Verisign Q4 2014 DDoS Trends: Public Sector Experiences Largest Increase in DDoS Attacks

• By • DDoS Protection, Security

Verisign just released our Q4 2014 DDoS Trends Report, which provides a unique view into online distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack trends from mitigations on behalf of, and in cooperation with, customers of Verisign DDoS Protection Services, and the security research of iDefense Security Intelligence Services. Many notable observations were made, including a rise in the average size of DDoS attacks against our customers; the most common attack vector continued to be User Datagram Protocol (UDP) amplification attacks leveraging Network Time Protocol (NTP), while Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) also continued to be exploited. Verisign also mitigated more attacks in December than any other month in 2014.

The most notable observation, however, is that public-sector customers experienced the largest increase in attacks, constituting 15 percent of total mitigations in Q4. Verisign believes the steep increase in the number of DDoS attacks levied at the public sector may be attributed to attackers’ increased use of DDoS attacks as tactics for politically motivated activism, or hacktivism, against various international governing organizations, as well as in reaction to various well-publicized events throughout the quarter, including protests in Hong Kong and Ferguson, Missouri. As outlined in iDefense’s 2015 Cyber Threats and Trends blog post, the convergence of online and physical protest movements contributed to the increased use of DDoS as a tactic against organizations, including the public sector, throughout 2014.

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Help Ensure the Availability and Security of Your Enterprise DNS with Verisign Recursive DNS

• By • Recursive DNS, Security

At Verisign, we’ve made the Domain Name System (DNS) our business for more than 17 years. We support the availability of critical Internet infrastructure like .com and .net top-level domains (TLDs) and the A and J Internet Root Servers, and we provide critical Managed DNS services that ensure the availability of externally facing websites to customers around the world.

As we continue to expand our role in Internet security, we are excited to announce the next step in protecting the stability of enterprise DNS ecosystems: Verisign Recursive DNS. This new cloud-based recursive DNS service leverages Verisign’s global, securely managed DNS infrastructure to offer the performance, reliability and security that enterprises demand when securing their internal networks and that communications safely and securely reach their intended destinations.

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Verisign OpenHybrid™: An Essential New Approach to DDoS Protection

• By • DDoS Protection, Security

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a threat to businesses worldwide and the attacks are getting larger and more sophisticated.  The industry’s approach to protecting against DDoS attacks must change, and change fundamentally, to stay ahead of this growing threat.

For too long, the problem has been tackled piecemeal, using isolated devices or services. But protecting against DDoS attacks increasingly requires communication and coordination between many components – from networking equipment, to specialized appliances and cloud-based services.

A shift in security architecture is needed to an open platform where devices and services from different vendors can share and act on information in concert. It must be a hybrid platform, allowing on-premise routers and security appliances to detect and mitigate attacks locally, while automating alerting and switchover to cloud-based services if an attack threatens to swamp the business’ network connection.

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New from Verisign Labs: What’s in your attack surface?

• By • Security
Recently, Verisign Labs researcher Eric Osterweil and Verisign CSO Danny McPherson, along with Lixia Zhang, a professor of computer science at UCLA, received the Best Paper Award at this year’s IEEE Workshop on Secure Network Protocols (NPSec ‘14) for their paper, “The Shape and Size of Threats: Defining a Networked System’s Attack Surface.” Below is a guest post from one of the authors, Eric Osterweil, principal researcher for Verisign Labs, describing the genesis of the research and future plans.

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New from Verisign Labs: Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root

• By • Security

If you are trying to communicate anonymously on the internet using Tor, this paper may be an important read for you. Anonymity and privacy are at the core of what the Tor project promises its users. Short for The Onion Router, Tor provides individuals with a mechanism to communicate anonymously on the internet. As part of its offerings, Tor provides hidden services, specifically anonymous networking between servers that are configured to receive inbound connections only through Tor. In order to route requests to these hidden services, a namespace is used to identify the resolution requests to such services. Tor uses the .onion namespace under a non-delegated (pseudo) top-level-domain. Although the Tor system was designed to prevent .onion requests from leaking into the global DNS resolution process, numerous requests are still observed in the global DNS, causing concern about the severity of the leakage and the exposure of sensitive private data.

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Verisign Mitigates 300 Gbps DDoS Attack and Other Q2 2014 DDoS Trends

• By • Security

It has been another busy quarter for the team that works on our DDoS Protection Services here at Verisign. As detailed in the recent release of our Q2 2014 DDoS Trends Report, from April to June of this year, we not only saw a jump in frequency and size of attacks against our customers, we witnessed the largest DDoS attack we’ve ever observed and mitigated – an attack over 300 Gbps against one of our Media and Entertainment customers.

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New from Verisign Labs – Measuring Privacy Disclosures in URL Query Strings

• By • Security
Have you ever gone to socially share or email a URL and found that it was much longer than you had expected? Take the following contrived URL as an example:

http://www.example.com/path/submit.php?user=userabc&pageid=012345&utm_referrer=rss&localtime=+0500

In your personal experience, as in our example, you might have realized that the URL was as much about you, the client, as it was about the web resource you were trying to access. Indeed, internet addresses may contain a wealth of information about the identities and activities of the users visiting them. URLs often utilize query strings (i.e., key-value pairs appended to the URL path; in our example, everything after the question mark) as a means to pass session parameters and form data. While sometimes benign and necessary to render the web page, query strings often contain tracking mechanisms, user names, email addresses and other information that users may not wish to publicly reveal. In isolation this is not particularly problematic, but the growth of web 2.0 platforms such as social networks and micro-blogging means such URLs are increasingly being publicly broadcast.

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The Evolving Threat of Amplification DDoS Attacks

• By • DDoS Protection, Security

If there is one trend in the cybersecurity world over the last 12 to 18 months that cannot be ignored, it is the increasing prevalence and destructive power of amplification-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

An amplification attack is a two-part DDoS attack that generally uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). An attacker first sends a large number of small requests to unsuspecting third-party servers on the internet. The attacker crafts these requests to result in large responses, but they are otherwise normal except that their source addresses are rewritten (spoofed) so they appear to have come from the victim instead of the attacker. When all the third-party servers send their large responses to the victim, the resulting amount of traffic is much more than the attacker could have generated alone. These attacks often overwhelm the resources of the victim, as attacks in the hundreds of gigabits per second (Gbps) are possible using this method.

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Almost Half of Companies Lack DDoS Response Plans

• By • DDoS Protection, Security

It’s tempting to see the threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) as noise in the background of cybersecurity discussions, but don’t be fooled. Any risk to your critical web infrastructure can have a severe impact to your business, and given that the frequency, scale and sophistication of these types of attacks are increasing, the threat is very real.

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