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

In the Line of Fire – the Morphology of Cyber-Attacks
Dennis Usle
Security Solutions
Architect
DennisU@Radware.com

AGENDA
Availability-based threats
Attacks on the US banks
Other popular attack patterns & trends

2001 20102005
Attack
Risk
Time
© 2011, Radware, Ltd.
Blaster
2003
CodeRed
2001
Nimda
(Installed Trojan)
2001
Slammer
(Attacking SQL sites)
2003
Vandalism and Publicity
Storm
(Botnet)
2007
Agobot
(DoS Botnet)
Srizbi
(Botnet)
2007Rustock
(Botnet)
2007
Kracken
(Botnet)
2009
2010
IMDDOS
(Botnet)
Financially Motivated
Mar 2011 DDoS
Wordpress.com
Blending Motives
Mar 2011
Codero DDoS /
Twitter
Google / Twitter
Attacks2009
Republican
website DoS
2004
Estonia’s Web Sites
DoS
2007
Georgia Web sites
DoS 2008
July 2009
Cyber Attacks
US & Korea
Dec 2010
Operation
Payback
Mar 2011
Netbot
DDoS
Mar 2011
Operation
Payback II
“Hacktivism”
LulzSec
Sony, 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 Integrity
in its broadest meaning refers
to the trustworthiness of
information over its entire
life cycle.
Security Availability
is 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
Slide 5
Availability-
based Threats
Network Floods
(Volumetric)
Application
Floods
Low-and-Slow
Single-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)

AGENDA
2012 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!
Slide 20

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
Slide 23
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
Slide 25
Parameter Value Port 53 Value Port 80
Packet size 1358 Bytes Unknown
Value in Garbage ‘A’ (0x41) characters
repeated
“/http1”
(x2fx68x74x74x70x
31) - 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
Slide 29
-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.
Slide 31
*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
Slide 36
Worldwide!

AGENDA
2012 Availability-based threats
Attacks on the us banks
Others 2012 popular attack patterns & trends

Availability-based Threats Tree
Slide 38
Availability-
based Threats
Network Floods
(Volumetric)
Application
Floods
Low-and-Slow
Single-packet
DoS
UPD
Flood
ICMP
Flood
SYN
Flood
Web
Flood
DNS SMTP
HTTPS

Asymmetric Attacks

HTTP Reflection Attack
Slide
Website A Website B
(Victim)
Attacker
HTTP
GET

Slide
iframe, width=1, height=1
search.php
HTTP Reflection Attack Example

HTTPS – SSL Re Negotiation Attack
Slide 42
THC-SSL DoS
THC-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.

Low & Slow
Slide 43
Availability-
based Threats
Network Floods
(Volumetric)
Application
Floods
Low-and-Slow
Single-packet
DoS
UPD
Flood
ICMP
Flood
SYN
Flood
Web
Flood
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)
Slide 45
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.

Slowloris
Slide 46
Slowloris
Slowloris 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).

Radware Security Products Portfolio
Slide 47
AppWall
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
DefensePro
Network & Server attack prevention device
APSolute Vision
Management and security reporting &
compliance

Thank You
www.radware.com

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

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