Security News

U.S. authorities have announced the seizure of 13 internet domains that offered DDoS-for-hire services to other criminal actors. The development comes almost five months after a "Sweep" in December 2022 dismantled 48 similar services for abetting paying users to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against targets of interest.

The U.S. Justice Department announced today the seizure of 13 more domains linked to DDoS-for-hire platforms, also known as 'booter' or 'stressor' services. "As part of an ongoing initiative targeting computer attack 'booter' services, the Justice Department today announced the court-authorized seizure of 13 internet domains associated with these DDoS-for-hire services," the Department of Justice said.

A new reflective Denial-of-Service amplification vulnerability in the Service Location Protocol allows threat actors to launch massive denial-of-service attacks with 2,200X amplification. This flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-29552, was discovered by researchers at BitSight and Curesec, who say that over 2,000 organizations are using devices that expose roughly 54,000 exploitable SLP instances for use in DDoS amplification attacks.

Details have emerged about a high-severity security vulnerability impacting Service Location Protocol that could be weaponized to launch volumetric denial-of-service attacks against targets. "Attackers exploiting this vulnerability could leverage vulnerable instances to launch massive Denial-of-Service amplification attacks with a factor as high as 2200 times, potentially making it one of the largest amplification attacks ever reported," Bitsight and Curesec researchers Pedro Umbelino and Marco Lux said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

Experts say the attacks demonstrate the risk that fairly unsophisticated attacks pose even to well-defended enterprises and that other countries should take notice and prepare. Starting before the annual OpIsrael hacktivist assault on Israeli enterprises from April 6 to 9, Israel experienced recent attacks by Russian entities like Killnet and Anonymous Sudan, a cybersecurity bugbear for Israel this year.

With over one billion websites worldwide, HTTP/HTTPS application-layer attacks have increased by 487% since 2019, with the most significant surge in the second half of 2022, according to NETSCOUT. The dynamic nature of the DDoS threat landscape. "DDoS attacks threaten organizations worldwide and challenge their ability to deliver critical services," said Richard Hummel, threat intelligence lead, NETSCOUT. "With multi-terabit-per-second attacks now commonplace, and bad actors' arsenals continuing to grow in sophistication and complexity, organizations need a strategy that can quickly adapt to the dynamic nature of the DDoS threat landscape."

Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks in the first quarter of 2023 have shifted from relying on compromised IoT devices to leveraging breached Virtual Private Servers. In general, Cloudflare reports steady DDoS activity in the first quarter of the year, with a notable 60% YoY increase in the ransom DDoS attacks, representing 16% of all recorded/reported DDoS attacks.

The pro-Russia hacker group NoName057(16) reportedly claimed it was behind Denial of Service attacks against the Finnish parliament's website on Tuesday, the day the country joined NATO. The country's Technical Research Centre of Finland was also hacked, according to Finnish news site, YLE. NoName057(16) is the same group that took responsibility for a distributed denial of service attack, taking down the website for the country's parliament last August, and who also attacked Ukraine, the U.S., Poland and other European countries. In a new study, Unveiling the New Threat Landscape, NetScout said that the U.S. national security sector experienced a 16,815% increase in DDoS attacks in the second half of 2022, many related to Killnet.

The NCA says all of its fake so-called "Booter" or "Stresser" sites which have so far been accessed by several thousand people-have been created to look like they offer the tools and services that enable cyber criminals to execute these attacks. "However, after users register, rather than being given access to cyber crime tools, their data is collated by investigators," reads an NCA advisory on the program.

Cloudflare research showed a "Massive spike" in application layer DDoS attacks in Q1 2022, while network layer attacks also jumped substantially. The DDoS attacks themselves are getting bigger, says Klaus Darilion, head of operations of the anycast service RcodeZero DNS, because the internet itself is getting bigger and attackers have more bandwidth to play with.