Government And Private Companies Websites Struggle Against DDoS Attacks
Websites belonging to the federal government, regulatory agencies and private companies have been struggling against sustained online attacks that began on the Independence Day holiday, according to multiple published reports.
At time of writing, most of the targets appeared to be afloat. Nonetheless, several targets have buckled under the DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks, which try to bring down a website by bombarding it with more traffic than it can handle. FTC.gov was experiencing “technical issues” on Monday and Tuesday that prevented many people from reaching the site, spokesman Peter Kaplan said.
Other sites, including FAA.gov, Treas.gov and DOT.gov also experienced outages. DOT spokeswoman Sasha Johnson said late Tuesday: “The DOT has been experiencing network incidents since this past weekend. We are working with the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team at this time.”
Both Kaplan and Johnson declined to say whether their agencies’ sites were under attack.
The DDoS attacks appear to be originating from compromised computers located primarily in the Asia Pacific region and are being delivered as plain-vanilla floods of ping, syn and UDP packets, said the person, who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to share the details.
The attacks came as South Korean websites operated by the government and private companies also were hit, the Associated Press reports. In all, 26 websites, including those run by Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and the Washington Post are being targeted, according to The Washington Post, which also covered the attacks.
There seems to be some confusion about just how powerful the attacks are. The person familiar with the attacks said they were relatively modest.
“Most are easy to mitigate,” the person familiar with them said. “I’m surprised any of these attacks are as effective as they are.”
But an unidentified person briefed by government investigators told IDG News the attacks directed as much as 20 gigabytes to 40 gigabytes of bandwidth per second during their height over the weekend. They have since settled down to about 1.2 gigabytes per second, IDG said.
Credit: The Register
Update (July 09): It seems there is still a DDoS attack against a number of websites, most of them belong to US and South Korea goverment sites. The malware involved in the attack has been detected as Mydoom.HN. This is the list of URLs that is targeting:
www.president.go.kr
www.mnd.go.kr
www.mofat.go.kr
www.assembly.go.kr
www.usfk.mil
blog.naver.com
mail.naver.com
banking.nonghyup.com
ezbank.shinhan.com
ebank.keb.co.kr
www.hannara.or.kr
www.chosun.com
www.auction.co.kr
www.whitehouse.gov
www.faa.gov
www.dhs.gov
www.state.gov
www.voanews.com
www.defenselink.mil
www.nyse.com
www.nasdaq.com
finance.yahoo.com
www.usauctionslive.com
www.usbank.com
www.washingtonpost.com
www.ustreas.gov
whitehouse.gov
faa.gov
evisaforms.state.gov
www.moneyfactory.gov
www.dot.gov
www.ftc.gov
www.nsa.gov
www.usps.gov
www.voa.gov
www.yahoo.com
travel.state.gov
www.nyse.com
www.site-by-site.com
www.marketwatch.com
www.amazon.com
Credit: PandaLabs
More on CyberInsecure:
Posts
Leave a Reply
Comments with unsolicited links to other resources will be marked as spam. DO NOT leave links in comments. Please leave your real email, it wont be published.