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In terms of news about DDoS attacks, the last quarter of was livelier than the previous one. Some major botnets were discovered and destroyed.
In late October, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team CERT issued a warning about a massive botnet being assembled by a hacker group using the Reaper and IoTroop malware; earlier that same month, the spread of Sockbot through infected Google Play apps was detected and terminated. Besides the various battles with Trojan-infested botnets, the last three months of were dominated by three main DDoS trends: Politically motivated DDoS attacks remain eye-catching, but fairly ineffective.
The attack was a nuisance, but nothing more, and the results of the elections were duly announced on time. Another DDoS-based political protest was aimed at the Spanish government in connection with the Catalan question. But politics is politics, and business is, well, just that. Still punch-drunk from the November attack, Bitfinex was paralyzed by two more onslaughts in early December.
On the topic of total failure, it would be amiss not to mention the shutdown of four shadow markets in the deep web used for all kinds of illegal trade: They have been operating erratically ever since October. Q4 saw a whole host of charges and sentences handed down in DDoS-related cases.
The US judicial system was the most active: In Britain, the high-profile case of young hacker Alex Bessell from Liverpool went to trial. Bessell was recently jailed for having launched a series of major cyber attacks in the period against such giants as Skype, Google, and Pokemon.
A curious incident concerned year-old John Gammell of Minnesota, who was charged with hiring three hacking services to create problems for his former employers, the websites of the judicial system of the district where he lived, and several other companies where he was once a contractor.
As the investigators reported, the hacking services dealt with Gammel very professionally and cordially, thanking him for procuring their services and even upgrading his membership.
For instance, in December we logged a huge number of requests to non-existent 2nd and 3rd level domains, which created an abnormal load on DNS servers in the RU zone. A modification of the Lethic Trojan turned out to be the culprit. This long-known malware comes in many different flavors, its main task being to allow spam traffic to pass through infected devices, basically like a proxy server.
The version we discovered was unlike most modifications in that it operates in multiple threads to create a huge number of requests to non-existent domains. Our experts have assisted clients in many such instances. Kaspersky Lab has extensive experience of combating cyber threats, including DDoS attacks of various complexity types and ranges. Company experts track the actions of botnets by using the DDoS Intelligence system.
In the context of this report, it is assumed that an incident is a separate single DDoS-attack if the interval between botnet activity periods does not exceed 24 hours. For example, if the same web resource was attacked by the same botnet with an interval of 24 hours or more, then this incident is considered as two attacks. Also, bot requests originating from different botnets but directed at one resource count as separate attacks. The number of unique targets of DDoS attacks in this report is counted by the number of unique IP addresses in the quarterly statistics.
DDoS Intelligence statistics are limited only to those botnets detected and analyzed by Kaspersky Lab. It should also be noted that botnets are just one of the tools for performing DDoS attacks; thus, the data presented in this report do not cover every single DDoS attack that occurred during the specified period. In Q4 , DDoS attacks affected 84 countries, which represents a slight improvement over the previous quarter, when 98 countries were hit.
The figures for the US and South Korea, which retained second and third place, went up slightly to Fourth place went to Britain 2. The percentage of attacks directed against targets in the top ten countries grew in the last quarter but not by much to almost The landscape is much the same as before.
About half of all targets are still in China Vietnam again ousted Hong Kong from the top ten, taking ninth place with a 1. Feverish cybercriminal activity was clearly observed around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, dying down by the second third of December. The most significant peaks occurred on November 24 and 29, when the number of individual IPs storming our resources doubled.
Such fluctuations point to attempts by cybercriminals to boost their botnets in the run-up to major sales. Pre-holiday periods are incubators of cybercriminal growth for two reasons: These attacks still rank first, however. The percentage of ICMP attacks 3. Distribution of DDoS attacks by type, Q4 The frequency of multi-method attacks rose accordingly. This may be due to the fact that HTTP S attacks are quite expensive and complex, while in a mixed attack they can be used by cybercriminals to increase the overall effectiveness without additional costs.
The longest attack in Q4 was significantly shorter than its Q3 counterpart: Overall, the share of longish attacks continues to decline, albeit insignificantly. This also applies to attacks lasting hours and hours the shares of these categories are so small that even a change of 0. The most common are still micro-attacks, lasting no more than four hours: Also up was the proportion of attacks lasting hours, but again not by much — about 1. This is at least partially due to the termination of many Nitol botnet admin servers and the less active Xor botnet.
The steady increase in the number of Linux-based botnets continued this quarter: Accordingly, the share of Windows-based botnets fell from Correlation between Windows- and Linux-based botnet attacks, Q4 Q4 represented something of a lull: The final three months of were even calmer than the first three.
Perhaps the economic climate or tougher law enforcement has made it harder to maintain large botnets, causing their operators to switch tactics and start combining components from a range of botnets. At the same time, the increase in the number of attacks on honeypot traps in the runup to holiday sales indicates that cybercriminals are keen to expand their botnets at the most opportune moment, looking to grab a slice of the pie by pressuring owners of online resources and preventing them from making a profit.
Such fervor on the part of cybercriminals is not surprising given the explosive growth in the price of Bitcoin and Monero. Barring a collapse in the exchange rate short-term fluctuations that only encourage speculators do not count , these exchanges are set to remain a prime target throughout Clearly, the Internet is now so saturated with digital noise that an arbitrary resource can be hit by botnet activity without being the target of the attack or representing any value whatsoever to the attackers.
DDoS attacks in Q1 Your email address will not be published. Notify me when new comments are added. News overview In terms of news about DDoS attacks, the last quarter of was livelier than the previous one. Statistics for botnet-assisted DDoS attacks Methodology Kaspersky Lab has extensive experience of combating cyber threats, including DDoS attacks of various complexity types and ranges.
However, as in the previous quarter, the overwhelming majority of attacks occurred in the top ten countries in the list More than half of all attacks in Q4 In terms of both number of attacks and number of targets, South Korea, China, and the US remain out in front. The longest DDoS attack of Q4 lasted hours just over six days.
The days before and after Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw increased activity on dummy Linux servers honeypot traps , which lasted right up until the beginning of December. In Q4 , the share of Linux botnets climbed slightly to Geography of attacks In Q4 , DDoS attacks affected 84 countries, which represents a slight improvement over the previous quarter, when 98 countries were hit.
Distribution of DDoS attacks by country, Q3 and Q4 The percentage of attacks directed against targets in the top ten countries grew in the last quarter but not by much to almost Correlation between attack types according to Kaspersky DDoS Protection, and The longest attack in Q4 was significantly shorter than its Q3 counterpart: Leave a Reply Cancel Reply Your email address will not be published.