Hackers warn: We'll hit US banks... again
Insecure PHP web apps powering zombie DDoS assault
Hackers who claimed responsibility for a series of denial of service attacks against US banks in September have warned the US they plan to renew their assault shortly.
The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters named US Bancorp, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, PNC Financial Services Group and SunTrust as possible attack targets for the second phase of its Ababil operation. "In new phase, the wideness and the number of attacks will increase explicitly; and offenders and subsequently their governmental supporters will not be able to imagine and forecast the widespread and greatness of these attacks," it said in a statement posted on Pastebin on Monday.
The group of hackers continue to be incensed with the presence of the inflammatory and amateurish Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube. Pull the film and the attacks will be called off or stopped, the group says. The group doesn't accept arguments that the banks have no influence on clips hosted by YouTube.
Security researchers analysing the earlier attacks quickly came to the conclusion that they were largely powered by bots. DDoS mitigation experts Arbor Networks reckons most of the attack traffic was launched from insecure websites rather than malware-infected PCs.
Many compromised PHP web applications were used as bots in the [September] attacks. Additionally, many WordPress sites, often using the out-of-date TimThumb plugin, were being compromised around the same time. Joomla and other PHP-based applications were also compromised. Unmaintained sites running out-of-date extensions are easy targets and the attackers took full advantage of this to upload various PHP webshells which were then used to further deploy attack tools.
Several PHP-based tools were used in the September attacks, the most prominent of which was Brobot along with two other tools, KamiKaze and AMOS. A revamped version of the tool has been deployed in the second phase of the attacks, which have already begun to surface.
On December 11, 2012, attacks on several of these victims were observed. Some attacks looked similar in construction to Brobot v1, however there is a newly crafted DNS packet attack and a few other attack changes in Brobot v2.
A blog post by Arbor covering lessons learned from earlier attacks as well as preliminary observations about the latest run of assaults can be found here. ®
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COMMENTS
Joomla is ok to start with....
Really these guys are using Joomla? Joomla is a slippery slope, its all to easy to need something thats not in the framework, so you install a plugin for this, a plugin for that and before you know it you have a dozen plugins all of which you cant be 100% sure are safer. I must have moved on to at least 4 different forums plugins as they became unmaintained. The last backup was pushing 1Gb so something was definitely screwed somewhere!
Keep an eye on the log files its interesting to see the number of attempted attacks against the admin login page.
I starting learning php as a background thing and after about 12mths had learnt enough php to write my own framework. Rebuilt my site from scratch in about 3 weeks, now I just update the database via phpadmin and the articles on the site run under read only rights. Site with files/gfxs came in at approx 40Mb.
So in conclusion Joomla/Wordpress are ok to kick something off, but long term you should learn to do it yourself so you understand how your site works!
Why?
The banks are being DoSed by dollar stuffing anyway? Watch out for those fatty banker livers..... hmmm. Very nice with a side-dish of Weimar pickles.
We now have the announcement that Ben Bernanke’s Fed will buy $45 billion a month in treasuries, QE4, until unemployment reaches 6.5% or his version of inflation exceeds 2.5%. What a surprise! ....
Well, it does appear now that Bernanke was just easing his toe in by announcing the purchase of agency mortgages last September, and is really focused on treasuries. In all probability, he is afraid that the market for treasuries will falter. He can now support it anytime he wants without causing panic.
The next announcement may well remove the $45 billion monthly limit. Then he will be able to finance the government with as much fairy dust money as he likes.
There is always the chance that the foreign buyers will eventually be spooked and it will all come crashing down. But right now the foreign buyers do not have a lot of options and anyway Bernanke retires in a year.
It would be interesting ( and helpful) if Alan Greenspan suddenly had a Saul of Tarsus/ Paul experience and spoke out against his protege Bernanke. Or perhaps Paul Volcker, who admitted that the Fed might be violating the Fed statute in 2008 ( there was really no doubt about it) might speak up? Unfortunately none of this is likely. And we will continue on down the rabbit hole.
Way to promote Islam as the bestest religion ever. By hitting a completely unrelated series of targets. Not that banks don't deserve it on general principles; but if the video is the problem it should be video hosting services and the actual creators of the video would be the obvious people to go for.
I was starting to feel a little sympathy towards Muslims -not all of them are fruitbats- and then I discovered this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/10/the-seven-countries-where-the-state-can-execute-you-for-being-atheist/
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