DNS reflection | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

After successful in launching reflection and amplification Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks by abusing various protocols such as DNS, NTP and SMTP, hackers are now abusing Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) – part of the UPnP protocol standard – to target home and office devices, researchers warned. SSDP is a network protocol based on the Internet Protocol Suite that comes enabled on millions of networked devices, such as computers, printers, Internet gateways, Router / Wi-Fi access points, mobile devices, webcams, smart TVs and gaming consoles, to discover each other and automatically establish working configurations that enable data sharing, media streaming, media playback control and other services. FLAW IN UPnP USED IN AMPLIFICATION DDoS ATTACK Prolexic Security Engineering & Response Team (PLXsert) at Akamai Technologies have issued a warning that the devices use in residential or small office environments are being co-opted into reflection ...

The DDoS techniques have massively increased with the attackers becoming more skillful at working around the network security. A massive 300Gbps DDoS attack launched against Spamhaus website almost broke the Internet a year ago and also earlier this year, hackers have succeeded in reaching new heights of the massive DDoS attack targeting content-delivery and anti-DDoS protection firm CloudFlare, reaching more than 400Gbps at its peak of traffic. Akamai's Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) issued a threat advisory on Thursday reporting a significant surge in DDoS attacks last month abusing the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface in network devices. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based protocol which is commonly known and often used to manage network devices. SNMP is typically used in devices such as printers, routers and firewalls that can be found in the home and enterprise environments as well. Just as D...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

In 2013, we have seen a significant increase in the use of a specific distributed denial of service (DDoS) methodology known as Distributed Reflection Denial of Service attacks (DrDoS). Open and misconfigured DNS (Domain Name System) can be used by anyone to resolve domain names to IP addresses are increasingly abused to launch powerful DDoS attacks. But not only the DNS servers, Security Researchers at Symantec  have spotted Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection DDoS attacks being launched by cyber criminals during the Christmas Holidays. ' Network Time Protocol (NTP) ' is a distributed network clock time synchronization protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock times in a network of computers and runs over port 123 UDP. NTP is one of those set-it-and-forget-it protocols that is configured once and most network administrators don't worry about it after that. Unfortunately, that means it is also not a service that is upgraded often, leaving it vulnerable to th...

DDoS attackers attempted to bring down an Banking services earlier this week using one of the largest Distributed denial of service attack using DNS reflection technique. Prolexic, the global leader in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, announced  that it has successfully mitigated the largest DNS reflection attack ever recorded, which peaked at 167 Gigabits per second (Gbps). The company did not name the target of the digital assault. DNS-reflection was the attack method used in Operation Stophaus , an attack waged in March by The Spamhaus Project, a Geneva-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to fighting Internet spam . When Spamhaus was assaulted by a vast 300Gbps peak DNS reflection attack, it engaged the help of a content delivery network (CDN) called CloudFlare to help defend itself. The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Inte...

A website that can be described as " DDoS for hire " is perfectly legitimate, according to the owner. Malicious sites that offer attack services are not strangers on the Internet, but web sites sponsored by law enforcement is another story altogether. Ragebooter, is one of many sites that accepts payment through PayPal in order to flood sites with junk traffic, overloading servers and denying others access. The service uses a technique called DNS reflection to flood a website and amplify the amount of traffic directed at an address. Unlike other existing sites that offer similar services, the Ragebooter have particularly interesting back door leading directly to the FBI. It seems that the Federal Investigation Bureau uses the site to monitor the activity of users on the network, and that added to the site IP Logger that keeps the IP addresses of all users coming to the site. Investigation shows the site operator is a guy named Justin Folland located in M...

The last week has seen probably the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever. A massive 300Gbps was thrown against Internet blacklist maintainer Spamhaus' website but the anti-spam organisation , CloudFlare was able to recover from the attack and get its core services back up and running.  Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit organisation that aims to help email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content. Spamhaus is pretty resilient, as its own network is distributed across many countries, but the attack was still enough to knock its site offline on March 18. Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.  A group calling itself STOPhaus,  an alliance of hactivists and cyber criminals is believed to responsible for bombarding Spamhaus with up to 300Gbps. The attacks on Spamhaus illustrate a larger problem with the vulnerability of systems fundamental to the architecture of...