In the Line of Fire - The Morphology of Cyber-Attacks

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In the Line of Fire – the Morphology of Cyber-Attacks

Dennis UsleSecurity Solutions [email protected]

AGEN

DAAvailability-based threats

Attacks on the US banks

Other popular attack patterns & trends

2001 20102005

Attack Risk

Time

© 2011, Radware, Ltd.

Blaster2003

CodeRed2001

Nimda(Installed Trojan)

2001Slammer

(Attacking SQL sites)2003

Vandalism and Publicity

Storm(Botnet)

2007

Agobot(DoS Botnet)

Srizbi(Botnet)

2007Rustock(Botnet)

2007

Kracken(Botnet)

2009

2010IMDDOS(Botnet)

Financially Motivated

Mar 2011 DDoSWordpress.com

Blending Motives

Mar 2011Codero DDoS /

Twitter

Google / Twitter Attacks2009

Republican website DoS

2004

Estonia’s Web SitesDoS2007

Georgia Web sitesDoS 2008

July 2009 Cyber Attacks

US & Korea

Dec 2010Operation Payback

Mar 2011Netbot DDoS

Mar 2011Operation Payback II

“Hacktivism”

LulzSecSony, CIA, FBI

Peru, Chile

Attacker’s Change in Motivation & Techniques

“Worms”

DDoS

“Blend”

3

The Security Trinity

Integrity

Availability

Confidentiality

Security Confidentiality,a mainstream adaptation of the “need to know” principle of the military ethic, restricts the access of information to those systems, processes and recipients from which the content was intended to be exposed.

Security Integrityin its broadest meaning refers to the trustworthiness of information over its entire life cycle.

Security Availabilityis a characteristic that distinguishes information objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased (outage, an attack), or else because they lack such functions .

Availability Based Attacks

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Availability-based Threats

Network Floods (Volumetric)

Application Floods

Low-and-SlowSingle-packet

DoS

2012 Attack Motivation - ERT Survey

Slide 6Radware Confidential Jan 2012

Radware ERT Survey


2012 Target Trend - ERT Survey


Attacks Campaigns Duration


Attack Duration Requires IT to Develop New Skills

War Room Skills Are Required


Main Bottlenecks During DoS Attacks - ERT Survey


Attacks Traverse CDNs (Dynamic Object Attacks)


AGEN

DA2012 Availability-based threats

Attacks on the US banks

Other popular attack patterns & trends

Overview

• What triggered the recent US attacks?• Who was involved in implementing the attacks and name of the operation?• How long were the attacks and how many attack vectors were involved?• How the attacks work and their effects.• How can we prepare ourselves in the future?


What triggered the attacks on the US banks?

• Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (Alias- “Sam Bacile”), an Egyptian born US resident created an anti-Islamic film.

• Early September the publication of the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ film on YouTube invokes demonstrations throughout the Muslim world.

• The video was 14 minutes though a full length movie was released.


Protests Generated by the Movie


The Cyber Response


Who is the group behind the cyber response?

• A hacker group called “Izz as-Din al-Qassam Cyber fighters”.• Izz as-Din al-Qassam was a famous Muslim preacher who was a leader in the

fight against the French, US and Zionist in the 1920’s and 1930’s.• The group claims not to be affiliated to any government or Anonymous.• This group claims to be independent, and it’s goal is to defend Islam.


Operation Ababil launched!

• “Operation Ababil” is the codename of the operation launched on September 18th 2012, by the group Izz as-Din al-Qassam Cyber fighters

• The attackers announced they would attack “American and Zionist targets.”• “Ababil” translates to “Swallow” from Persian. Until today the US thinks the

Iranian government may be behind the operation.• The goal of the operation is to have YouTube remove the anti-Islamic film from

its site. Until today the video has not been removed.


The Attack

Vectors and Tactics!

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Initial attack campaign in 2 phases

• The attack campaign was split into 2 phases, a pubic announcement was made in each phase.• The attacks lasted 10 days, from the 18th until the 28th of September.• Phase 1 - Targets > NYSE, BOA, JP Morgan.• Phase 2 – Targets > Wells Fargo, US Banks, PNC.• Phase 3 - Targets > PNC, Fifth Third Bancorp, J.M.Chase, U.S.Bank, UnionBank, Bank of

America, Citibank, BB&T and Capitalone.


Attack Vectors

• 5 Attack vectors were seen by the ERT team during Operation Ababil.

1. UDP garbage flood.

2. TCP SYN flood.

3. Mobile LOIC (Apache killer version.)

4. HTTP Request flood.

5. ICMP Reply flood. (*Unconfirmed but reported on.)

6. Booters.

*Note: Data is gathered by Radware as well as it’s partners.

Radware Confidential Jan 2012

Booters

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A Booter is a tool used for taking down/booting off websites and servers.

Booters introduce high volumetric (server based) attacks and slow-rate attack vectors as a one stop shop.

UDP Garbage Flood

• Targeted the DNS servers of the organizations, also HTTP.• 1Gb + in volume.• All attacks were identical in content and in size (Packet structure).• UDP packets sent to port 53 and 80.• Customers attacked Sep 18th and on the 19th.


Tactics used in the UDP Garbage Flood

• Internal DNS servers were targeted , at a high rate.• Web servers were also targeted, at a high rate.• Spoofed IP’s (But kept to just a few, this is unusual.)• ~ 1Gbps.• Lasted more than 7 hours initially but still continues...

Packet structure

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Parameter Value Port 53 Value Port 80

Packet size 1358 Bytes Unknown

Value in Garbage ‘A’ (0x41) characters repeated

“/http1”(\x2f\x68\x74\x74\x70\x31) - repetitive


DNS Garbage Flood packet extract

• Some reports of a DNS reflective attack was underway seem to be incorrect.• The packets are considered “Malformed” DNS packets, no relevant DNS

header.


Attackers objective of the UDP Garbage Flood

• Saturate bandwidth.• Attack will pass through firewall, since port is open.• Saturate session tables/CPU resources on any state -full device, L4 routing

rules any router, FW session tables etc.• Returning ICMP type 3 further saturate upstream bandwidth.• All combined will lead to a DoS situation if bandwidth and infrastructure cannot

handle the volume or packet processing.


TCP SYN Flood

• Targeted Port 53, 80 and 443.• The rate was around 100Mbps with around 135K PPS.• This lasted for more than 3 days.


SYN Flood Packet extract

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-All sources are spoofed.-Multiple SYN packets to port 443.


Attackers objective of the TCP SYN Floods

• SYN floods are a well known attack vector.• Can be used to distract from more targeted attacks.• The effect of the SYN flood if it slips through can devastate state-full devices

quickly. This is done by filling up the session table.• All state-full device has some performance impact under such a flood.• Easy to implement.• Incorrect network architecture will quickly have issues.


Mobile LOIC (Apache killer version)

• Mobile LOIC (Low Orbit Iron Cannon) is a DDoS tool written in HTML and Javascript.

• This DDoS Tool does an HTTP GET flood.• The tool is designed to do HTTP floods.• We have no statistics on the exact traffic of mobile LOIC.

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*Suspected*Suspected


Mobile LOIC in a web browser


HTTP Request Flood

• Between 80K and 100K TPS (Transactions Per second.)• Port 80.• Followed the same patterns in the GET request (Except for the Input

parameter.)• Dynamic user agent.


HTTP flood packet structure

• Sources worldwide (True sources most likely hidden.)• User agent duplicated.• Dynamic Input parameters.

GET Requests parameters


Attackers objective of the HTTP flood

• Bypass CDN services by randomizing the input parameter and user agents.• Because of the double user agent there was an flaw in the programming behind

the attacking tool.• Saturating and exhausting web server resources by keeping session table and

web server connection limits occupied.• The attack takes more resources to implement than non connection orientated

attacks like TCP SYN floods and UDP garbage floods. This is because of the need to establish a connection.


Identified locations of attacking IPs

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Worldwide!


AGEN

DA2012 Availability-based threats

Attacks on the us banks

Others 2012 popular attack patterns & trends

Availability-based Threats Tree

Slide 38



Application Floods


DoS

UPD Flood

ICMP Flood

SYN Flood

WebFlood

DNS SMTP

HTTPS


Asymmetric Attacks


HTTP Reflection Attack

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Website A Website B(Victim)

Attacker

HTTPGET


Slide 41

iframe, width=1, height=1

search.php

HTTP Reflection Attack Example


HTTPS – SSL Re Negotiation Attack

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THC-SSL DoSTHC-SSL DOS was developed by a hacking group called The Hacker’s Choice (THC), as a proof-of-concept to encourage vendors to patch a serious SSL vulnerability. THC-SSL-DOS, as with other “low and slow” attacks, requires only a small number of packets to cause denial-of-service for a fairly large server. It works by initiating a regular SSL handshake and then immediately requesting for the renegotiation of the encryption key, constantly repeating this server resource-intensive renegotiation request until all server resources have been exhausted.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex2xz0ZOKKs&list=UU4HQOaZv6s6A4ek3ptaff7w

Low & Slow

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Application Floods


DoS

UPD Flood

ICMP Flood

SYN Flood

WebFlood

DNS SMTP

HTTPS

Low-and-Slow


Low & Slow

• Slowloris• Sockstress• R.U.D.Y.• Simultaneous Connection Saturation


R.U.D.Y (R-U-Dead-Yet)

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R.U.D.Y. (R-U-Dead-Yet?)R.U.D.Y. (R-U-Dead-Yet?) is a slow-rate HTTP POST (Layer 7) denial-of-service tool created by Raviv Raz and named after the Children of Bodom album “Are You Dead Yet?” It achieves denial-of-service by using long form field submissions. By injecting one byte of information into an application POST field at a time and then waiting, R.U.D.Y. causes application threads to await the end of never-ending posts in order to perform processing (this behavior is necessary in order to allow web servers to support users with slower connections). Since R.U.D.Y. causes the target webserver to hang while waiting for the rest of an HTTP POST request, by initiating simultaneous connections to the server the attacker is ultimately able to exhaust the server’s connection table and create a denial-of-service condition.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZqi41fJfBs

Slowloris

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SlowlorisSlowloris is a denial-of-service (DoS) tool developed by the grey hat hacker “RSnake” that causes DoS by using a very slow HTTP request. By sending HTTP headers to the target site in tiny chunks as slow as possible (waiting to send the next tiny chunk until just before the server would time out the request), the server is forced to continue to wait for the headers to arrive. If enough connections are opened to the server in this fashion, it is quickly unable to handle legitimate requests.Slowloris is cross-platform, except due to Windows’ ~130 simultaneous socket use limit, it is only effective from UNIX-based systems which allow for more connections to be opened in parallel to a target server (although a GUI Python version of Slowloris dubbed PyLoris was able to overcome this limiting factor on Windows).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ60NBPSoho

Radware Security Products Portfolio

Slide 47

AppWallWeb Application Firewall (WAF)

DefenseProNetwork & Server attack prevention device

APSolute VisionManagement and security reporting & compliance

http://www.tolly.com/TV/TV_home.aspx

Thank Youwww.radware.com


In the Line of Fire - The Morphology of Cyber-Attacks

Technology

radware confidential

dos attacks ert survey

radware ert survey slide

recent us attacks

movie slide

cyber attacks us korea

security availability

us banks