Firms warned to review IT security as WikiLeaks DDoS attacks intensify
1 min read
Amidst reports that several financial web portals have been downed, or had near misses, by the series of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks from WikiLeaks' supporters, firms are being urged to check their security measures.
Web security specialist Imperva's Hacker Intelligence Initiative (HII) says that the tool that initiates the attacks has now been downloaded more than 40,000 times, with most downloads in the US.
Imperva CTO Amichai Schulman comments: "It was originally developed as an open-source network stress-testing tool. However, it was recently tweaked to include a central command-and-control module – and Operation Payback's ability to challenge serious sites is very much coupled to the new version."
Worryingly, he continues: "My speculation is that, due to the substantial increase in downloads, it is highly likely this is no longer just a social movement, but also a technical movement, like a botnet."
And Shulman continues "With the rate of machines engaging in this activity, we are speculating that the hacktivists are now operating using involuntary botnets – infecting unaware victims to involve them in this campaign."
Imperva believes that the hacker group is nowcoordinating botnets with more than 100,000 computers capable of generating 800MGBPS traffic to increase the attack horsepower.
For concerned manufacturers and IT managers, one option is to host your web site on multiple servers, peered on different Internet peering exchanges. Another is implementing route diversity, and using multiple phone exchanges for the broadband connection.
