Reports
that the Banks of America's website has been experiencing some downtime
due to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by the
pro-WikiLeaks and pro-piracy group Anonymous have been confirmed.
Bank of America recently ceased processing donations to the whistleblower group WikiLeaks after the organization revealed that Bank of America may be the subject of the next set of confidential documents to be released.
UPDATED: Sources familiar with the details of the attack have provided Infosec Island with the following information:
"B
of A has been targeted for over 5 hours. The hive is not very strong so
the total volume is relatively small, not really impacting anything at
the moment, it’s more just an annoyance. The attackers are rotating
targets, first targeting www.bankofamerica on one port (HTTP), then on
another (HTTPS), then they switched the target to Bank of America’s
nameservers. Lot’s of different vectors as well – UDP and SYN Floods as
well as ICMP flooding."
"The attack was largely ineffective
because the IRC channel used for the command and control of the LOIC
tool was not functioning properly. Without the organized command and
control structure (what is called the “hive-mind”), manual attacks are
cumbersome."
"Anonymous leaders were recommending that their
followers use the manual method, which makes a concerted effort much
more difficult as users have to set up the tool with the correct target,
protocol, and number of threads to use. Monitoring Anonymous
communications on IRC channels revealed that there was much disarray and
overall the effort appeared to be very disorganized."
Anonymous
had previously targeted the websites of PayPal, Visa, MasterCard,
PostFinance Bank and others who had halted business relations with
WikiLeaks, spoke against the data release, or had similarly refused to
process donations to the group.
The rash of DDoS attacks by
Anonymous had fizzled out for some time due to lack of leadership and
coordination amongst the loosely associated international "gathering" of
script-kiddies, and a campaign of mass faxing was attempted with little or no effect on business operations reported.
In an article explaining DDoS attacks, Dan Dieterle states:
"Simply
put, in a denial of service attack, the attacker sends repeated
messages to a target website with such frequency, that the website can
not keep up and slows to a crawl, in effect taking it offline...
Attackers will usually use zombie machines that they have infected with a
virus (also called ‘bots’) to work together to attack a single site.
Sometimes hundreds and even thousands of systems are used in this
matter."
Defenses against DDoS attacks are few, but there are several commercial solutions available, as outlined in a comparison study by Alicia Smith:
"In
order to effectively determine the best solution you must know some key
things about DDoS and your own network. There are many different types
of DDoS attacks and they can affect your network in various ways - all
of which are negative."
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