Deconstructing hacktivist operations and tools
Imperva released its September Hacker Intelligence report, which details the latest methods deployed by hackers to execute DDoS attacks by analyzing the technical tools and trends employed during multiple attacks.
“Denial of service is a primitive, yet popular attack vector for politically and profit-motivated hackers,” said Tal Be’ery, one of Imperva’s senior web researchers. “DDoS can gridlock enterprise resources to a halt, just like traffic on the highway, but organizations can mitigate these effects by learning how to identify and protect against malicious traffic.”
DDoS attacks deplete enterprise resources by rallying multiple users and botnets to make superfluous requests that overwhelm critical systems. Because DDoS attacks do not seek to breach data integrity or privacy, they can be conducted without the requirement of identifying vulnerabilities to exploit the application.
Report highlights include:
Application DoS overview
Though not new, application DoS does not address the network resources, or the bandwidth to the service, but instead focuses on the web application and the server itself. Application DoS may be directed at specific flavors of web servers such as IIS or Apache) or to specific applications (such as SharePoint) by understanding backend architecture.
Analysis of hacktivist operations
Examining real-word incidents, Imperva discusses how and why hacktivists utilize DDoS to support their goals and promote a message.
Technical Tool Group Review
Imperva research highlights the latest and most popular DDoS tools, including LOIC, SlowHTTPTest and railgun to demonstrate how black-hat hackers conduct attacks by utilizing white-hat testing tools.
Detection and mitigation techniques
Imperva discusses the characteristics at the essence of DDoS attacks and attack-specific characteristics, so that information security professionals can arm themselves with the knowledge required to identify and protect against DDoS attacks.
The complete report is available here.