National White Collar Crime Center

DDoS attacks rise in number, thanks to free tools

The Internet Crime Complaint Center on Thursday warned of a growing number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, many of which have been motivated by reasons not related to financial gain.

In a report detailing the latest scams, IC3, a partnership of the FBI and National White Collar Crime Center, said a number of websites, including many belonging to gaming companies, have come under recent attack by hacking groups.

"Open source of intelligence indicates that some of the attacks are supposedly in response to the company itself, while other attacks are in response to group rivalries," the report said, adding that hacking collectives, receiving coverage in the media, have been able to influence widespread participation in DDoS assaults.

The uptick in DDoS, a style of attack that is at least a decade old, is largely attributable to tools such as the open-source Low Orbit Ion Cannon -- a type of voluntary botnet --  or more traditional networks of compromised computers, which can be rented for as little as $10 per hour for up to 50,000 nodes, experts said.

"[DDoS has] been around forever, but it's way more accessible now," Eric Hemmendinger, senior product manager for managed security services at Tata Communications, told SCMagazineUS.com on Thursday. "All that translates in internet terms to that you don't have to be a rocket scientist  to do this anymore. For short money, you can get command-and-control for an hour of a very large number of nodes to inflict an attack on the target of your choice."

He said many organizations and their hosting providers lack the means to detect and ward off particularly vicious DDoS attacks, ones that could measure multiple gigabits per second.

"Once the attack starts, if you're concerned with what you can do in the [first] 12 to 24 hours, you're pretty much limited to the resources you have on hand or your service provider has on hand," Hemmendinger said. "What it comes down to is if you perceive yourself as potentially being a target, then waiting to become a target is not a smart strategy."

IC3 cited a number of complaints it received. In one case, an e-commerce company reported absorbing 165 million hits over a three-day period. In another, attackers bombarded a banking website with 8,000 hits per second to its login page, crippling access.

"It's not really for financial gain as opposed to a lot of the other fraud reported through (IC3)," Tim Gallagher, a supervisory special agent, told SCMagazineUS.com. "In general, they're not economically based crimes [and are] usually [done] to get across some sort of message.

FBI Scam Alert: Phony Emails And Bogus Payday Loan Calls

Alerts by the IC3 , a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), simulate new cyber-crime trends and new takes on existing scams. Recent alerts have enclosed warnings about virus-laden Osama Bin Laden spam and a reshipping fraud written to steal your personal data .

The ultimate inform contains a few threats. Here’s a outline of two of them :

Email Promises Huge Winnings and Threatens Arrest by FBI

The IC3 says it’s received a number of complaints about spam email that purports to be from the FBI. Although the e-mail has the look and feel of a conventional Nigerian 419 fraud , it does go the additional mile by inclusive the FBI sign and the record [WHAT'S "the log"? we DON'T KNOW THAT TERM.]of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission ( EFCC) in an endeavor to consult legitimacy and dope fence-sitters.

The e-mail instructs recipients to meeting the EFCC in Lagos, Nigeria, to get hold of “clearance documents” and asks the target to supply their full name, residence and telephone/cell number. Recipients are moreover told to send $250 for arising the fraudulent authorization document, after that they mount to gather a self-existent $1.5 million.

The e-mail moreover attempts to bully recipients in to replying by melancholy a revisit from sovereign agents, claiming FBI Director Robert Mueller “will have an representative advance revisit you at home for questioning” if they flop to meeting the EFCC immediately.

The fraud concludes by ratcheting up the pressure on victims, saying that “failure to supply the on top of necessity in the next 24 hours, authorised action will be taken right away by impediment and detaining you.”

The artificial e-mail was signed, “Faithfully Yours, Robert S. Mueller III, FBI Director,” and it cc’s assorted agencies inclusive the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. District and Circuit Courts.

The IC3 warns consumers that amicable engineering techniques that take advantage of authorized supervision agencies help fraudsters intimidate, impress, and remonstrate recipients the emails are on top of board.

Several Public Service Announcements ( PSA) have been posted on the www.fbi.gov , www.lookstoogoodtobetrue.com , and www.ic3.gov websites connected to these variety of schemes.

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