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Zero Day

Ryan Naraine, Emil Protalinski and Dancho Danchev

DDoS applications becoming democratized, tools of protest

By | March 11, 2009, 1:28pm PDT

Summary: In a presentation at SOURCE Boston, Dr. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks stated that DDoS applications are moving from the domain of trained attackers to tools for the average person to voice a political statement. During his presentation, Nazario covered the major political DDoS events from the past 10 years, starting with DDoS attacks focused on [...]

In a presentation at SOURCE Boston, Dr. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks stated that DDoS applications are moving from the domain of trained attackers to tools for the average person to voice a political statement.

During his presentation, Nazario covered the major political DDoS events from the past 10 years, starting with DDoS attacks focused on NATO during the Kosovo campaign through the recent past’s events in Georgia. One can conclude from the presentation that the attacks are either being enacted by non-regular militias and citizen armies that are being motivated by central governments or by grassroots groups protesting a significant geopolitical touchstone, such as the outcome of certain events in the Olympics. The story that was the most surprising to me was the ease of use of the tools used to wage the attacks.

While we may believe that political DDoS attacks are being waged by centrally controlled botnets, the reality is that there is a large amount of end-user complicity. The parties waging the DDoS attack are arming their militias with DDoS applications. Just like in the real world, arming a citizen militia requires easy to use weapons, and over time the weapons are becoming increasingly easy to use. The first political DDoS attacks consisted of message board posts asking individuals to run a Microsoft batch script containing a series of ping commands. The most advanced attacks consist of webapps that fire off AJAX requests against a targeted site and compilers that allow actors to create custom applications for the sole purpose of DDoSing a specific target.

When pressed, Nazario would not comment on the prevalence of such tools amongst domestic political groups, but I think we would be naive to believe that populist DDoS attacks are not occurring in the western world. Like many things, it is only a matter of time until it becomes an issue in the United States.

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Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000.

Disclosure

Adam O'Donnell

Adam J. O’Donnell currently works for Cloudmark, a messaging security company whose clients include the majority of the Tier 1 customer-facing service providers as well as mobile carriers and social networks. He serves on the advisory committee for the SOURCE Security Conference, as well as several conference technical program committees. Many of his close friends work in the security industry, and he will disclose those relationships as he deems it necessary.

Biography

Adam O'Donnell

Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco.

Adam early on mastered the art of writing in complete sentences, using both hands and one foot. Later, he learned to do so with each individually. After fourteen years of apprenticeship in the mist-covered hills of central Nepal, Dr. O'Donnell emerged an unparalleled digital warrior and in desperate need of a anti-fungal wash.

Approaching both life and enterprise security with the verve of a particular capuchin, he is respected the world over as an observer of all he sees. Adam's dry blade of analysis will sever the hard candy shell surrounding most technical security concepts, and significantly goo-ify the remaining so as to be consumable in small bites with sufficiently large servings of digestive aids. Just what the doctor ordered.

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