...Best Practices for Internal DDoS Attacks Best Practices for Internal DDoS Attacks 2013 Best Practices for DDoS Attack 1 What is a DDoS? A Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS, is an attack which is implemented to take down a server and make it unavailable to legitimate users. This attack can be very costly as it suspends services and causes a break in connection to the internet. The reason this attack is called ‘Distributed’ is because there is a large number of computers that are used to overwhelm the web servers. These computers are called bots or slaves. They are controlled by one computer, which is called the master or handler. The master sends a command to the bots to that will cause an attack. In this case, the master sent a command to flood the web server with fake traffic, which will cause the server to become unreachable. Most of the time, the attack comes from an external source. The attack on the university’s web server originated within the schools network. There was a password sniffer used to capture an Administrator password. The password allowed the attacker to have elevated privileges. This allowed for the bots to be controlled and the attacker to do whatever he or she wanted to do. In this case, the attacker chose to bring down the registration system. Best Practices to Practices to Prevent Internal DDoS There are several measures that can be taken to prevent DDoS. This Guide will focus on steps to prevent these attacks from originating internally...
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...Running head: Best Practice Guide Best Practice Guide for a DDoS Attack WGU – LOT2 Hacking Task 2 Abstract This paper will accompany a PowerPoint presentation about best practices for preventing a DDoS attack. This will be the best practice guide and will be mentioning and elaborating all of the points in the slideshow. Best Practice Guide for a DDoS Attack It is important to have a plan in place when dealing with a DDoS attack. This guide will serve as the best practice guide for the university. Outlined will be some of the best practices to help prevent a DDoS attack and will be followed by the university. The first thing that the university needs to do is create a response plan and practice the plan over and over. The worst thing that could happen is a DDoS attack starts to occur and nobody knows what to do or what their role is in stopping this attack. A team must be formulated and assignments can be broken down between team members to divide and conquer this attack. It is better to have five different people working on five different tasks or ways to stop the attack instead of five people working on one. The best way to understand the attack is to attack yourself and find the weak spots. Performing a vulnerability assessment on your network will give you a better understanding how your networks functions and where you can find single points of failure. Redundancy is being able to still continue working...
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...a service. Packets are delivered to their destination, and the server at the destination must decide whether to accept and service these packets. While defenses such as firewalls were added to protect the servers from the attacks and threats posed, a key challenge for these defenses was to discriminate legitimate requests for service from malicious access attempts. If it is easier for sources to generate service requests than it is for a server to check the validity of those requests, then it is difficult to protect the server from unauthorized and illegitimate requests that waste the resources of the server. This creates the opportunity for a class of attack known as a denial of service attack [1]. 1.2 DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACKS A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a computer resource such as network bandwidth, CPU time, etc., unavailable to the legitimate users. It disrupts services by limiting the access to the machine or the service instead of subverting the attack. Such attacks are much easier to carry out than remotely gaining administrative access to the target system. Because of this, DoS have become very common on the internet. DoS attacks have different types and the earliest form of this is the flood attack. During a flood attack, the attacker simply...
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...the enforcement of decisions that affect applications and the IT infrastructures that support them. 2. Why is data the most important asset an organization possesses? What other assets in the organization require protection? Without data there will be no record of anything that they have done. 3. Which management groups are responsible for implementing information security to protect the organization’s ability to function? Both General management and IT management. 4. Has the implementation of networking technology created more or less risk for businesses that use information technology? Why? More risk, now that attackers have the potential to access the networks from anywhere. 5. What is information extortion? Describe how such an attack can cause losses, using an example not found in the text. When information is held hostage until demands are met. 7. What measures can individuals take to protect against shoulder surfing? Avoid, if possible, accessing sensitive information whenever others are present. Be aware of your surroundings. 8. How has the perception of the hacker changed over recent years? What is the profile of a hacker today? The perception of a hacker has changed and grown to include male/females from the ages of 12-60. 9. What is the difference between a skilled hacker and an unskilled hacker (other than skill levels)? How does the protection against each differ? A skilled hacker will create their own tools to get their jobs done, while an unskilled hacker...
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...Best Practices Guide for DoS/DDoS Prevention In this document are guidelines that can be implemented in order to prevent future Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the university. No one individual practice, contained in this guide, will act as a perfect form of prevention, but will instead act as an additional layer of security. By combining these practices, the chances of another DoS/DDoS attack succeeding will be greatly diminished. Acceptable Use Policies Acceptable Use policies define the types of actions that are allowed to be performed on systems and the network. These policies also define the actions that are to be taken if the policy is violated. For the university, a policy may be created which states that can only use the computers for functions related to the school. This usage could be limited to homework and research, for example. If the computer is used for anything else, penalties could range from temporary suspension of computer privilege to expulsion, depending on the number and/or severity of the offenses. This policy would have to be made publically available. This could be done in a number of ways, including, but not limited to, posting it in the computer labs, adding the acceptance of it to the login process, and redirecting the user to it if the user attempts to install software or access a prohibited folder. Incident Response Procedures Incident Response procedures define the steps to take if any incident...
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...software download area with software for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Mobile.” The paper under review today is titled “Targeted Cyber Attacks”, written by the site GFI.com and published as an eBook available at Help net Security. Targeted Cyber Attacks is an extensive, 25-page review of cyber attacks in a general sense, exposing the impact, extent of the problem, effectiveness of attacks, solutions and attack avoidance. It explains that the definition of a cyber attack is specifically when a company is attacked electronically for the purposes of gaining access to data or compromising functionality and causing denials of service. The paper starts off with a definition of those who are actually at thread for attack – EVERY organization. The paper’s position is that all organizations are vulnerable, whether they believe it or not, and that there is no target too large or too small that can be attacked. Visibility of the company, perception of the ease of attack, and hiding their vulnerability from the public all have nothing to do with whether or not an attack will take place. GFI explains how the actual extent of the problem is wide-ranged, consisting mainly of opportunistic (non-targeted) attacks such as Trojan horse programs, phishing scams, 419 scams, and mass-scanning for vulnerable services (which can transition to a targeted attack!). One test reported in the paper showed that an unprotected Windows-based system might be compromised by opportunistic...
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...integration with internal and external networks. While providing the simplicity many administrators are losing focus on vulnerabilities the resources are exposed to, which otherwise is not a trade-off for simplicity. In addition to this, the attacks are getting more complex in nature and are also increasing the risk of losing Information Assurance (IA). Protection against the attacks can be done using many security services in cumulative way for IA. These include Availability, integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation. Thus to provide a robust Information Assurance (IA), one has to focus on four primary key elements: people, technology, application and operations. ‘Defense in depth’ is a strategy, which can help achieve IA while keeping the balance between operational cost and procedures, performance and protection capabilities. To protect your assets defense in depth helps to resist or progressively weaken attack. It is like an onion and to reach the inner most part (i.e. asset), one has to pass through layers and hope if one layer fails other layer will surely detect and drop. There are many Tools, Techniques and Methodology (TTM) used by attacker. Hence there is no single procedure/method/strategy for blocking these attacks. For example firewall cannot provide protection if the user in LAN targets another host in the LAN. Hence it calls for ‘defense in depth’ where if one layer fails to detect/deter attacker, another layer will surely be successful in blocking...
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...that they pose. Here are some of the attacks we used as of priority to protect ourselves when looking to see what we would be up against: • DOS/DDOS Attacks • Man In the Middle Attacks / Spoofing • Buffer Overflow • Fragmentation Attacks • Session Hijacking • Social Engineering • SQL Injection / Injection attacks • Eavesdropping • Replay Attacks There are many more attacks possible but these are the attack we focused on. With each threat, we analyzed how these attacks could be used against us and what counter measures would be used to prevent or mitigate such events from happening. DOS/DDOS Attacks- In general, Denial of Service attacks are used to flood an infrastructure with requests to the point where systems cannot keep up with the volume and crash as a result. As a business that relies on bidding and some public access, this can be troublesome as it would crash the website and stop business at critical times. In order to prevent such attacks, a NIDS or Network Intrusion Detection System can and should be implemented to “weed out” false requests from IP addresses that are flooding the system. For further protection the use of a “Honeypot” or trap for hackers can be used to direct any incoming attacks towards a lesser valuable target. Man in the Middle attacks- Man in the middle attacks are exactly what they sound like. The danger in these attacks lay with the hacker who lies between the...
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...An attack against a computer system or network is how PC Magazine defines a cyber-attack. A Cyber-attack can take many forms, for many reasons and can be executed on a small or large scale. Most cyber-attacks are criminal in nature. These cybercrimes are usually motivated by profit. Recent examples include the cyber-attacks on Visa/MasterCard and attacks on Google’s network by China. The cyber-attacks on Visa and MasterCard were part of “operation payback”, and were carried out by various loose nit groups that organized using social networking sites. “Operation payback” was retaliation against Visa and MasterCard for refusing to continue to do business with the website WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks posted leaked classified U.S. diplomatic communications on their website for the world to see. The United States felt this was a criminal act and pressured Visa and MasterCard to stop processing transactions for WikiLeaks. In response hackers launch “operation payback” which used distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to crash Visa and MasterCard Servers. Google recently exited the Chinese market. According to the New York Times, “Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyber-attacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attacks were directed at some 34 companies or entities, most of them in Silicon Valley, California, according to people with knowledge of...
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...user. This may have been one possible highway that was used by the attackers to gain access to and delete data from the customer website. Open Ports & Services – By default, many server type operating systems leave a large quantity of ports open. This allows greater configurability and compatibility for software and server based services. However, leaving these default ports and a multitude of default services in operation, increase the attack surface and overall vulnerability of the server. These vulnerable ports allow for attacks such as ‘Denial of Service’, and this may have been factor in the latency and slowdown experienced by employees and customers alike. Missed Patches – Every day new attack vectors are discovered, and operating system and software vulnerabilities are identified. Many server type operating systems come with a robust security suite, however these security measures fail to identify new threats if patches are not being kept up to date and installed on a regular interval. By missing updates, hackers utilize the new attacks against the server. Backdoor Access – Often installed alongside a rootkit or Trojan, backdoor’s leave a permanent route of ingress unknown to the end-user. This access allows the hacker to gain access to the system and remote...
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...qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwer...
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...Potential Malicious Attacks, Threats and Vulnerabilities Joseph Escueta Strayer University CIS 333 Dr. Emmanuel Nyeanchi January 30, 2014 Abstract The world of any organization lays a network structure that controls all the operations of the company. Every company has its own sensitive information about their success and why they such a good reputation. Because of the growing technology various enchantments have been develop to make sure that its investments are secured and locked hidden in its networks. However network attacks have been around for decades and each new security can be breach. This is one of the major causes of any company to lose money or its capital after being attack by network attackers. It is proven to be a nuisance for any organization trying to make a living. However, this attacks can be avoided if one should take precautions and to be aware of the network attacks. In this case study I will identify its causes and threats against the network. I will also expose the vulnerabilities that exist in networks today. Identifying Potential Malicious Attacks, threats and Vulnerabilities There are many attacks in the network but the most important purpose is to protect the company’s assets. We are not taking about average hackers who just do it for fun but rather want to cause damage to a company’s reputation. In a network security there are two important categories which is logic attacks and resource attacks. A logic attack usually involves websites...
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...Cyber: The Terrorist New-Battlefield Sparkle Grayson American Military University “American military superiority on the conventional battlefield pushes its adversaries toward unconventional alternatives.” - Carter, Ashton B., John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. The use of terror tactics as a means of coercion, dates back to the 1st and 14th centuries AD. The first documented instance of terrorism that most resembled modern day terrorist tactics is attributed to the Zealots of Judea. This “terrorist” group showed many if not all the characteristics of modern day terrorists; being politically/religiously motivated, the organization of their group, and ultimately their goal, which was to strike fear into not only the current leaders or governing authority but into anyone who they felt agreed with the current state of politics. In short, though, their endeavor was ultimately unsuccessful, “the fact that they are remembered hundreds of years later, demonstrates the deep psychological impact they caused” (terrorism-research, 2013, n.p). Though terrorism is often associated with physical acts of violence, the ever increasing globalization of the world, and the increasing dependency on technology has given way to a new tactic that can be destructive to property, finances, and media. Cyber-terrorism is a new occurrence but is highly effective, and until recently the United States had no formal “cyber-protection” in the private sector...
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...types of information online, Hackers or Cyberterrorists can affect certain things by initiating a cyber attack. But what is a Cyberattack? It is an “attack on computer based systems to sabotage, destroy or to spy on others, through such means as viruses, hacking, denial-of-service attacks.” [Jannson] For example, one method is DDoS, which would make the victim’s machine inaccessible to them. If these Cyberattacks are politically motivated, then the conflict is named Cyberwarfare. It is well known that confidential or personal data of any type in the wrong hands could have catastrophic effects on whoever the victim shall be, whether it be a single person, family, company, corporation or even the government. But what happens in an instance where the government is being targeted by Cyberterrorists or Hacktivists, (a.k.a social activists that hack) are their actions considered Acts of War? There are multiple sides to this argument, both having very strong points and back up the support their main argument. A popular argument is that cyberattacks are no different than any other attack. But this is not entirely true because of the fact that the definition of an Act of War is that it allows countries to retaliate. However, if it was recognised as an Act or War, this give the go ahead for the victim to retaliate however they would like, this gives the an opportunity of an armed attack in defense, which in turn can result in a loss of...
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...Disturbed Denial of Service attack (DDoS attack) in June 2011. DDos attacks occur when multiple computers are exploited to execute and amplify an attack. The attackers bombarded Network Solution servers with packets causing the load on the company’s servers. The attack left the customers unable to access servers, email accounts, hosted websites or DNS servers. As the further impact of attack, the call centers lines of the service provider was jammed by the queries of customers regarding unable to access the servers. The attacks lasted for several hours after which company was able to restore the servers. Information assets affected: The DDoS attacks caused the servers of Nerwork Solution to be overloaded by the requests. Because of which the server responses were very sluggish or no responses at all for the customers. The end customers experienced the outages and could not access the websites, email accounts, DNS servers hosted by Network Solution. Vulnerabilities: The company is in the business of network service providers. The servers of the company are exposed to internet. The internet protocols used in hosting websites, email servers, DNS servers are mostly unauthenticated e.g. HTTP, SMTP etc. It made it easier for the attackers to gain the access to the server through internet and exploit the access to the servers. Threats: Although these attacks did not lead to stealing any information from hosted servers, the goal of these attacks were to create large amount...
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