Components of DDoS attack
Computer security is a protection that safeguards the system, hardware, software and networks from all the malicious attacks. The need of computer security is increasing day by day because cyber-crimes are also increasing. Thus, it is necessary to protect all the information as organisations and enterprises completely rely over network for keeping their information private (Schwartz, 2017). The role of computer security is to maintain confidentiality, availability and integrity of information. The vulnerabilities and attacks are increasing day by day. One such attack that is considered in this report is distributed denial of service. It is an attack that makes the resources and services unavailable from the valid user. DDoS attack is difficult to detect as in this system is fooled from the attacker by sending huge amount of traffic to the victims computer. In this report, one real life example of DDoS that is operation ababil is discussed.
Distributed denial of service is an attack that has penetrated in the real world. It makes many web applications and services unavailable from the user for a time slot. It is caused due to many infected computers on the internet that are under the control of hackers (Alieyan, Kadhum, Anbar, Rehman & Alajmi, 2016). It basically targets servers and do not allow legitimate users to access the information. Theses attacks take place silently as even the owners of computer are not aware that their system is being access by third party (Alieyan, Kadhum, Anbar, Rehman & Alajmi, 2016). This attack is carried by increasing eth traffic over the web or flooding it with many requests in order to degrade the service.
This attack has five major components, the two major components are master computer from which the attack is being initiated and the other is victim server, where attack hits. If only theses components are present the attack is said as denial of service. The presence of other three components in between makes it distributed denial of service. This attack is carried due to the presence of malicious bugs that gets installed in the system.
This attack is very difficult to detect as there is no fixed IP or when through which bugs enter the system. They do not directly communicate with the computers but silently attacks the software.
It is seen that attacks are increasing day by day, it is found that DDoS attack don’t target the victims directly but they target the organisation on which victim is working on. The platform can be cloud provider or ISPs. It is a kind of cyber-attack that makes the resources and service unavailable for the valid user by disrupting the services temporarily or for some indefinite time. This is made possible by flooding the network of target machine by overloading the server. This makes the resources superfluous of requests with the only motive of not allow valid user access the information.
As seen in the above picture, that victims website is been attacked by zombies knowingly. They flood the traffic to the victim’s servers so that for a time period server goes down. The role of attacker is to simply increase the traffic so that valid users are not able to perform their usual operations (Yu, 2014)
Impact of DDoS attack
The usual steps that are taken by hackers are shown in the above figure. The first step that is carried by attackers is sending commands at the victim’s server so that it can cause a small botnet (Sridaran & Kilari, 2016). Botnet is a machine that is used to spoof the IP address of the actual user by sending UPnP packets that are said as a discovery packets used to open the devices. Thus, victim computers are not aware about such network so that allow botnet packets t hit the system and access the system. These botnet directly access the victim’s computer by increasing the traffic on the site (Yu, 2014). This does not allow valid user to access the information.
Once this botnet has been set up successful, the attacker gets the right to have direct communication with the machine so that they send all the false instructions (McGregor, Charters, Holliday & Roesner, 2015). The IP address is targeted by the botnet which cause the server to overflow from its actual capacity. The overflowing of the capacity results in increasing the traffic which in turn causes distributed denial of service (Sridaran & Kilari, 2016). It is very difficult to identify as each bot is a real device that separates the attacker traffic from normal traffic can be difficult. The goal of this attack is to create traffic or congestion by making all bandwidth available between target and internet (Kau & Kaur, 2015).
Distributed denial of service attack is very dangerous and it increased in these recent years. The attack that is discussed over is operation ababil that targeted many banks in America with the motive of disallowing valid users to access the information. The real world example of Distributed denial of service was operation ababil that occurred in the tear 2012 and 2013 (McGregor, Charters, Holliday & Roesner, 2015). It generally impacted the nation and state cyber-attacks by making at least 26 victims. In this attack mostly the loss was face by banks of U.S., as they were hit with it.
- This attack was given a name that is “Operation ababil” and it occurred in December 2012 and January 2013 (Mallikarjunan, Muthupriya & Shalinie, 2016). It was a series of cyber-attack that hit various financial institutes of America. The name of this attack came from Izz as-Din al-Qassam, he was a muslin preacher that once fight against British people (Gillman, Lin, Maggs & Sitaraman, 2015).
- The outcome of this incident was very negative as this attack affected the retaliation on U.S. sanctions on Iran. This attack was majorly on the bank of America, capital one, chase, Citibank, ONC bank and many others. These banks went completely offline after this attack (Gillman, Lin, Maggs & Sitaraman, 2015). This attack disturbed the operations of many banks for approximately six months. The online security of banks was also affected as this attack tried to capture encryption keys and tries to breach the security by reading or accessing the confidential data (Stavrou, Fleck & Kolias, 2016). The result of this attack was that online servers of banks were flooded with traffic and the legitimate and valid users were not able to access the information.
- The impact of this attack caused security breach and also lost the customers trust. Due to this attack the working condition of many financial institutes were affected and many government authorities were dismissed for having poor security protections.
- The aim of security is to maintain availability, confidentiality and integrity. Confidentiality assures that all the information remains private and is accessed only by valid user. Integrity assures that data is received and delivered to authenticated user and availability states that services and information will remain available all the time to valid user (Stavrou, Fleck & Kolias, 2016). In this attack, availability was breached as attackers flood the network which do not allow valid user to access step information. It is just a way of blocking the access of valid user, thus the goal of DDoS defence is to maintain availability (Dev, 2015).
- The attack can be mitigated by protected your assets from all the malicious attacks this can be done by monitoring the internet 24/7 and blocking the sites through which bugs can penetrate in the system (Geers, Kindlund, Moran & Rachwald, 2014). Apart from, that it is also recommended that firewalls and anti-viruses should be used so that viruses can be detecting. Once the virus is detected it becomes easy to safeguard the network (Schwartz, 2017) .It is also stated that every organisation should have a disaster recovery plan so that security of the website is maintained (Adminhacks, 2017). It is suggested that data should be encrypted so that all the sensitive information remains private and is not leaked to any other organisation.
Conclusion
Computer security is as important term that is used to maintain confidentiality, integrity and availability of all the information. In this report, the attack that is discussed in distributed denial of service that breaches the availability of data. It do not allow valid user to access computer assets and services. This denial of service affect the brand image thus it is necessary to maintain integrity, confidentiality and availability. The second part of the report covers discussion about the attack named as operation ababil that was a DDoS attack. It captured various American banks and breached security.
References
Adminhacks. (2017). How Does a DDOS Attack Happen?. Retrieved from https://adminhacks.com/ddos-attacks.html.
Alieyan, K., Kadhum, M. M., Anbar, M., Rehman, S. U., & Alajmi, N. K. (2016, October). An overview of DDoS attacks based on DNS. In Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC), 2016 International Conference on (pp. 276-280). IEEE.
Dev, P. R. (2015). Use of Force and Armed Attack Thresholds in Cyber Conflict: The Looming Definitional Gaps and the Growing Need for Formal UN Response. Tex. Int’l LJ, 50, 381.
Geers, K., Kindlund, D., Moran, N., & Rachwald, R. (2014). World War C: Understanding nation-state motives behind today’s advanced cyber attacks. FireEye, Milpitas, CA, USA, Tech. Rep., Sep.
Gillman, D., Lin, Y., Maggs, B., & Sitaraman, R. K. (2015). Protecting websites from attack with secure delivery networks. Computer, 48(4), 26-34.
Kaur, R., & Kaur, R. (2015). AN OVERVIEW OF CLASSIFICATION OF DDOS ATTACKS AND DEFENCE MECHANISMS FOR DDOS ATTACKS. Int J Adv Engg Tech/Vol. VI/Issue II/April-June, 12, 14.
Mallikarjunan, K. N., Muthupriya, K., & Shalinie, S. M. (2016, January). A survey of distributed denial of service attack. In Intelligent Systems and Control (ISCO), 2016 10th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). Ieee.
McGregor, S. E., Charters, P., Holliday, T., & Roesner, F. (2015, August). Investigating the Computer Security Practices and Needs of Journalists. In USENIX Security Symposium(pp. 399-414).
Schwartz. M. (2017). Banks Hit Downtime Milestone In DDoS Attacks. Retrieved from https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-and-breaches/banks-hit-downtime-milestone-in-ddos-attacks/d/d-id/1109390.
Sridaran, R., & Kilari, N. (2016, March). The performance analysis of NS architecture to mitigate DDoS attack in cloud environment. In Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom), 2016 3rd International Conference on (pp. 3460-3463). IEEE.
Stavrou, A., Fleck, D., & Kolias, C. (2016). On the Move: Evading Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks. IEEE Computer, 49(3), 104-107.
Yu, S. (2014). An overview of DDoS attacks. In Distributed Denial of Service Attack and Defense (pp. 1-14). Springer, New York, NY.
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