Tag Archives: DDoS

Continuing the story about recent CUPS vulnerabilities: vulnerable hosts will be used by attackers to amplify DDoS attacks

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Continuing the story about recent CUPS vulnerabilities: vulnerable hosts will be used by attackers to amplify DDoS attacks

Continuing the story about recent CUPS vulnerabilities: vulnerable hosts will be used by attackers to amplify DDoS attacks.

Researchers from Akamai Technologies wrote about this. An attacker can send a special packet to a vulnerable host with CUPS: “add a printer located at this IP address”. CUPS will start sending large IPP/HTTP requests to the specified IP address. Thus, vulnerable hosts can be organized in such a way that they start DDoSing IP addresses chosen by the attacker.

Akamai has discovered more than 198,000 vulnerable hosts with CUPS, of which more than 58,000 (34%) can be used for DDoS attacks. Of these, hundreds demonstrated an “infinite loop” of requests in response to HTTP/404.

Assuming that all 58,000+ vulnerable hosts are used for the attack, they can cause a traffic flow of 1 GB to 6 GB per attacker’s udp packet. The victim will have to handle 2.6 million TCP connections and HTTP requests.

На русском

PHDays 11: towards the Independence Era

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PHDays 11: towards the Independence Era. Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about the Positive Hack Days 11 conference, which took place on May 18 and 19 in Moscow. As usual, I want to express my personal opinion about this event.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239091

As I did last year, I want to start talking about this conference with a few words about the sanctions. US sanctions against Positive Technologies, the organizers of Positive Hack Days, were introduced a year ago. At that time it seemed very serious and extraordinary. But today, when our country has become the most sanctioned country in the world, those sanctions against Positive Technologies seem very ordinary and unimportant. In fact, it even seems to benefit the company somehow.

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What’s new in Gartner WAF Magic Quadrant 2017?

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What’s new in Gartner WAF Magic Quadrant 2017? To tell the truth, I was not much interested in Web Application Firewall market since the time when I was doing competitive analysis in Positive Technologies. And a few days ago Gartner published a fresh WAF research with interesting Magic Quadrants. I decided to figure out what’s new there.

Here you can download full Gartner WAF MQ 2017 report for free. Thanks to Positive Technologies for such an opportunity!

First of all, let’s look at the illustrations. I took the Magic Quadrant from this year’s report:

Gartner Magic Quadrant WAF 2017

And for comparison from 2014 and 2015 reports:

Gartner Magic Quadrant WAF 2014 and 2015.

The first thing that caught my eye was Akamai in the leaders! And apparently this will be the main message.

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Not for Russians

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Not for Russians. Let’s talk about web-site blocking. Not about cases of government censorship, not about cases where content is blocked for copyright reasons and not even about sanctions. I want to pay attention to the cases when companies block access to their own sites voluntarily for user from the whole country, in particular for the users from Russia.

I do not know why they actually do such things. Perhaps they are trying to defend themselves against evil Russian hackers. Not the most effective measure. Attackers know how to use proxies and VPNs. Maybe they are under constant DDoS attack from Russian IPs? But these problems can also be solved more effectively without blocking an entire country. And this can be understood for the company, which is not much in Information Security, but I see this regularly on the websites of Security Vendors. For example, Tanium:

Tanium

Or a very recent purchase of Qualys, start-up Nevis Networks:

Nevis Networks

But okay, in these cases, only sales of these companies in Russia suffer (if they even exist).

A slightly different case was recently seen on the Amazon recruiting site.

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