DDoS

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Slightly over one year ago, several major distributed denial-of-service (“DDoS”) attacks took place, including a major event affecting the domain name service provider Dyn, which caused outages and slowness for a number of popular sites, including Amazon, Netflix, Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Twitter.

Now, a new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet, called IoT Reaper, or IoTroop, has been discovered by researchers and could present a threat that could dwarf the 2016 attacks and create a major disruption to internet activity around the world.

Late last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) released  Special Publication 800-160 (the “Guidance”) on implementing security in Internet-of-Things (“IoT”) devices.  The Guidance was released following several highly-publicized distributed denial-of-service (“DDoS”) attacks in 2016 and is intended to provide a framework for software engineers to better address security issues and to develop more defensible and survivable systems in a sustainable manner throughout the life cycle of these devices.

The US Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, a nonpartisan group established by President Obama in early 2016, released its final report on December 1, 2016. The report provides an in-depth view of cybersecurity challenges facing the digital economy, and provides a roadmap for addressing those challenges. For some issues, the Commission recommends that the next presidential administration take action within its first 100 days in office. Here are the six “imperatives” discussed in the Commission’s report.

Several significant distributed denial-of-service (“DDoS”) attacks have taken place in the last few weeks, including a major event involving a domain name service provider (Dyn), which caused outages and slowness for many popular sites like Amazon, Netflix, Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Twitter. This significant attack came on the heels of two major DDoS attacks against KrebsonSecurity and France-based hosting provider, OVH, in late September—each of which set records as the largest of these attacks in history. Most recently, nearly 900,000 Deutsche Telekom routers in Germany were attacked, causing significant internet and television outages across the country. While DDoS attacks have been around for some time, what stands out in these cases is the attackers’ exploitation of security weaknesses in tens of thousands of Internet-of-Things (“IoT”) devices to launch the attacks. Unfortunately, these types of widespread outages may be more common in the future if these weaknesses are not addressed.

On Friday, October 21, a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were launched against the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. DNS hosts operate in a manner akin to a switchboard for the Internet, helping to route domain names (e.g., dataprotectionreport.com) to underlying IP addresses (e.g., 104.28.6.115). By attacking Dyn, hackers were able to prevent end-users from reaching the websites and online services that relied on Dyn, including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud, Amazon, AirBnB, Reddit, PayPal, Pinterest, CNN, Fox News, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. In a statement, Dyn described the attack as “a sophisticated, highly distributed attack involving 10s of millions of IP addresses.”