Beware of attack tool kits from malicious websites: Symantec

The latest threat to internet users from hackers is tool kits from malicious websites that attack computers with software programmes, says global security solutions provider Symantec Corporation . Its global intelligence network has detected 240,000 attack tool kits across 200 countries.

"Attack tool kits are software programmes that infect networked computers when unsuspecting users surf malicious websites created by cyber criminals," Symantec India vice-president Shantanu Ghosh told IANS here, citing a Symantec study.

The ease with which tool kits are accessible has drawn even traditional criminals without expertise into cybercrime, fuelling a self-sustaining, profitable and organised global economy, the study by the US-based company's security technology and response unit pointed out.

"A techie who develops the kit customises the publicly available exploit code and incorporates it into the kit for setting up a malicious website, which attacks computers when viewed," Ghosh explained.

The Symantec global intelligence network, which identifies cyber threats, takes action and prevents impact, detected 240,000 attack tool kits across 200 countries worldwide in a recent survey.

"As cyber attacks have become more profitable, tool kits have become popular with newer versions. These kits are sold on a subscription-based model with updates and support services," Ghosh noted.

Web attack takes Anonymous activists offline

The notorious message board 4Chan has been taken offline by an overwhelming web attack.

Because of the attack, the discussion boards of the site have been hard to reach or offline for almost 24 hours.

The attack might be retaliation for similar attacks that some 4Chan members, as part of the Anonymous group, mounted in support of Wikileaks.

It is not yet clear who is carrying out the attacks and no-one has come forward to claim responsibility.

News about the large-scale web attack, known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, came to light via a message posted on Twitter by Moot, the founder of 4Chan.

He wrote: "Site is down due to DDoS. We now join the ranks of Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, et al - an exclusive club!"

A DDoS attack involves bombarding a server behind a website with data in an attempt to knock it offline.

Many members of 4Chan work together in the guise of a group called Anonymous to carry out attacks on websites they deem to be enemies of freedom of speech.

Most recently, Anonymous members took action in support of whistle-blowing site Wikileaks. Anonymous used a DDoS tool to hit the corporate websites of Mastercard, Visa and Paypal because the firms had cut off payment connections to Wikileaks.

Paul Mutton, a security analyst at site watching firm Netcraft, said the attack on 4Chan was ongoing.

"For most of the past 24 hours, the site has either been very slow to respond or has been completely unreachable," he said.

Statistics gathered by Netcraft show 4Chan was hit hard early on Wednesday but that it recovered towards the afternoon.

A blog showing the status of the various elements of 4Chan suggests the image boards, the most heavily used part of the site, have been down for hours.

Early reports suggested that a hacktivist known as the Jester was behind the attack. Before now, some members of Anonymous said they would target the Jester with DDoS attacks after he declared an ambition to knock Wikileaks offline.

However, in a Twitter message, the Jester denied any involvement in the attack.

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Web attacks target human rights sites

Human rights groups and campaigners are being hit hard by huge web attacks launched by those opposed to their views, finds research.Many web-based campaigning groups are being knocked offline for weeks by the attacks, it found.

The researchers expect the tempo of attacks to increase as the tools and techniques become more widespread.It urged human rights groups and independent media groups to beef up their defences to avoid falling victim.

Flash flood
The research by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University tried to get a sense of how often human rights groups and independent media organisations are hit by what is known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

DDoS attacks try to knock a site offline by overwhelming it with data.

In the 12 months between August 2009 and September 2010 the research found evidence of 140 attacks against more than 280 different sites. The report acknowledged that these were likely to be the most high profile attacks and that many more had probably gone unreported.

"These attacks do seem to be increasingly common," said Ethan Zuckerman, one of the authors of the report.

While some attacks were triggered by specific incidents such as elections, others had no obvious cause, he said.The report cites a sustained DDoS attack on Novaya Gazeta, the website of Russia's most liberal indepedent newspaper.

Deputy executive editor Sergey Sokolov is not certain who attacked his website but suspects government-sponsored Kremlin Youth organisations.The report finds that DDoS is increasingly being used as a political tool and as a form of protest.

Attacks that recruit participants in so-called volunteer DDoS are proving popular. The report gives the example of the organisation 'Help Israel Win' which recently invited individuals to install a software package, dubbed Patriot DDos, on their computers so the machine could be used to launch attacks, on what the authors assume would be Palestinian targets.

The most recent example of a volunteer DDoS comes from Anonymous, a loose-knit group of activisits, who used the method to launch attacks on the websites of firms it perceived to be anti-Wikileaks. DDoS attacks could hit small media groups and campaigners hard because the organisations have such limited resources, said Mr Zuckerman.

"If you are a human rights organisation or independent media organisation you might be using an account you are paying £20 a month for and its very hard at that level of hosting to fend off DDoS," he told the BBC.
The attacks did not have to be prolonged, he said, to cause real problems for small campaigning groups.

"They just have to do it long enough to annoy their ISP and they will kick them off and then they have to find another place to host," said Mr Zuckerman.

Easy tools
The work of some groups only appears on the web, said Mr Zuckerman, so knocking them offline effectively silences the campaigners. It can take a long time for some to find a new host, upload content and re-build a site.

He said: "We see sites that do not come back online for two to three weeks."The report also found that DDoS attacks are often only the most visible element of a much broader attack against a site or group.

"There's a very good chance that if you are experiencing DDoS you are being filtered, sent targeted e-mail to get access to your system or to snatch your passwords," he said.Mr Zuckerman said some DDoS attacks logged in the report used hundreds or thousands of PCs in a botnet - networks of hijacked home computers - but others had just as big an effect with far fewer resources.

"There are certain attacks that seem to work if you have only one or two machines," he said.What might cause problems in the future, he suggested, would be easy-to-use tools like those employed by Anonymous activists in support of Wikileaks.

"It seems like DDoS has become easier for more people to engage in," he said. "The threats do seem to be increasing."In response, he said, rights groups needed to work hard to understand the threats and prepare in case they were hit.

"This community needs to get much, much smarter and much more knowledgeable," he said.

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Web Attacks Test Firms'(PayPal's) Internet Defenses

The computer attacks against Visa Inc., PayPal and other companies that cut off ties with WikiLeaks are testing businesses' digital preparedness for what has become a high-stakes cyber war.
Moments after a manifesto saying "PayPal is the enemy" surfaced Sunday on blogs, PayPal's chief information security officer, Michael Barrett, moved his team "into red alert status," including at the company's operations nerve center in San Jose, Calif.
What ensued was a week-long chess game between hackers and PayPal engineers in some nine locations around the world. The attackers tried to flood PayPal.com and other sites with a surge of Internet traffic meant to overwhelm their server systems and make their websites inaccessible.
"A good chess player will typically go several half-moves ahead," Mr. Barrett said in an interview Friday. "We have counter-measures and counter-counter-measures," he said, such as shifting server resources from one part of the site to another. Amid the assault, PayPal's site has occasionally slowed down, but hasn't crashed.
By contrast, MasterCard Inc. and Visa both suffered website outages on Wednesday. The companies don't conduct business on those sites, which act as electronic brochures. Both firms said sensitive customer information and transaction processing networks were unaffected.
The attacks by a loose-knit collective known as "Anonymous" weren't a good measure of what the world's hackers can mete out on corporate sites. The attacks appear to be classic distributed denial of service (DDOS) assaults of a type that have plagued sites since almost the first days of the Web. The attacks were relatively unsophisticated.
Yet the fact that financial companies like MasterCard and Visa have left part of their operations vulnerable raises questions of whether businesses are using every tool available to them to gird for attacks from a more-sophisticated cyber army.
The cyber attacks were ongoing Friday. A prosecutors office in the Netherlands said its website had been disrupted by a denial-of-service attack, Reuters reported, a day after a teenager suspected of involvement in the attacks was arrested in the country.
On Friday, some "Anonymous" members put out an announcement saying they were shifting their strategies from attacking websites to flooding news sites and forums with interesting bits from the exposed WikiLeaks documents.
"We do not want to steal your personal information or credit card numbers. We also do not seek to attack critical infrastructure of companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon," they wrote in a statement posted online. "Our current goal is to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair WikiLeaks' ability to function."
U.S. authorities say there are multiple probes into various aspects of the WikiLeaks case, including people responsible for leaking the documents and the recent Internet-based attacks, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Justice Department has used a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., which has jurisdiction over criminal cases involving the Pentagon, to conduct aspects of the investigations, according to people familiar with matter. It couldn't be learned what aspects of the investigation have been presented to the grand jury or whether prosecutors are moving close to making arrests.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has investigators embedded in several police agencies around the world that are probing the cyber attacks, officials said. The FBI's role generally consists of providing Internet service provider information and other data from companies attacked. FBI investigators provided assistance in Wednesday's arrest of the Dutch teenager, the officials said.
"It is a scary reality of putting your business online that it is relatively cheap and relatively easy to mount a major attack from around the world," said Shawn White, the senior director of external operations at mobile and Internet performance monitoring firm Keynote Systems Inc.
The Web industry offers an arsenal of weapons against denial-of-service attacks, often selling them as services to corporations that can't afford to set up those technologies in-house.
Such services are often used to market the "cloud computing" industry, which urges corporations to move many of their computing tasks online to services that distribute the load across many servers, often in multiple locations.
Denial-of-service attacks are "the kind of thing that will never go away," says Rich Mogull, an analyst at research and consulting firm Securosis. But the more bandwidth a business has the less likely an attack is to succeed. Bringing down a large website like Amazon.com or PayPal isn't easy because such sites are used to dealing with large volumes of traffic.
But any slowdown has the risk to hurt PayPal's business. On Wednesday the graphic design website 99designs.com experienced a 15 to 20 minute outage in PayPal's payment service and had difficulty accepting payments via PayPal for several more hours, says its chief technology officer, Lachlan Donald.
While 99designs also accepts credit card payments, the company plans to add an additional payment option in order to buffer itself against possible future PayPal outages.
In PayPal's network operation center, charts showing total payments processed per minute and total traffic to the site, along with other data, are projected on a large, curved wall in front of around 20 workstations, each holding three to five computer monitors.
After the attacks began Monday, the line graph showing payments processed each minute dipped slightly as PayPal came under siege—signaling the website was slowing—while the neon green bar graph showing traffic to the website spiked, said Mr. Barrett.
PayPal, which is owned by and shares resources with e-commerce giant eBay Inc., was prepared. "We have made more changes in the last week than I can remember ever, simply to ensure the site is as robust as possible," said Mr. Barrett, the chief information security officer. Those include "hotwiring" the defensive layers that might get stressed. For example, the company repurposed server resources that might normally be used to redirect people who type in the company's Web address without the needed "www" at the beginning.
PayPal's information security teams work on a global basis, handing off tasks between places as far apart as Tokyo and Dublin. "We made some changes last night that didn't work as we wanted," said Mr. Barrett. "The team in Chennai was able to fix them," while teams in the U.S. focused on other issues, he said.
On Friday morning, even as the attacks continued, the key charts had returned to their typical levels, signaling that PayPal's defensive layers were successfully deflecting unwanted traffic, said Mr. Barrett, who has been working 18 to 20 hours a day this week.
Both Visa and MasterCard were skittish about saying why the attacks hobbled their sites more than PayPal and Amazon, or what they are doing now to prevent such a disruption from occurring again.
"We're not commenting on technology questions," said a MasterCard spokesman. Visa declined to comment.
Raj Chaudhary, who leads the security and privacy practice at consulting firm Crowe Horwath LLP, said the unknown question about Visa and Mastercard is whether they had plans in place to thwart an attack. Most companies, he added, still have not constructed adequate defenses even after a decade of intermittent disruptions to Internet commerce.
The events of the last week have prompted new requests from clients to put together a new defense. Mr. Chaudhary said, companies want to know, "How can I assure I don't become Visa."

Disclaimer: All information on this news has been compiled from their respective official websites or through public domain sites and leading newspapers. Although, we have taken reasonable efforts to provide you with accurate information, but we assumes no responsibility for the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the Information and would advise you to verify it from the official product provider. We cannot guarantee that the information on this page is 100% correct. If you would like to advertise on our site please contact us