Wednesday, January 29, 2014

DDOS Attacks Way Up as Hackers Learn from Each Other and Use DNS Amplification Attacks

"Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have scaled up in the past year, according to Arbor Networks' latest Infrastructure Security Report (PDF), and many attackers are learning from each other to meet their objectives.

Those surveyed in the study, around 220 operational security professionals, reported that DDoS attacks are the number one threat against their infrastructure.

Attackers are thought to be ideological hacktivists, mostly targeting the customers of those hosting infrastructure, but the report states that attacks against infrastructure providers themselves are increasing.

'Last year, we saw eight times the number of attacks over 20Gbps when compared to 2012. In short, attackers seem to have refocused on utilising large volumetric attacks to achieve their goals,' report co-author and Arbor Networks solutions architect Darren Anstee said.

The problem is compounded by the increase in DNS amplification attacks. Such attacks allow attackers to make several requests to an open DNS server, but with the requesting IP forged to their victim. The server then responds to the victim with the requested information, unaware that they did not actually ask for it. As the size of the response from the server can be many times the size of the request, this assists attackers in amplifying how much damage they can do:"

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