BUZZOLO DOMAIN NAMES - GREAT DOMAINS NAMES FOR YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
Great Domain Names for Your Online Presence from Buzzolo
  • Home
    • Contact Us >
      • Payment Options
      • Escrow
      • Services >
        • All Time Domain Sales
        • Godaddy
        • Make More Money on your Site
        • Word of the day
    • Brandable !
    • Why ?
  • Buy It Now .com
    • .com for Sale
  • Buy It Now TLDs
    • Other TLDs
  • Free Blackberry Unlock Codes
    • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Mobile Handsets >
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Bold 9930
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Bold 9900
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Bold 9790
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Bold 9780
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Bold 9700
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Bold 9000
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Bold 9650 , Tour 9630
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Torch 9860
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Torch 9850
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Torch 9810
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Torch 9800
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Curve 9320 , 9360 , 9380
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Curve 9300
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Curve 8520 , 8500
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Curve 8900
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Storm 9500 , 9530 , 9550
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Pearl 9105
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Pearl 9100
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Curve 8310 , 8310 , 8320
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Pearl flip 8200 , 8220
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Pearl 8100 , 8110 , 8120
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry 6xxx 7xxx: ie, 6230, 7100, 7290
      • Unlocking Instructions for BlackBerry Z10 Z30 Q5 Q10 Q30
    • How to Check if your Blackberry is Locked ,Unlocked or Hard Locked
    • Blackberry MEP Reader
    • Cell phone Unlocking . Illegal or not ?
    • Glossary of Blackberry Terms
    • How to Unlock A Blackberry Phone with OS 6.0, 7.0 or higher
    • Unlock BlackBerry With Zero MEP Code Tries Remaining?
    • Unlocked successfully !!!
  • Blog

HOW HACKERS COULD DECAPITATE THE NET

5/5/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
By Prof Alan Woodward Department of Computing, University of Surrey

A recent threat, purportedly from the hacker group Anonymous, stated boldly that its members would stop the internet on 31 March.

The term "Operation Blackout" was coined and it caused much discussion in all the usual forums.

Those issuing the threat even stated how they would do it. They claimed they could disable the Domain Name Service (known by engineers as the DNS) and that would stop the internet. How so?

The Domain Name Service is what converts the web addresses you type into your browser (such as www.bbc.co.uk) into what the internet actually uses: IP addresses (something like 212.58.244.66).

It is essentially the phone book for the internet. If you could prevent access to the phone book then you would effectively render the web useless.

The DNS ensures that you are sent to the correct site when you enter a web address The theory behind the proposed attack is based on the fact that the Domain Name Service is a tree structure: it starts with 13 servers at the top level and each of those talks to the next level down, which then pass it on to a further level down, and so on.

When a change is made at the top level it is copied out across the net so that when you look up what is effectively your local copy of the phone book, it takes you to the correct place.

If somehow one could prevent some or all of the 13 top level members of the DNS from working, specifically from communicating with others, then this would disrupt the remainder of the tree, and very quickly no-one would be able to use the addresses that we all typically know.

Overwhelmed When the threat was made, it did cause some concern as the would-be hackers correctly identified the locations of the top level systems.

But, that information was relatively easy to come by from the internet itself.

The suggestion was made that the hackers could mount what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the top level of the DNS.

A DDOS attack is one where you simply flood a webserver with so many requests that it can no longer respond to legitimate requests.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the computer security firm Sophos, likens it to "15 fat men trying to fit through a revolving door all at once - nothing moves".

One way the hackers might generate enough traffic is by hijacking others' computers to send the requests.

They could use a virus to turn the machines into "bots" to do their bidding. The innocent owners need never be aware.

A DNS attack caused google.com and other well-known web addresses to divert traffic elsewhere This technique was used to prevent access to Interpol's website on 28 February 2012. Hackers identifying themselves with the Anonymous movement committed the act - apparently as retaliation against recent arrests.

It is just one of many organisations to have fallen victim to the manoeuvre over the years.

"If the attacker has enough bandwidth, almost anything can be taken down," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the anti-malware firm F-Secure told me.

"In 2004, the massive botnet created by the Mydoom worm briefly shut down Google.com."

Amplified assault So the big question is whether it is possible to use a similar process to generate enough traffic to stop the whole internet.

“Start Quote The torrent of data could render significant portions of the web unusable, preventing all of us from accessing the systems we have come to rely upon”

Prof Alan Woodward University of Surrey As ever, the answer is "that depends". Not surprisingly the authorities know which are the particularly critical elements of the DNS and they have plans to protect them.

The 13 top-level systems are actually in different countries, are looked after by different organisations and run on different technologies.

We can be as sure as one can ever be when dealing with the internet, that the top level of DNS can be kept secure.

But there is a potential problem if hackers subvert the way the DNS has been set up to make it part of the attack.

This could be done by a process dubbed "amplification" which exploits two facts:

  • A DNS query returns far more information than was in the request itself.
  • It is relatively easy to falsify the address from which a query was sent.
To carry out the assault the hacker would first identify a target system and then create an army of bots spoofing its IP address.

This botnet would then send a large number of requests to the DNS which would reply, resulting in a much larger amount of data being fired at the target, causing it to be swamped.

Create several such botnets and select several targets and you can cause the DNS to flood the very network it is supposed to be serving.

BH Consulting's information security expert Brian Honan agrees there is a real-world risk.

"It should be noted though that this disruption, if successful, would be localised to segments of the internet vulnerable to these attacks," he told me.

"Unfortunately despite this vulnerability being widely known about for many years a large proportion of DNS servers are still not configured correctly to prevent this type of attack."

Nightmare scenario Recently one network provider suffered what appeared to be just such an attack that employed 140,000 machines from the Domain Name Service.

DNS servers' ability to churn out huge amounts of data can be exploited to bring down large parts of the internet The attack was able to generate such an avalanche of data that it completely overwhelmed the network.

There are relatively simple ways of reconfiguring the machines within the Domain Name Service so that they conduct their searches in an alternative way that doesn't allow this "amplification". But few machines do this.

New technologies are being developed to help make the domain name service more secure. The best known is domain name system security extensions (DNSSEC), which was designed to address threats such as DNS spoofing. Others will doubtless emerge to help with amplification attacks. But, only a fortnight ago a study showed that 40% of the US federal agencies had not yet deployed DNSSEC, despite it being US government policy to do so, which serves as a reminder that even when there are technologies that can address known security issues they are of little help if not widely implemented.

And, consider for a moment what would happen if the DNS network was used to attack itself using such an amplification technique? The resulting torrent of data could render significant portions of the web unusable, preventing all of us from accessing the systems we have come to rely upon in our daily lives.

So to those who say our Domain Name Service is secure and can never be used to disable to internet, I say, never say never.

Alan Woodward is a visiting professor at the University of Surrey's department of computing. He has worked for the UK government and still provides advice on issues including cybersecurity, covert communications and forensic computing

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Author

    Stu Walker

    Archives

    July 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    May 2012

    Categories

    All
    Adsense
    Domain News
    Google
    Internet
    Local
    Movies
    Seo
    Technology
    Tv
    Website

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.