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The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex with the increase in the skills of attackers and so, has become one of favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend or crash the services of a host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack. Since 2013, Hackers have adopted new tactics to boost the sizes of Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack known as ' Amplification Attack ', leveraging the weakness in the UDP protocols. One of the commonly used by hacker is (Domain Name System) DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS). WHAT IS DrDoS ATTACK? The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Internet protocol spoofing, the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to the target and the target of the attack receives re...

Till Now the Internet was encountering the traditional Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks , where a large number of compromised systems use to flood servers with tremendous amount of bandwidth; but in past few months we have noticed massive change in the techniques of DDoS attack. Hackers are using creative, but evil DDoS techniques such as NTP and DNS Amplification DDoS attacks. Last month we have seen that how cybercriminals abused a vulnerability in one of the biggest Chinese video hosting website Sohu.com to convert their millions of visitors to participate into the Layer 7 (Application Layer) DDoS attack with 20 Million requests. According to the new report released by a US based security solutions provider Incapsula , another interesting DDoS attack activities have been noticed by the researchers in which an attacker abused two major anti-DDoS Service providers to perform massive DDoS attack on other websites. Its really EPIC that the services who should...

Serverless environments, leveraging services such as AWS Lambda, offer incredible benefits in terms of scalability, efficiency, and reduced operational overhead. However, securing these environments is extremely challenging. The core of current serverless security practices often revolves around two key components: log monitoring and static analysis of code or system configuration. But here is the issue with that: 1. Logs Only Tell Part of the Story Logs can track external-facing activities, but they don't provide visibility into the internal execution of functions. For example, if an attacker injects malicious code into a serverless function that doesn't interact with external resources (e.g., external APIs or databases), traditional log-based tools will not detect this intrusion. The attacker may execute unauthorized processes, manipulate files, or escalate privileges—all without triggering log events. 2. Static Misconfiguration Detection is Incomplete Static tools that check ...

Hackers are leveraging large number of compromised machines (a botnet network) to carry out massive DNS Flood DDoS attack against a large Video Gaming Industry website, peaking above 110 Gbps. A US based security solutions provider Incapsula , is protecting a famous Video Gaming website from this high bandwidth DDoS attack from last 48 Hours and according to them, the attack is still continuing. Incapsula has not yet disclosed the name of the video gaming company. "The attack is still going on - that over 48 hours by now, from what I see it ain't gonna stop anytime soon ," Incapsula spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to The Hacker News. DDoS AT 90 MILLION PACKETS/SECOND The researchers at the security firm noticed a surge of massive DNS Flood DDoS attack on one of its clients, peaking at approximately 90 Mpps (Million Packets Per Second), which is really a very very big number. Majority number of attacking IP addresses belong to China and India. " Good reason to think ...

The Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex, and, according to security experts , the next DDoS vector to be concerned about is SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) amplification attacks. Yesterday afternoon, the SANS Internet Storm Center reported SNMP scans spoofed from Google's public recursive DNS server searching for vulnerable routers and other devices that support the protocol with DDoS traffic and are opened to the public Internet. " We are receiving some reports about SNMP scans that claim to originate from 8.8.8.8 (Google's public recursive DNS server), " wrote Johannes Ullrich, dean of research of the SANS Technology Institute and head of the Internet Storm Center. " This is likely part of an attempt to launch a DDoS against Google by using SNMP as an amplifier/reflector. " Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based protocol designed to allow the monitoring of network-...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed more light on a Chinese actor codenamed SecShow that has been observed conducting Domain Name System (DNS) on a global scale since at least June 2023. The adversary, according to Infoblox security researchers Dr. Renée Burton and Dave Mitchell, operates from the China Education and Research Network ( CERNET ), a project funded by the Chinese government. "These probes seek to find and measure DNS responses at open resolvers," they said in a report published last week. "The end goal of the SecShow operations is unknown, but the information that is gathered can be used for malicious activities and is only for the benefit of the actor." That said, there is some evidence to suggest that it may have been linked to some kind of academic research related to "performing measurements using IP Address Spoofing Techniques on domains within secshow.net" modeled on the same approach as the Closed Resolver Project . This, howeve...

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...

In recent months the DDoS world has shifted from complex small scale Botnet attacks to much larger network based DDoS attacks , perpetrated largely by hijacked web servers. How many of these hijacked servers are out there remains to be seen. However, Incapsula recently got a very good idea of just how large these DDoS cannons are getting. Last Saturday Incapsula mitigated a rather small, 4Gbps DDoS attack, but this time it had a different pattern that attracted our attention. At first sight the attack seemed rather simple, generating 8 million DNS queries per second, to many domains, from spoofed IP addresses (using real domain name servers' IPs). But this time it included a hint about where it was coming from: all that traffic was coming from the same source. Probably on the same network, maybe even the same device. Tracing it to a single Source - TTL Giveaway Incapsula were able to trace the attack to a single source because this time the attackers slipped-u...

Cybercriminals have figured out a way to abuse widely-used Memcached servers to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attacks than their original strength, which could result in knocking down of major websites and Internet infrastructure. In recent days, security researchers at Cloudflare , Arbor Networks , and Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 noticed that hackers are now abusing "Memcached" to amplify their DDoS attacks by an unprecedented factor of 51,200. Memcached is a popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory and has been designed to work with a large number of open connections. Memcached server runs over TCP or UDP port 11211. The Memcached application has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. It's widely used by thousands of websites, including Facebook, Flickr,...

In March of this year, we saw the first ever 300 Gigabit DDoS attack , which was possible due to a DNS Reflection Amplification attack against Spamhaus . On 24 September World's 3rd Largest Bitcoin exchange BTC China , a platform where both Bitcoin and Chinese yuan are traded faced massive DDoS attack for continued nine hours, where no amplification techniques were used. Incapsula , Cloud-based security service provider helped the Chinese Bitcoin trader to protect them from such massive denial-of-service attack and successfully mitigated the threats. Incapsula tweeted  a graph of DDoS attack last month as shown, " Yesterday we prevented a ~100Gbps DDoS. The attack's load was distributed across our 350Gbps network. " Specialist at Incapsula shared the details of the attack with TheRegister , explained " The attack against BTC China took the form of a SYN flood rather than the DNS amplification-style attack ", " The attacker balanced the assault betwee...

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...

Two separate proofs-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for Memcached amplification attack have been released online that could allow even script-kiddies to launch massive DDoS attacks using UDP reflections easily. The first DDoS tool is written in C programming language and works with a pre-compiled list of vulnerable Memcached servers. Bonus—its description already includes a list of nearly 17,000 potential vulnerable Memcached servers left exposed on the Internet. Whereas, the second Memcached DDoS attack tool is written in Python that uses Shodan search engine API to obtain a fresh list of vulnerable Memcached servers and then sends spoofed source UDP packets to each server. Last week we saw two record-breaking DDoS attacks— 1.35 Tbps hit Github and 1.7 Tbps attack against an unnamed US-based company—which were carried out using a technique called amplification/reflection attack. For those unaware, Memcached-based amplification/reflection attack amplifies bandwidth of th...

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...

Weaknesses in the implementation of TCP protocol in  middleboxes  and censorship infrastructure could be weaponized as a vector to stage reflected denial of service (DoS) amplification attacks against any target, surpassing many of the existing UDP-based amplification factors to date. Detailed by a group of academics from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado Boulder at the USENIX Security Symposium, the volumetric attacks take advantage of TCP-non-compliance in-network middleboxes — such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and deep packet inspection (DPI) boxes — to amplify network traffic, with hundreds of thousands of IP addresses offering  amplification factors  exceeding those from DNS, NTP, and Memcached. The research, which received a Distinguished Paper Award at the conference, is the first of its kind to describe a technique to carry out DDoS reflected amplification attacks over the TCP protocol by abusing middlebox misconfigu...

The threat actors behind the CatDDoS malware botnet have exploited over 80 known security flaws in various software over the past three months to infiltrate vulnerable devices and co-opt them into a botnet for conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "CatDDoS-related gangs' samples have used a large number of known vulnerabilities to deliver samples," the QiAnXin XLab team  said . "Additionally, the maximum number of targets has been observed to exceed 300+ per day." The flaws impact routers, networking gear, and other devices from vendors such as Apache (ActiveMQ, Hadoop, Log4j, and RocketMQ), Cacti, Cisco, D-Link, DrayTek, FreePBX, GitLab, Gocloud, Huawei, Jenkins, Linksys, Metabase, NETGEAR, Realtek, Seagate, SonicWall, Tenda, TOTOLINK, TP-Link, ZTE, and Zyxel, among others. CatDDoS was previously documented by  QiAnXin  and  NSFOCUS  in late 2023, describing it as a  Mirai botnet variant  capable of performing DDoS attacks using...

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks leveraging a new amplification technique called TCP Middlebox Reflection have been detected for the first time in the wild, six months after the novel attack mechanism was presented in theory. "The attack […] abuses vulnerable firewalls and content filtering systems to reflect and amplify TCP traffic to a victim machine, creating a powerful DDoS attack," Akamai researchers  said  in a report published Tuesday. "This type of attack dangerously lowers the bar for DDoS attacks, as the attacker needs as little as 1/75th (in some cases) the amount of bandwidth from a volumetric standpoint," the researchers added. A distributed reflective denial-of-service ( DRDoS ) is a form of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that relies on publicly accessible UDP servers and bandwidth amplification factors (BAFs) to overwhelm a victim's system with a high volume of UDP responses. In these attacks, the adversary sends a ...

Distributed Denial of Service attacks have increased in scale, intensity and frequency. The wide range of motives for these attacks political , criminal, or social makes every merchant or organization with an online presence a potential target. Over the weekend Incapsula mitigated a unique DDoS attack against a large gaming website, in which they have discovered a DDoS attack using thousands of legitimate WordPress blogs without the need for them to be compromised. Incapsula released the list of approximately 2,500 WordPress sites from where the attack was originated, including some very large sites like Trendmicro.com, Gizmodo.it and Zendesk.com . In a recent report , we posted about another method for DDoS attacks using DNS amplification , where a DNS request is made to an open DNS resolver with the source IP address forged so that it is the IP address of the targeted site to which the response is thus sent, but this new method uses HTTP rather tha...