In the Line of Fire-the Morphology of Cyber Attacks

In the Line of Fire -
The Morphology of
Cyber-Attacks
David Hobbs
Director of Security Solutions
Emergency Response Team
DavidH@Radware.com
April 2013
Radware Confidential Jan 2012

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

Radware ERT Survey
Slide 3Radware Confidential Jan 2012

2012 Attack Motivation - ERT Survey

2012 Target Trend - ERT Survey

Main Bottlenecks During DoS Attacks - ERT Survey

Attacks Campaigns Duration

Attack Duration Requires IT to Develop New Skills
War Room Skills Are Required

Attacks Traverses CDNs (Dynamic Object Attacks)

“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 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.
New York Stock
Exchange

The Attack
Vectors and Tactics!
Slide 18

“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).
*Note: Data is gathered by Radware as well as it‟s partners.

“UDP Garbage Flood”
• Targeted the DNS servers of the organizations, also HTTP.
• Up to 1Gbps volume (Possibly higher).
• 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
Slide 21
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 from the Sep 18th for more than 3 days.

“SYN flood Packet extract”
Slide 25
-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 27
*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.
• Attack time was short (No confirmed timeline)
• Rates are unknown.
• Dynamic Input parameters.
GET Requests parameters

“HTTP flood packet parameters identified”
Slide 31
HTTP Request Samples
GET /financial-literacy/all-about-investing/etvs?2408b
GET /financial-literacy/all-about-investing/bonds?4d094
GET /inside-the-exchange/visiting?aad95
GET /
HTTP Request Samples
DoCoMo/2.0 SH902i (compatible; Y!J-SRD/1.0;
http://help.yahoo.co.jp/help/jp/search/indexing/indexing-27.html)
Googlebot/2.1 ( http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
IE/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR
1.1.4322;)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030505 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)
msnbot-Products/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

“Identified locations of attacking IP‟s”
Slide 32
Worldwide!

“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.

Unconfirmed Vectors of attack
Slide 34

“Unconfirmed attacks”
• The following 2 attack vectors were reported to us by our customers however
we have no data internally to indicate these attacks took place.
• The data was either gathered through intelligence the customer had (IRC chat,
Forums etc..) or something they suspected and reported to Radware but never
provided logs for.
• The 2 other vectors suspected are:
– ICMP Reply Flood.
– Dirt Jumper.

“ICMP Reply flood”
• This attack was gathered through Cisco logs at the customers site.
• We have no statistics on the attack.

“ICMP Reply Flood explained”
• ICMP “Requests” (ICMP Type 8) are sent to the target in order to generate multiple ICMP
“Reply” (ICMP Type 0) packets.
• This can also be from spoofed IP‟s (Sent packets, ICMP Type 8).
• This saturates bandwidth on the servers up/down stream as well as CPU processing to
process the ICMP packets and respond.
• To do a replay flood you just spoof the SRC IP of the ICMP request.

“Dirt Jumper”
• Dirt Jumper is a BOT currently at version 5.
• Dirt jumper is used in various HTTP floods.
• POST, GET and download floods are supported by the latest version of Dirt
Jumper.
• User Agent and Referrer randomization are supported too.

“Dirt Jumper C&C”

Availability-based Threats Tree
Slide 41
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 45
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 46
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 48
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 49
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 50
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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