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DDoSSecurity

Could Your Local Car Dealer, Bank or Doctor’s Office be Next?

August 17, 2017 — by Mike O'Malley — 0

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What do local car dealers, hospitals and banks all have in common? At first glance, not much. However, all of them have become recent hacker targets. Why now when other, much larger corporate entities have traditionally been targets? One word – resources. Their resources, both network and personnel, are stretched thin. With the increased complexity and length of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, it’s a struggle for all organizations, let alone small and medium businesses. The 2016 State of SMB Security Report found that half of the 28 million small businesses surveyed were breached in the past year. Verizon cited, in their 2017 Data Breach report, that 61% of data breach victims were businesses with less than 1,000 employees.

DDoSSecurity

The Money Behind DDoS Managed Security Services

July 27, 2017 — by Mike O'Malley — 0

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In a recent Light Reading webinar, Principal Heavy Reading Analyst Jim Hodges and I discussed the growing need for Managed Security Services. DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, lasting more than 24 hours in some cases. The attacks aren’t limited to specific industries or company sizes anymore, and push stretched internal IT resources to the breaking point. The 0s and 1s that flash through service provider networks are equally vulnerable.  Attackers don’t care where the data is coming from…they’re looking for vulnerabilities they can exploit for money. The days of hacks focused on large retail organizations like Target and Home Depot are behind us. Merck and Co., a large U.S.-based pharmaceutical firm, was one of several global companies impacted by a massive global attack. Don’t let these hacks bring your customers’ network down.

Attack Types & VectorsDDoSSecurity

Gaming – Legitimate vs. Malicious Users

July 20, 2017 — by Daniel Smith — 0

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Over the years Radware has followed the evolution of DDoS attacks directed at the gaming industry. For the industry, large-scale DDoS attacks can result in network outages or service degradation and has become an everyday occurrence. In 2016 Lizard Squad and Poodle Corp launched repeated attacks against EA, Blizzard and Riot Games, resulting in service degradation and outages for users around the world.

DDoSSecurity

The Service Side of Denial of Service

July 13, 2017 — by Jim Hodges — 0

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Over the past four years, communications service providers (CSPs) have taken measurable strides to migrate network functions and applications to the cloud. And while we are not there yet, it’s clear that the cloud will drive the future of service innovation. However, in my view, the very definition of service innovation is also extended in the cloud environment.

A prime example in my mind is the expansion of managed services to a cloud managed services model which drives profound business and technical change. While this cloud managed services model continues to be defined in real time, it’s readily apparent that cloud-based managed security services will play a prominent role.

Attack Types & VectorsDDoSSecurity

Eliminating Single Points of Failure, Part 2

July 6, 2017 — by Louis Scialabba — 0

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The Risk DDoS Attacks Pose to Enterprises

What is the impact of a DDoS Attack?

Denial of Service attacks affect enterprises from all sectors (e-gaming, Banking, Government etc.), all sizes (mid/big enterprises) and all locations. They target the network layer up through the application layer, where attacks are more difficult to detect since they can easily get confused with legitimate traffic.
A denial of service attack generates high or low rate attack traffic exhausting computing resources of a target, therefore preventing legitimate users from accessing the website. A DDoS attack can always cause an outage, but often they have the stealth impact of slowing down network performance in way that enterprise IT teams do not even realize the network is under attack and simply think the network is congested, not knowing the congestion is actually caused by an attack.

Attack Types & VectorsDDoSSecurity

The Expansion of IoT since Mirai.

March 22, 2017 — by Daniel Smith — 0

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The idea of an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet is nothing new in our industry. In fact, the threat has been discussed for many years by security researchers. It has only now gained public attention due to the release and rampage of the Mirai botnet. Since Mirai broke the 1Tbps mark in late 2016 the IoT threat has become a popular topic of conversation for many industries that utilize connected devices. Not only are companies worried about if their devices are vulnerable but they are also worried if those devices can be used to launch a DDoS attack, one possibly aimed at their own network.

DDoSSecurityWAF

CDN Security is NOT Enough for Today

March 8, 2017 — by David Hobbs — 0

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Today, many organizations are now realizing that DDoS defense is critical to maintaining an exceptional customer experience. Why? Because nothing diminishes load times or impacts the end users’ experience more than a cyber-attack, which is the silent killer of application performance.

As high-availability and high performance distributors of content to end-users, CDNs can serve as a lynchpin in the customer experience. Yet new vulnerabilities in CDN networks have left many wondering if the CDNs themselves are vulnerable to a wide variety of cyber-attacks, such as forward loop assaults.

So what types of attacks are CDNs vulnerable too? Here are top 5 cyber threats that threaten CDNs so you can safeguard against them.

Blind Spot #1: Dynamic Content Attacks

Attackers have learned that a significant blind spot in CDN services are the treatment of dynamic content requests. Since the dynamic content is not stored on CDN servers, all the requests for dynamic content are sent to the origin’s servers. Attackers are taking advantage of this behavior and they generate attack traffic that contains random parameters in the HTTP GET requests. CDN servers immediately redirect this attack traffic to the origin, expecting the origin’s server to handle the requests. But, in many cases, the origin’s servers do not have the capacity to handle all those attack requests and they fail to provide online services to legitimate users, creating a denial-of-service situation.

Many CDNs have the ability to limit the number of dynamic requests to the server under attack. This means that they cannot distinguish attackers from legitimate users and the rate limit will result in legitimate users being blocked.

Blind Spot #2: SSL-based attacks

SSL-based DDoS attacks target the secured online services of the victim. These attacks are easy to launch and difficult to mitigate, making them attackers’ favorites. In order to detect and mitigate DDoS SSL attacks, CDN servers must first decrypt the traffic using the customer’s SSL keys. If the customer is not willing to provide the SSL keys to its CDN provider, then the SSL attack traffic is redirected to the customer’s origin, leaving the customer vulnerable to SSL attacks. SSL attacks that hit the customer’s origin can easily take down the secured online service.

During DDoS attacks when WAF technologies are involved, CDN networks also have a significant weakness in terms of the number of SSL connections per second from a scalability capability, and serious latency issues can arise.

[You might also like: WAF and DDoS – Perfect Bedfellows: Every Business Owner Must Read.]

PCI and other security compliance issues are also a problem as sometimes this limits the data centers that are able to be used to service the customer, as not all CDN providers are PCI compliant across all datacenters. This can again increase latency and cause audit issues.

Blind Spot #3: Attacks on non-CDN services

CDN services are often offered only for HTTP/S and DNS applications. Other online services and applications in the customer’s data center such as VoIP, mail, FTP and proprietary protocols are not served by the CDN and therefore traffic to those applications is not routed through the CDN. In addition, many web-based applications are also not served by CDNs. Attackers are taking advantage of this blind spot and launch attacks on applications that are not routed through the CDN, hitting the customer origin with largescale attacks that threaten to saturate the Internet pipe of the customer. Once the Internet pipe is saturated, all the applications at the customer’s origin become unavailable to legitimate users, including the ones that are served by the CDN.

Blind Spot #4: Direct IP Attacks

Even applications that are serviced by a CDN can be attacked once the attackers launch a direct attack on the IP address of the web servers at the customer origin. These can be network based floods such as UDP floods or ICMP floods that will not be routed through CDN services, and will directly hit the servers of the customer at the origin. Such volumetric network attacks can saturate the internet pipe, resulting in taking down all the applications and the online services of the origin, including the ones that are served by the CDN. Often misconfiguration of “shielding” the data center can leave the applications directly vulnerable to attack.

Blind Spot #5: Web Application Attacks

CDN protection for web applications threats is limited and exposes the web applications of the customer to data leakage, data thefts and other threats that are common with web applications. Most CDN-based web application firewall capabilities are minimal, covering only a basic set of predefined signatures and rules. Many of the CDN-based WAFs do not learn HTTP parameters, do not create positive security rules and therefore it cannot protect from zero day attacks and known threats. For the companies that DO provide tuning for the web applications in their WAF, the cost is extremely high to get this level of protection.

In addition to the significant blind spots identified earlier, most CDN security services are not responsive enough, resulting in security configurations that take hours to manually deploy and to spread across all its network servers. The security services are using outdated technology such as rate limit that was proven to be inefficient during the last attack campaigns, and it lacks capabilities such as network behavioral analysis, challenge – response mechanisms and more.

 

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DDoSSecurityWAF

WAF and DDoS – Perfect Bedfellows: Every Business Owner Must Read.

March 2, 2017 — by David Hobbs — 0

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Among the reasons to marry DDoS & WAF (web application firewall) together, beyond a single pane of glass, beyond single vendor and quick technical response, and higher quality detection and mitigation – it makes sound business sense. Today, a good number of companies have developed the understanding that DDoS defense is critical to maintaining an exceptional customer experience (CX). Because of the extremely competitive nature of business these days, we are seeing more companies make the investments into digital transformation and customer experience. According to Gartner, customer experience is the new king.

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