News overview
This past quarter we observed a new DDoS attack that confirmed our earlier hypothesis regarding attacks through the Memcached protocol. As we surmised, the attackers attempted to use another, rather exotic protocol to amplify DDoS attacks. Experts at Akamai Technologies recently registered an attack on one of their clients that was carried out by spoofing the return IP address through the WS-Discovery multicast protocol. According to other security researchers, cybercriminals started using this method only recently, but have already achieved an attack capacity of up to 350 Gbps. The WSD protocol has limited scope and is not generally intended for connecting machines to the Internet; rather devices use it to automatically discover each other on LANs. However, it is fairly common for WSD to be used not entirely for its intended purpose in a variety of equipment — from IP cameras to network printers (about 630,000 such devices are currently hooked up to the Internet). Given the recent rise in the number of WSD-based attacks, owners of such devices are advised to block on the server UDP port 3702, which is used by this protocol, and to take a number of additional steps to protect their routers.
Another new tool in the hands of DDoSers was detected by our colleagues at Trend Micro in the shape of a new payload distributed through a backdoor in the data search and analytics tool Elasticsearch. The malware is dangerous because it employs a ..
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