the known good bots) which we don’t want to block, and XSE which contains alternate Spiders and bots that while legitimate can cause impact on some websites. The other 15% of traffic is from hosting companies, ISPs, and commercial traffic from unknown bots. This traffic is not automatically bad , but hidden somewhere in there are the malicious bots and scrapers which we do want to block. This is where the philosophy “ban the bots” makes things more complicated than it needs to be, because while it is a trivial matter to find and locate bots, it focuses you on the actor not the action. Don’t ban the bots, ban the malicious actions . If you design your web security to defend against malicious actions it shouldn’t matter whether they are from bots or not. At DOSarrest this is what we do, we create special features to focus on the malicious bot traffic and apply them to customer configurations and leave the good bots alone. In fact, I’ll go one step further: don’t ban the bots, help the bots. Because while I disagree with the conclusion the facts are not wrong, bots do consume more than a trivial amount of resources. By helping the bots find the content they are looking for you can reduce the impact on your site and possible improve your overall ranking. Your first goal is getting the bots to your content in as few requests as possible, and at the same time stopping the bots from crawling pages you don’t need (or want) to show up in search results. Most modern sites have dynamic, pop-up, hidden menus that require multiple javascript and CSS resources to properly render. They might look fantastic, but a bot isn’t interested in the aesthetics of your site, they are looking for content. A sitemap is a great tool for linking all the content you want to emphasize without a bot having to navigate through a bunch of complicated dynamic resources. Then there are the rest of the pages in your site, things that are useful to your users but not things that need to appear in the search rankings, login pages, feedback forms, etc. Use robots.txt file or ‘noindex’ meta tags to direct the bots not to bother with these pages. Your sitemap and robots.txt will help bots find the resources you want them to find, and avoid the ones you don’t. This will help lighten the load on your webserver, but won’t necessarily help your site ranking. The number one thing they are looking for is quality content. But searchbots also look for good performing sites. Too many errors or slow responses will negatively impact your ranking in a big way. The answer here is caching. Many bots, googlebot included, do full page downloads when indexing your site. They are looking for javascript and CSS files, images and PDFs, or whatever resources you’ve linked. Most of these resources are static and can be served up out of a CDN. Not only will this alleviate the load on your server, but the performance improvement will make all your quality content that much more appealing to the bots. Sean Power Security Solutions Architect DOSarrest Internet Security Source: https://www.dosarrest.com/ddos-blog/don-t-ban-the-bots/

DDoS Attacks Could Disrupt Brexit Negotiations

IT security professionals are bracing for DDoS attacks of unprecedented frequency in the year ahead, and are already preparing for attacks that could disrupt the UK’s Brexit negotiations and cause outages worldwide. That’s according to a survey from Corero Network Security, which found that more than half (57%) of respondents believe that the Brexit negotiations will be affected by DDoS attacks, with hackers using DDoS to disrupt the negotiations themselves, or using the attacks merely as camouflage while they seek to steal confidential documents or data. The latter “hidden attack” scenario is on the radar of many, and it generally involves the use of smaller, low-volume DDoS attacks of less than 30 minutes in duration. As Corero found in its research, these Trojan-horse campaigns typically go un-mitigated by most legacy solutions, and are frequently used by hackers as a distraction mechanism for additional efforts, like data exfiltration. About 63% of respondents are worried about these hidden effects of these attacks on their networks— particularly with the GDPR deadline fast-approaching, where organizations could be fined up to 4% of global turnover in the event of a data breach. At the same time, worryingly, less than a third (30%) of IT security teams have enough visibility into their networks to mitigate attacks of less than 30 minutes. Meanwhile, many in the industry expect to see a significant escalation of DDoS attacks during the year ahead, with some (38%) predicting that there could even be worldwide Internet outages during 2017. As for who’s behind the growing wave of attacks, the perpetrators are generally financially motivated, IT pros said—despite continued discussions about nation-state attackers or political activism. Security teams believe that criminal extortionists are the most likely group to inflict a DDoS attack against their organizations, with 38% expecting attacks to be financially motivated. By contrast, just 11% believe that hostile nations would be behind a DDoS attack against their organization. This financial motivation explains why almost half of those surveyed (46%) expect to be targeted by a DDoS-related ransom demand over the next 12 months. Worryingly, 62% believe it is likely or possible that their leadership team would pay. “Despite continued advice that victims should not pay a ransom, a worrying number of security professionals seem to believe that their leadership teams would still consider making a payment in the event of an attack,” said Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero. “Corporations need to be proactive and invest in their cybersecurity defenses against DDoS and ransomware to protect themselves against such extortion.” The good news is that the vast majority of security teams (70%) are already taking steps to stay ahead of the threats, such as putting business continuity measures in place to allow their organizations to continue operating in the event of worldwide attacks. However, they also agree that some responsibility for DDoS protection lies with the ISPs; and about a quarter of those surveyed (25%) believe their ISP is primarily to blame for not mitigating DDoS attacks. At the end of 2016, the head of Britain’s new National Cyber Security Centre suggested that the UK’s ISPs could restrict the volume of DDoS attacks across their networks by rewriting internet standards around spoofing. Continued discussions on this topic have led nearly three-quarters of respondents (73%) to expect regulatory pressure to be applied against ISPs who are perceived to be not protecting their customers against DDoS threats. “While most in the IT security industry wouldn’t expect their ISP to automatically protect them against DDoS attacks, there is a growing trend to blame upstream providers for not being more proactive when it comes to DDoS defense,” said Stephenson. “To help their cause, ISPs could do more to position themselves as leading the charge against DDoS attacks, both in terms of protecting their own networks, and by offering more comprehensive solutions to their customers as a paid-for, managed service.” Source: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ddos-attacks-could-disrupt-brexit/

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DDoS Attacks Could Disrupt Brexit Negotiations

An internet-connected fish tank let hackers into a casino’s network

A high-tech, internet-connected fish tank in a North American casino has been used to exfiltrate data from the company’s network. Smart drawing pads used in an architectural firm were part of a botnet used to mount DDoS attacks against websites around the world owned by entertainment companies, design companies, and government bodies. These are just some of the discoveries made by UK-based cyber defense Darktrace, but serve as perfect examples of how lax security when … More ?

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An internet-connected fish tank let hackers into a casino’s network

Smart Drawing Pads Used for DDoS Attacks, IoT Fish Tank Used in Casino Hack

Some clever hackers found new ways to use the smart devices surrounding us, according to a report published last week by UK-based cyber-defense company Darktrace. The report, entitled the Darktrace Global Threat Report 2017, contains nine case studies from hacks investigated by Darktrace, among which two detail cyber-incidents caused by IoT devices. Smart drawing pads used for DDoS attacks In one of these case studies, Darktrace experts reveal how an unknown hacker had hijacked the smart drawing pads used at an architectural firm to carry out DDoS attacks as part of an IoT botnet. The hacker had used the default login credentials that came with the design pad software to take over the devices, which the architectural firm had connected to its internal WiFi network, and was exposing to external connections. “An attacker scanning the internet identified the vulnerable smart drawing pads and exploited them to send vast volumes of data to many websites around the world owned by entertainment companies, design companies, and government bodies,” the report reads. “Involvement in the attack could have legal implications for the firm had their infrastructure been responsible for damaging another network.” Smart fish tank used to hack North American casino Another case where attackers leveraged a smart device was at a North American casino. Darktrace says that an unknown hacker had managed to take over a smart fish tank the casino had installed at its premises for the enjoyment of its guests. In spite of the fact that the fish tank was installed on its own VPN, isolated from the rest of the casino’s network, the hacker managed to break through to the mainframe and steal data from the organization. “The data was being transferred to a device in Finland,” says Darktrace. “No other company device had communicated with this external location.” “No other company device was sending a comparable amount of outbound data,” experts added. “Communications took place on a protocol normally associated with audio and video.” In total, the hacker managed to steal over 10GB of data by siphoning it off via the IoT fish tank. Other hacking scenarios detailed in the Darktrace report include the case of a US insurance company who had its servers hijacked by a cryptocurrency miner, and several cases of insider threats, companies hacked by former or current employees. Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smart-drawing-pads-used-for-ddos-attacks-iot-fish-tank-used-in-casino-hack/

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Smart Drawing Pads Used for DDoS Attacks, IoT Fish Tank Used in Casino Hack