Denial of Service Attacks Targeting U.S. Financial

Institutions

January 2013

Agenda

• What is DDoS• Who’s Behind the Attacks and Why• Timeline of the Attacks• What Do the Attacks Look Like• How are the Attacks Changing• What are Banks Doing About It

Types of DoS Attacks• ICMP Flood (Ping) – AKA Smurf

– Relies on misconfigured network devices that allow packets to be sent to all computer hosts on a particular network via the broadcast address of the network, rather than a specific machine. The network then serves as a smurf amplifier.

• Teardrop Attacks– Older attack that sends mangled IP fragments with overlapping, over-sized payloads to the target machine. This can crash various older operating systems

due to a bug in their TCP/IP fragmentation re-assembly code.• Peer-to-Peer Attacks

– No botnet and the attacker does not have to communicate with the clients it subverts. Instead, the attacker acts as a 'puppet master,' instructing clients of large peer-to-peer file sharing hubs to disconnect from their peer-to-peer network and to connect to the victim’s website instead.

• Permanent Denial of Service – AKA Phlashing– Damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. Unlike the distributed denial-of-service attack, a PDoS attack exploits

security flaws which allow remote administration on the management interfaces of the victim's hardware, usually messing with firmware to render it inoperable.

• Nuke– Old denial-of-service attack against computer networks consisting of fragmented or otherwise invalid ICMP packets sent to the target, achieved by using a

modified ping utility to repeatedly send this corrupt data, thus slowing down the affected computer until it comes to a complete stop.• Distributed

– Multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system.• Reflective

– Sending forged requests of some type to a very large number of computers that will reply to the requests. Using Internet protocol spoofing, the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to (and flood) the target.

• Degradation-of-Service– Compromised computers are directed to launch intermittent and short-lived flooding's of victim websites to slow it down rather than crashing it.

• Unintentional– Unforeseen outages due to unplanned events, such as power failure, hardware/software bugs, or a sites sudden enormous spike in popularity.

• Blind– Attacker must be able to receive traffic from the victim, then the attacker must either subvert the routing fabric or use the attacker's own IP address.

Attacker uses a forged IP addresses, making it extremely difficult for the victim to filter out those packets. The TCP SYN flood attack is an example of a blind attack.

• Level II– Cause a launching of a defense mechanism which blocks the network segment from which the attack originated.

What is a DDoS?

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)Attack

How DDoS Looks Through the Eyes of Your Technology

DDoS Threat is not Temporary…

• Thanks to the increasing availability of custom coded DDoS modules within popular malware and crimeware releases, opportunistic cybercriminals are easily developing managed DDoS for hire, also known as “rent a botnet” services, next to orchestrating largely under-reported DDoS extortion campaigns against financial institutions and online gambling web sites.

Mainstream: Rent a BotNet

The Attacks: The “Who” is Important

• The ancient Chinese warrior Sun Tzu taught his men to "know your enemy" before going into battle. – If "you know your enemy and know yourself," he wrote, "you need not

fear the result of a hundred battles." – But, "If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you

will also suffer a defeat."

• Understand your opponent;– Funding– Techniques– Capabilities

• Weapons• Scale

– Focus/Drivers• Why• When have you “Won”?

Who and Why?

• Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters – Pastebin Post - protest against the “Innocence of

Muslims” trailer that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad. (Available on MetaTube)

“Insult to a prophet is not acceptable especially when it is the Last prophet Muhammad”

– http://pastebin.com/yftgau9w

* DO NOT GO TO THIS SITE WITHOUT ANONOMYZING *

Attackers Country Affiliation• NOT Proven to be State sponsored at this time.• Interesting statement in a recent post says “..continue to insult Muslim saints” may

provide a better understanding of the source. • Likely indicates Shia Muslim origin. Research indicates that the vast majority of Muslims are

Sunni (85%), who vehemently reject the concept of sainthood, while the Shia accept this term. • Previous posts implied all Muslims are offended and participating in these attacks. This new

term indicates only a small geographic region, centered on Iran, may be offended.• Previous guesses at attribution have indicated Iran with no evidence to support those claims.

One could presume that the pastebin posts and the translation are under the control of the originator (as they use it as an official channel), so this is not a mistake.

Shia Muslims believe that an Imam (Islamic leadership position) is sinless by nature, and that his authority is infallible as it comes directly from God. Therefore, Shia Muslims often honor the Imams as saints and perform pilgrimages to their tombs and shrines in the hopes of divine intercession.

Sunni Muslims counter that there is no basis in Islam for a hereditary privileged class of spiritual leaders, and certainly no basis for the veneration or intercession of saints. Sunni Muslims contend that leadership of the community is not a birthright, but a trust that is earned and which may be given or taken away by the people themselves.

Public Reaction

• OMG… What are we going to do?• ….Where’d they go?• OMG… There Back…

Who Has Been Targeted?

Timeline of Attacks Targeting US Financial Institutions (Americans)

September 18, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters claim responsibility for BoA, CITI, and NYSE Hack in retaliation

for the Innocence of Muslim Movie

September 27, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters Attack Wells Fargo

and US Bank

September 19, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters Attack Chase Bank

September 28, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters Attack PNC

October 9 -11, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters Attack CapitalOne,

SunTrust and Regions

December 11-14, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters Announce PHASE 2 targeting U.S. Bancorp, JP Morgan Chase,

Bank of America, PNC, and SunTrust Banks

January 3-6, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters Announce attacks against

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, US Banc, PNC Financial Services Group, BB&T, SunTrust

and Regions

November, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters acquire different infrastructure and enhances tools used

Late October, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters infrastructure taken down

by US Law Enforcement, Carriers, and Private Sector

December 19-20, 2012Muslim Cyber Fighters target BB&T, US

Bank, and PNC

What do the Attacks Look Like?

• Up to 80GBps• The attacks started with HTTP and HTTPS traffic targeting the

institutions public websites • Followed by attacks against the customer login site which

caused a significant spike in the firewall state tables. • Next wave of attacks changed over to DNS server over

loading. • Next the logic and database layers are attacked by performing

many large full site searches.• If more is needed, targeting of the download of large files is

used.

Impact from the Attacks• Local Internet Services around FI Datacenters• Customer Impacts– Nothing/Slow/Down• Retail Online Banking• WWW Site (Login Page?)

– Reduced Website Functionality• Mobile Not Targeted (Yet)• Call Center DDoS• Alternate Communication Channels– Social Media

Wave One Attack GEO Sources

Tools are They Using

• LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon)– Open source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack

application. LOIC was initially developed by Praetox Technologies for the purposes of network load testing, but was later released into the public domain.

• itsoknoproblembro – AKA brobot– Designed and implemented as a general purpose PHP script injected

into a victim’s machine allowing the attacker to upload and execute arbitrary Perl scripts on the target’s machine. It injects an encrypted payload, in order to bypass IPS and Malware gateways into the website main file index.php, allowing the attacker to upload new Perl scripts at any time. Initial server infection is usually done by using the well known Remote File Inclusion (RFI) technique.

Sophistication is Changing

• Initially– Targets Announced– Scheduled and Automated– Same Attack for all FI’s– Finger Printed User Agent String– Invalid Keep Alive (= 0)

• Recent– Attacks target specific likely site weaknesses– Unannounced– Long Lasting / No Schedule– Hashing (masking) Uniquely Identifiable Information

What are Banks Doing About It?• Acquire / Refine Current Mitigation– Cloud Service Providers

• DDoS Mitigation (BlackHole)• DNS Outsourcing• Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s)

– Premise Technology• Firewalls and Intrusion Prevention Systems to Block bad Traffic• Turn off/down non mission critical services (Search, File

Downloading, etc…)• Add more capacity (Internet, Servers, Network)

• Mitigation Testing• Incident Management Exercising• Communication Plans

Final Thought: Remember it’s Mitigation NOT Elimination