For the last 30 years basic idea behind the Internet’ design hasn’t changed - it connects people and services with each other. However, some authorities may have a different angle on what services their citizens should be able to connect to. A regulator might require ISPs to block off selected content or IP-address space for the end-users. How is that implemented? There are many options, but the most popular one is with the help of static routes, that may be propagated locally in BGP. Mistakes in this ‘local propagation’ have happened before: most notable was the YouTube hijack back in 2008, but less famous events were continually happening all over the decade. Today we observed another one, created by Iranian ISP that affected Telegram messenger.

During the World Cup 2018 active period traffic of online stores has decreased by almost 1.5 times. Online games and Forex sites attendance felt even stronger, Qrator Labs found. The days of Russian team’s plays made the drop even more pronounced and evident. Such dynamics are tied not only to the popularity of football matches but also the holiday season, explain market participants.

Dear colleagues, we are glad to inform you that our team has finished integration with IRR data sources and ROA records. It should significantly increase the quality of hijacks detection, plus improve transparency of what is happening to route objects in different registries.

Recently, several severe routing incidents were spreading globally: hijack of the 5% of an entire IPv4 address space from Brazil, route leak between Russia and Asia through Kyrgyzstan, and at last, previous Friday there was an event that could lead to an outage of a significant part of all the BGP ecosystem. Fortunately, it didn’t happen.

A few days ago several cybersecurity resources reported details of an entirely malicious traffic redirection that combined DNS, and BGP hijacking. The primary goal of this attack was to steal money from different cryptocurrency wallets and services. Moreover, it was successful, since Amazon did not detect it in time. Today, on April 26, another significant incident happened that seems to be also unnoticed by the majority of players.

The situation we observed last week was both peculiar and strange when panic for Cisco Smart Install Protocol remote code execution vulnerability (cisco-sa-20160323-smi) started circling. There was confirmed botnet activity that was wiping configuration files exploiting this vulnerability and leaving a message “Don’t mess with our elections.” Moreover, there were rumors that significant amount of ISPs and even Internet segments get down due to this malicious actions.

Originally this post has been published at the APNIC blog.

Cybersecurity attacks have become a weekly occurrence in many news columns. One recent example was that of one of our customers, QIWI payment system, successfully mitigating a 480 Gbps memcached amplified UDP DDoS attack.

While we at Qrator Labs would rather stay out of the news, such instances justify all the preparation that we put into mitigating for such attacks. To help others learn from our experience, I thought I’d recap several facts about amplification attacks, so that you too will be prepared ‘when’ the day comes.

We would like to present you, the reader, a shorter version of the annual Qrator Labs report on cyber- and infosecurity, as well as DDoS, that covers the year 2017. Special thanks to our longstanding partner — Wallarm, for supporting us with content on notable vulnerabilities and hacks.

In 2017 Qrator Labs and Wallarm noticed increasing diversification of threats from a widening variety of attack methods. The range of critical vulnerabilities on today’s web is so broad that attackers can choose from many different methods to create problems for almost any organization. A growing number of tools can operate automatically making centralized command & control unnecessary.

If 2016 could be named the year of botnets and terabit attacks, then 2017 was the year of ransomware and routing. The incidents, like Google in Japan and Level3 in the United States, Rostelecom in Russia, and many others demonstrate the persistently strong risks from human factors rooted in mismanagement and insufficient automation. A brave engineer who confidently cancels an important automated script could create the possibility of severe issues in internet service availability and accessibility.

Last week there were several notable network incidents, which were the result of a new method for DDoS attacks amplification, using memcached database. Several DDoS mitigation providers, including Qrator Labs and Akamai, have confirmed that they were hit by this new attack kind. The new type of DDoS attack was able to break the record and reach 1.3 Tbps bandwidth. As a reaction to this new threat, Qrator.Radar team has added detection of the open-to-world memcached database in our daily scan.

A long time ago in a git repository far-far away, a commit made by Brian Aker introduced a brilliant feature of the default listening to UDP traffic in memcached.

Days in between February 23, 2018, and the Monday of February 26, 2018, were marked by multiple memcached-amplification DDoS attacks across entire Europe.