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Published: 26 October 2016

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Prevent Don't React

Consider this scenario:

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Published: 23 October 2016

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Group Called New World Order Responsible

A CYBER attack that downed popular internet sites including Twitter, Paypal, Netflix and Spotify — by targeting the service that allows users to connect to them — has been US DYN Hack Resolved, US-based DNS provider Dyn says, after hours of outages that spread around the world.

The wave of several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Dyn began at 1110 GMT on Friday (8pm AEDT on Thursday) and while the outages initially affected only the eastern United States, later users in Europe and Asia reported problems connecting to dozens of major websites.

In a DDoS attack, systems are intentionally flooded with data to slow or stop legitimate users from accessing them. Dyn said it had not received any communication from the attackers and did not know who was responsible, CNBC reported.

A senior US intelligence official told US broadcaster NBC that authorities do not believe the attack was state sponsored, instead identifying it as a case of “internet vandalism”. Dyn told CNBC that Friday’s attacks were “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time”.

The attacks were carried out partly through the “internet of things” — physical devices like printers and appliances connected to the internet. The hijacked devices had been infected with malware, Dyn said, according to the report. Dyn’s services are part of the infrastructure of the internet, directing users to its client websites.

Members of a shadowy hacker collective that calls itself New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter.

They said they organized networks of connected “zombie” computers that threw a staggering 1.2 terabits per second of data at the Dyn-managed servers.

“We didn’t do this to attract federal agents, only test power,” two collective members who identified themselves as “Prophet” and “Zain” told an Associated Press reporter via Twitter direct message exchange. They said more than 10 member participated in the attack. It was not immediately possible to verify the claim.

The collective, named NewWorldHacking on Twitter, has in the past claimed responsibility for similar attacks against sites including ESPNFantasySports.com in September and the BBC on December 31. The attack on the BBC marshalled half the computing power of Friday’s onslaught.

Outages monitor downdetector.com on Saturday showed service back to normal on dozens of affected websites.

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Published: 22 October 2016

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Nationwide Hack

New Weapons Used to Disrupt Major Websites

On Friday last week, leading major websites were inaccessible to people across wide portions of the United States. According to the source article on this; a company that manages crucial parts of the internet’s infrastructure said it was under attack. These sources reported sporadic problems reaching several websites, including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud and The New York Times.

The company, Dyn, houses servers that monitor and reroute internet traffic. Dyn said it began experiencing what security experts called a distributed denial-of-service attack just after 7 a.m. Reports that many sites were inaccessible started on the East Coast, but spread westward in three waves as the day wore on and into the evening.

In addition, something new to consider along with this attack is specifics about this indicate that it relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors, on line security devices, and home routers that have been infected — without their owners’ knowledge — with software that allows hackers to command them to flood a target with overwhelming traffic.

It is also reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security were looking into the incident and all potential causes, including criminal activity and a nation-state attack. According to these reports, Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategist, said his company and others that host the core parts of the internet’s infrastructure were targets for a growing number of more powerful attacks. “The number and types of attacks, the duration of attacks and the complexity of these attacks are all on the rise,” Mr. York said.

Security researchers have long warned that the increasing number of devices being hooked up to the internet, the so-called Internet of Things, would present an enormous security issues. And the assault on Friday, security researchers say, is only a glimpse of how those devices can be used for online attacks.

Dyn is based in Manchester, N.H., and indicated that it had fended off the assault by 9:30 a.m. But by 11:52 a.m., but found it was again under attack. After fending off the second wave of attacks, Dyn said at 5 p.m. that it was again facing a flood of traffic.

DDoS - A distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, occurs when hackers flood the servers that run a target’s site with internet traffic until it stumbles or collapses under the load. While most web masters, DNS providers, and large server provioning companies are aware these attacks are common, this attack last week provides evidence that there is evidence that they are becoming more powerful, more sophisticated and increasingly aimed at core internet infrastructure providers. Definitely not good news for the average home consumer. Going after companies like Dyn can cause far more damage than aiming at a single website.

The core service provider Dyn, is one of many outfits that host the Domain Name System, or DNS. DNS, which functions as a switchboard for the internet; does translate user-friendly web addresses like fbi.gov into numerical addresses that allow computers to speak to one another. Without the DNS servers operated by internet service providers, the internet could not operate.

In this specific case on Friday, the attack was aimed specifically at the Dyn infrastructure that supports internet connections. While the attack did not affect the websites themselves, it blocked or slowed users trying to gain access to those sites. Mr. York, the Dyn strategist, said in an interview during a lull in the attacks that the assaults on its servers were complex.

“This was not your everyday DDoS attack,” Mr. York said. “The nature and source of the attack is still under investigation.”

A notice from Dyn on its website about the outage:

Later in the day, Dave Allen, the general counsel at Dyn, said tens of millions of internet addresses, or so-called I.P. addresses, were being used to send a fire hose of internet traffic at the company’s servers. He also confirmed that a large portion of that traffic was coming from internet-connected devices that had been co-opted by type of malware, called Mirai.

Dale Drew, chief security officer at Level 3, an internet service provider, found evidence that roughly 10 percent of all devices co-opted by Mirai were being used to attack Dyn’s servers. Just one week ago, Level 3 found that 493,000 devices had been infected with Mirai malware, nearly double the number infected last month.

Mr. Allen added that Dyn was collaborating with law enforcement and other internet service providers to deal with the attacks.

In a recent report, Verisign, a registrar for many internet sites that has a unique perspective into this type of attack activity, reported a 75 percent increase in such attacks from April through June of this year, compared with the same period last year.

The attacks were not only more frequent, they were bigger and more sophisticated. The typical attack more than doubled in size. What is more, the attackers were simultaneously using different methods to attack the company’s servers, making them harder to stop. The most frequent targets were businesses that provide internet infrastructure services like Dyn.

“DNS has often been neglected in terms of its security and availability,” Richard Meeus, vice president for technology at Nsfocus, a network security firm, wrote in an email. “It is treated as if it will always be there in the same way that water comes out of the tap.”

Last month, Bruce Schneier, a security expert and blogger, wrote on the Lawfare blog that someone had been probing the defenses of companies that run crucial pieces of the internet.

“These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well the companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down,” Mr. Schneier wrote. “We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation-state. China and Russia would be my first guesses.”

While i may be too early to determine who was behind Friday’s attacks, it is this type of attack that has election officials concerned. They are worried that an attack could keep citizens from submitting votes.

Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow internet voting for overseas military and civilians. Alaska allows any Alaskan citizen to do so. Barbara Simons, the co-author of the book “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?” and a member of the board of advisers to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal body that oversees voting technology standards, said she had been losing sleep over just this prospect.

“A DDoS attack could certainly impact these votes and make a big difference in swing states,” Dr. Simons said on Friday. “This is a strong argument for why we should not allow voters to send their voted ballots over the internet.”

This month the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and the Department of Homeland Security accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee, apparently in an effort to affect the presidential election. There has been speculation about whether President Obama has ordered the National Security Agency to conduct a retaliatory attack and the potential backlash this might cause from Russia.

Gillian M. Christensen, deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency was investigating “all potential causes” of the attack.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” this month that the United States was prepared to respond to Russia’s election attacks in kind. “We’re sending a message,” Mr. Biden said. “We have the capacity to do it.”

But technology providers in the United States could suffer blowback. As Dyn fell under recurring attacks on Friday, Mr. York, the chief strategist, said such assaults were the reason so many companies are pushing at least parts of their infrastructure to cloud computing networks, to decentralize their systems and make them harder to attack.

“It’s a total wild, wild west out there,” Mr. York said.

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By NICOLE PERLROTHOCT. 21, 2016 Erin McCann contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on October 22, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Weapons Used in Attack on the Internet. Photo
A map of the areas experiencing problems, as of Friday afternoon, according to downdetector.com.

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Published: 17 August 2016

Hits: 3658

Experts Warn Of Security Flaw

People visit an Android stand at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona March 4, 2015. (REUTERS/Gustau Nacarino)iComEx is reporting today that tech security researchers warned in reports a Linux flaw lets attackers hijack internet traffic and it also affects nearly 80 percent of Android devices. Mobile security company Lookout reports that the recently discovered Linux flaw could impact around 1.4 billion Android devices.

“The vulnerability lets attackers obtain unencrypted traffic and degrade encrypted traffic to spy on victims,” explained Lookout Security Researcher Andrew Blaich, in a blog post Monday.

While the Linux flaw is not specific to Android, its potential to affect a large number of devices has grabbed plenty of attention.

Reports say that this flaw first appeared with the introduction of Linux 3.6 in 2012, according to Ars Technica, which warns that an attacker could insert malicious code or content into unencrypted TCP internet connections between two parties. Even if the connection is encrypted, an attacker may be able to terminate it, Ars Technica adds.

“If you’re running an enterprise mobility program, a number of Android devices are potentially vulnerable to a serious spying attack,” wrote Blaich, in the Lookout blog post. “CISOs [Chief Information Security Officers] should be aware that this new vulnerability affects their Linux environments, Linux-based server connections (e.g., to popular websites), in addition to Android devices.”

Blaich also urges companies to check if any of the traffic to their services, such as email, is using unencrypted communications. “If so, targeted attacks would be able to access and manipulate unencrypted sensitive information, including any corporate emails, documents, or other files,” he added.

"We have been aware of this issue and we're taking the appropriate actions," explained a spokesman for Google, in an email to FoxNews.com.

Digital Trends reports that the flaw, which will likely be remedied when the new version of Android, Android 7.0 Nougat, becomes available to the public. The final release of Android 7.0 Nougat will be available by the end of September, according to Android Authority.

 Source: Ars Technica