Hacking The TDoS Attack

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/hacking-the-tdos-attack/240155809

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
Dark Reading
May 30, 2013

When an ICU nurse refused to pay scammers who insisted she owed money 
for a payday loan, they unleashed a robo-dial flood of hundreds of calls 
per hour that ultimately shut down the phone system of the hospital's 
intensive care unit. In another case, supporters of a popular company 
that received a negative rating from a major financial firm voiced their 
displeasure by crowdsourcing phone calls to the firm in an attempt to 
block its trading and other functions -- and they organized it via a 
Facebook Event post.

These real-world cases of telephony denial-of-service (TDoS) attacks in 
the past year didn't get the publicity that distributed 
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks did, but security experts say these 
types of attacks have been on the rise in the past couple of years and 
can be just as damaging as a DDoS.

"Personally, I believe that it's a more invasive approach to target a 
company's [or] individual's primary means of communication. Just like 
DDoS attacks, based on my observations, they tend to abuse the 
infrastructure of legitimate services, Skype, ICQ, major U.S-based 
carriers, and relevant SIP providers," cybercrime researcher Dancho 
Danchev said in an interview via email.

TDoS attacks -- which earlier this year were becoming prevalent enough 
that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about a 
threat of TDoS attacks on public sector entities in an attempt to extort 
money -- are typically similar in motivation and goals as DDoS attacks 
that flood networks, websites or other servers with massive volumes of 
traffic meant to bring an organization's data structure to its knees. 
Call centers are the most popular TDoS targets -- they're easy to 
contact and flood with calls -- and, increasingly, there are more tools 
readily available tools for launching these attacks on any organization 
or individual's location.

[...]


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