In the Line of Fire-the Morphology of Cyber Attacks

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

Bob Simpson
Vice President
BobS@Radware.com

April 2013

Radware Confidential Jan 2012

AGENDA
Radware’s Twitter Handle: @radware
Hashtag for this presentation - #Radware

AGENDA
Availability-based threats

Attacks on the US banks

Other popular attack patterns & trends

Attacker’s Change in Motivation & Techniques

LulzSec
Sony, CIA, FBI
Mar 2011
Vandalism and Publicity Financially Motivated “Hacktivism” Dec 2010 Netbot
Blending Motives Operation DDoS
Payback

Attack
Risk 2010
Peru,
IMDDOS
Chile
Kracken (Botnet) “Blend”
Mar 2011
Srizbi (Botnet) Codero DDoS /
(Botnet) 2009 Twitter
Rustock 2007
DDoS (Botnet)
2007 July 2009
Storm Cyber Attacks
(Botnet) Mar 2011
CodeRed US & Korea Operation
2001 2007
Payback II
“Worms” Blaster
2003 Google / Twitter
Nimda
Estonia’s Web Sites Attacks2009
(Installed Trojan)
Agobot DoS
2001
Slammer (DoS Botnet) 2007 Mar 2011 DDoS
(Attacking SQL sites) Wordpress.com
2003
Republican
website DoS
2004 Georgia Web sites
DoS 2008

2001 2005 2010 Time
© 2011, Radware, Ltd. 4

The Security Trinity

Security Confidentiality,
a mainstream adaptation of the
“need to know” principle of the
military ethic, restricts the
Security Integrity
access of information to those
in its broadest meaning refers
systems, processes and
to the trustworthiness of
recipients from which the
information over its entire
Integrity
content was intended Confidentiality
to be
life cycle.
exposed.

Security Availability
is a characteristic that distinguishes information objects
that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from
Availability
those that do not, either because such functions have
ceased (outage, an attack), or else because they lack such
functions .

Availability Based Attacks

Availability-
based Threats

Network Floods Application Single-packet
Low-and-Slow
(Volumetric) Floods DoS

Slide 6

2012 Attack Motivation - ERT Survey

Radware Confidential Jan 2012 Slide 7

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 Egyption born US resident
created an anti Islam 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
Septembetr18th 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 operations goal is to have “Youtube” remove the anti-muslim film from it‟s
site. Until today the video has not been removed.


The Attack
Vectors and Tactics!

Slide 21

“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.


Booters

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.

Slide 24

“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.
• Customer 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
Parameter Value Port 53 Value Port 80

Packet size 1358 Bytes Unknown
Value in Garbage ‘A’ (0x41) characters “/http1”
repeated (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”

-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.

*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 IP‟s”

Worldwide!


AGENDA
2012 Availability-based threats

Attacks on the us banks

Others 2012 popular attack patterns & trends

Availability-based Threats Tree

Availability-
based Threats

Low-and-Slow

ICMP Web
Flood DNS SMTP
Flood

UPD
Flood HTTPS

SYN
Flood


Asymmetric Attacks


HTTP Reflection Attack

Attacker

Website A Website B
(Victim)

HTTP
GET

Slide

HTTP Reflection Attack Example

iframe, width=1, height=1

search.php

Slide

HTTPS – SSL Re Negotiation Attack

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

Availability-
based Threats

Low-and-Slow

ICMP Web
Flood DNS SMTP
Flood

UPD
Flood HTTPS

SYN
Flood


Low & Slow

• Slowloris
• Sockstress
• R.U.D.Y.
• Simultaneous Connection Saturation


R.U.D.Y (R-U-Dead-Yet)

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

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

DefensePro
Network & Server attack prevention device

AppWall
Web Application Firewall (WAF)

APSolute Vision
Management and security reporting &
compliance

Slide 48

Thank You
www.radware.com


In the Line of Fire-the Morphology of Cyber Attacks

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