David Hobbs’ Presentation from his series of presentations during SecureWorld that discusses Availability-based threats; Attacks on U.S. banks and others popular attack patterns & trends.
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In the Line of Fire-the Morphology of Cyber Attacks
1. 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
11. “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?
Slide 11Radware Confidential Jan 2012
12. “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.
Slide 12Radware Confidential Jan 2012
15. “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.
Slide 15Radware Confidential Jan 2012
16. “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.
Slide 16Radware Confidential Jan 2012
17. “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.
Slide 17Radware Confidential Jan 2012
New York Stock
Exchange
19. “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.
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
20. “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.
Slide 20Radware Confidential Jan 2012
21. “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
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
22. “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.
Slide 22Radware Confidential Jan 2012
23. “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.
Slide 23Radware Confidential Jan 2012
24. “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.
Slide 24Radware Confidential Jan 2012
25. “SYN flood Packet extract”
Slide 25
-All sources are spoofed.
-Multiple SYN packets to port 443.
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
26. “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.
Slide 26Radware Confidential Jan 2012
27. “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
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
28. “Mobile LOIC in a web browser”
Slide 28Radware Confidential Jan 2012
29. “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
Slide 29Radware Confidential Jan 2012
30. “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
Slide 30Radware Confidential Jan 2012
31. “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)
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
33. “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.
Slide 33Radware Confidential Jan 2012
35. “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.
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
36. “ICMP Reply flood”
• This attack was gathered through Cisco logs at the customers site.
• We have no statistics on the attack.
Slide 36Radware Confidential Jan 2012
37. “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.
Slide 37Radware Confidential Jan 2012
38. “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.
Slide 38Radware Confidential Jan 2012
41. 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
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
45. 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.
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
46. 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
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
48. 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.
Radware Confidential Jan 2012
49. 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 Confidential Jan 2012
50. Radware Security Products Portfolio
Slide 50
AppWall
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
DefensePro
Network & Server attack prevention device
APSolute Vision
Management and security reporting &
compliance
-This pic is from the very beginning of the video, stating “There is an angry mob in the middle of the street”*Notes - On September 9, 2012, an excerpt of the YouTube video was broadcast on Al-Nas TV, an Egyptian Islamist television station.[11][12]Demonstrations and violent protests against the film broke out on September 11 in Egypt and spread to other Arab and Muslim nations and some western countries.
-Libyan riots top left - http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/14/why_the_embassy_riots_wont_stop.-Lebonon riots bottom left - http://au.ibtimes.com/articles_slideshows/384606/20120915/lebanon-protesters-destroy-kentucky-fried-chicken-and-hardees-over-innocence-of-muslims-film-photos.htm
Links about Izz as-Din al-Quassam The preacher - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izz_ad-Din_al-Qassam *Notes - The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, State of Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, Hatay Province of Turkey, some regions of northwestern Iraq and theSinai Peninsula.Links about the Cyber hacker group - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/the-grid/who-are-the-izz-ad-din-al-qassam-cyber-fightershttp://www.ehackingnews.com/2012/12/izz-ad-din-al-qassam-cyber-fighters.htmlPic from - http://www.standupamericaus.org/terror-jihad/cyber-fighters-of-izz-al-din-al-qassam-alert-to-banks-in-usa/
Links for translation of ababil - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghods_AbabilThe pic from - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hirundo_abyssinica.jpgClaims of Iranian involvement -http://betabeat.com/2012/09/iran-possibly-behind-operation-ababil-cyber-attacks-against-financial-institutions/http://features.rr.com/article/0coOckreSy1vL?q=Bank+of+America
Data taken from internal doc.
Pic taken from - http://news.yahoo.com/americas-failing-grade-cyber-attack-readiness-153640058--abc-news-topstories.html
-Taken from internal report.
-Taken from internal report.
Reflective attack - Attackers send forged requests of some type to a very large number of computers that will reply to the requests. Using spoofed SRC IP’s of the victim, which means all the replies will go to (and flood) the target.
-Stateful inspection in the DNS area is limited. Was in smartdefense at CP, but how many people use it?-The server is forced to respond with ICMP packets “Destination Unreachable” (ICMP type3 Code 3) for port closed when udp packet arrives.-Returning ICMP type 3 further saturate (Packet size in return will be close to received packet).
-Internal data.
-The SYN flood attack simply sends a high rate of SYN’s with spoofed IP’s and the server is left waiting for the ACK.-This means the attacker needs much fewer hosts to exhaust target machine because no session is actually kept alive on the “Attackers” side.-You exhaust the Backlog of the TCP stack (Linux default is 3mins and Win2k is 45 sec. for half open timeouts, these can be changed). So the server can no longer accept a new connection.-
-Another reported attack technique that was allegedly used during this campaign is a custom version of the Mobile LOIC tool (aka Mobile LOIC - Apache Killer) which is designed to exploit a known vulnerability in Apache servers – corresponding to CVE-2011-3192.-This attack tool targets Apache servers using Apache HTTP server versions 1.3.x, 2.0.x through 2.0.64, and 2.2.x through 2.2.19.
Target URL- Specifies the URL of the attacked target. Must start with http://. Requests per second-Specifies the number of desired requests to be sent per second. Append message-Specifies the content for the “msg” parameter to be sent within the URL of HTTP requests
Resource internal.
-This value is unique since it seems to contain a typo which is caused by placing the “User Agent:” string inside the user agent value itself.Resource internal.
Resource internal.
Resource internal.
Internal resources.
-Taken from Radware internal resources.
The image above shows how the agent controls the Botnet: The „Today‟ and „Online‟ shows the number of computers under its control, the „URLs‟ specify the URLs to be attacked, the „Flows‟ specify the attack vector and attack intensity, and the „Start‟ and „Stop‟ allows the agent to inflict pain and voluntarily stop it.