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Denial of service attacks over the internet are growing easier and more
powerful. Their perpetrators are more cunning, too
Jun 22nd 2013
TICK tock tick tock , tweeted Anonymous Africa, a group of computer hackers,
on June 14th. Minutes later a website of the African National Congress (ANC),
South Africa s ruling party, went offline: another victim of the oldest and
crudest form of cyber-assault, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Arbor Networks, an American security firm, counts 2,800 each day. Unlike some
forms of internet mischief DDoS attacks generally are not clever or complex.
They consist of floods of nuisance traffic, which slows or crashes the victims
websites, leaving them offline, unable to send e-mail, process orders, make
bank transactions or (for governments) run the country.
Teenage pranksters in the 1990s used DDoS attacks to boot enemies from internet
chat rooms. Youthful mischief still accounts for many. Matthew Prince of
CloudFlare, a networking firm, says attacks spike in the summer holidays.
Politics and religion often fuel them too. The ANC s attackers cited its
support for Zimbabwe s Robert Mugabe. Arab hackers who clobbered American banks
between September and May wanted The Innocence of Muslims , a controversial
video, removed from the web. Iranian military hackers may have helped though
the attacks also resembled those carried out in 2010 against PayPal, Visa and
MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks, a
whistle-blowing group.
Now DDoS is maturing. Extortion is thriving: pay up, or your site stays
offline. Rival businesses may use them during peak sales periods or while
bidding for big contracts. They are useful as part of other crimes, distracting
attention, for example, during the theft in 2011 of more than 100m customer
records from Sony, a media and electronics giant. Mt Gox, the largest exchange
for Bitcoin, a digital currency, said market manipulators used DDoS attacks to
drive down prices in April. In last year s Russian election, attacks hit news
sites and election observers. In 2012 a South Korean politician s aide was
jailed for an attack aimed at stopping opposition voters from finding the right
polling stations.
An underground economy makes ordering such attacks easy. Gwapo is one of
several firms that openly advertises DDoS services on YouTube. It charges $5 an
hour to disable small sites and up to $100 for big ones. Payment is in Bitcoin
or by other anonymous means. A plethora of tiny firms claims to help test
defences, but they rarely check who runs the sites they target.
For the technologically adept, DDoS software is available free. The Low Orbit
Ion Cannon is named after a weapon in Command and Conquer , a video game.
Other tools let sympathisers join in by using their internet browsers. The
attacks are growing more powerful (see chart). In March CloudFlare helped
Spamhaus, a spam-fighting charity, against nuisance traffic which flooded in at
an unprecedented 300 gigabits per second, almost 200 times faster than an
average assault.
As well as roping in collaborators, most attackers use botnets: vast networks
of virus-infected computers that obey secret commands from a faraway
bot-herder . These are getting beefier. A typical botnet in the past comprised
infected single computers, mostly in emerging countries. Now the bot-herders
have learned to commandeer huge corporate or public-sector computers in
America. These have more processing power and better internet connections.
Whereas big attacks once used tens of thousands of zombie computers, this year
s assaults on American banks employed only about 2,500.
Attackers are also getting better at exploiting flaws in the internet s design.
Deep in its architecture are computers known as domain name system (DNS)
servers. These help direct genuine traffic around the network. But they can be
tricked into firing data at their victims. Many thousands of DNS servers helped
batter Spamhaus; geeks think concerted attackers could rope in 20m.
Better-targeted attacks need less muscle to do more damage. Instead of
congesting the connections between the victim and the internet, hackers
increasingly target internal weaknesses on the targeted website. They identify
functions that use a lot of processing power such as search boxes or login
scripts then pummel them until the whole site freezes. These now make up about
a quarter of all large attacks. They are fiddlier to arrange, but hard to
counter, says Dan Holden of Arbor Networks.
The technical means of blocking DDoS attacks are growing. The legal screws are
tightening too. Such attacks have been illegal in Britain since 2006, and for
longer in America (where some culprits face up to 15 years in jail). In May a
judge in London handed down jail terms of 24 to 32 months to three members of
Lulzsec, a short-lived gang which crashed the site of Britain s Serious
Organised Crime Agency in 2011. A month earlier police investigating the
Spamhaus attack arrested Sven Kamphuis, a Dutchman who praised the assault on
Russian television. Supposedly in hiding, he failed to conceal his real-world
whereabouts. A battered orange van, laden with satellite equipment, drew
attention to his flat near Barcelona; so did his name on the letter box.
Hapless cyber-vandals are easier to nab than sophisticated cyber-criminals. But
some free-speech activists think automatic criminalisation of DDoS attacks is
unfair. They liken the tactic to civil protests such as sit-ins. Hackers think
technology actions should be protected like free speech, explains Vanessa
Barnett, a lawyer.
Jay Leiderman, a Californian lawyer, thinks sentences are hysterically unjust
. He defended Christopher Doyon, a hacker better known as Commander X, who
fled to Canada last year while awaiting trial for an 18-minute attack on the
Santa Cruz County website, in protest at rules that outlaw sleeping in parks.
Mr Leiderman wants American laws to tolerate limited and constrained DDoS
campaigns.
Foreign precedents may help. In 2006 a German court overturned the conviction
of a campaigner who attacked the site of the airline Lufthansa because it let
its planes be used to deport asylum-seekers. But in January an American
petition demanding the decriminalisation of DDoS failed to force an official
response. Recent efforts to rewrite America s aged computer-crime law are
bogged down. I worry we ve taught bored teenagers that with ten lines of code
they can scare the internet and make the front page of the New York Times,
says Mr Prince. As denial of service becomes a destructive, sophisticated and
lucrative criminal industry, pranksters can expect less tolerance, not more.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the attack on
Spamhaus reached 300 gigabytes per second. It should have said 300 gigabits.
Sorry.