Hacker meltdown fails to materalise

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

[Just as I suspected, NIPC FUD, Personally I think its a NIPC
conspiracy to keep IT workers from enjoying New Years parties.
I also have to wonder when all this Chicken Little 'Sky is falling'
alerts will start to fall on deaf ears?  - WK]


http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/15766.html

By: John Leyden
Posted: 02/01/2001 at 18:37 GMT

The widespread fear of a concerted distributed denial of service
(DDoS) attack over the holiday season thankfully failed to
materialise, but security experts are still at odds over how serious
the threat was.

Fears about an attack similar to that which swamped prestige internet
sites such as Yahoo and eBay led the National Infrastructure
Protection Center - the FBI's cyber crime busters - to issue an alert
urging security administrators to bolt up their security hatches.

The alert stated that based on FBI investigations and other
information: "The NIPC believes DDoS attacks could occur over the
holiday. Several security companies have cited the threat of DDOS
attacks, and some have taken place already."

Administrators were advised to check their firewall configurations and
download a utility from the NIPC site to check whether their network
has been infected with DDOS Trojans such as Trin00, Tribal Flood Net,
TFN2K, MStream, Stacheldraht and Trinity v3. The SubSeven Trojan,
which has been associated with the proliferation of daemons used in
DDoS attacks, was singled out as especially risky.

Systems administrators were also advised to update their virus
definitions daily and perform thorough scans for viruses and worms.

In the last few weeks, security experts warned that crackers may have
planted DDoS Trojans on hundreds of computer systems thereby turning
them into "zombies" (clients) that could be turned against sites via a
simple command.

The most recent edition of SubSeven supports IRC commands, enabling
malicious kiddiots to launch ping floods from each infected machine
logged into an IRC channel, using a single command.

DDoS attacks can render a network inaccessible by flooding it with a
huge volume of spurious traffic, often generated from hundreds of
infected clients. Because of the distributed nature of the attack it
can be very difficult to defend against and techniques such as
configuring internet routers to block such attacks remain unproven.

All this is scary stuff but, so far at least, nothing much has
happened.

Matt Tomlinson, business development director at MIS Corporate Defence
Solutions, said the risk had been "hyped and has not come to
fruition".

However Richard Stagg, senior security architect at Information Risk
Management, said he had come across zombie agents on corporate
systems, and that it is only a question of when they will be
activated.

He added that firms who are infected with zombie agents might find
themselves sued for loss of business and other damages by sites
subject to denial of service attacks.

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