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Finnish Bank OP Under Persistent DDoS Attack
An anonymous reader writes The Finnish bank OP Pohjola Group has been a target of a dedicated DDoS attack for days. The attack, which investigators said was launched from both Finland and abroad, began on New Year's Eve. OP was forced to open a helpline for customers unable to confirm payments or transfer money because of jammed systems. On Saturday the firm said it would compensate people for any losses or late payment fees incurred as a result of attack. On Sunday morning the bank tweeted that its services were operating normally and even customers based outside Finland were able to access their accounts — and that it was still monitoring traffic carefully to try and ward off any renewed strikes. However, on Sunday afternoon further denial of service attacks took place delaying payments and preventing access to banking services for OP customers. A formal police complaint has been filed and OP says that KRP is looking into the case.
That traffic be too OP for OP to handle...
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
God prefers stone tablets. They last longer, at least if you don't intentionally smash them...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Sure... Linux will solve all DDoS problems with fairy dust and other magic.
I'm by no means a fan of Windows, but install any odd Linux distribution of a few months old on a public IP address, with most standard features enabled and let's see how long it lasts without getting exploited.
Also, Linux solves nothing if you're on the receiving end of a very large DDoS. The only thing that will help you then is sufficient bandwidth, sufficient server capacity and dedicated, specialized filtering equipment. Then again, it's still hard to fight many of those "semi-intelligent" DDoSes and even the best hardware and massive pipes will get you only so far.
It's time to see those DDoSes for what they really are: Lame acts of vandalism or extortion. There's nothing clever about them and they're causing an increasing amount of financial damages, often also a lot of collateral damage. Maybe it helps if those who initiate them get caught more often and don't get away with a few weeks of house arrest and public service.
There are service providers that specialize in DDoS mitigation. Some of them already host banks (lots of them, in some cases), and have multiple terabits of bandwidth available to survive DDoS attacks with minimal impact. They're able to mitigate attacks in the hundreds of gigabits.
They're not cheap, but they work, and banks tend to be able to afford it.
In addition to OP (Osuuspankki), Nordea has also been attacked, and even Danske Bank is having troubles at the moment, though it's not known if they're being DDOSed or if it's just the usual incompetence.
I see no other reason for this DDoS attack but vandalism of some sort. The attackers have no political agenda (this is a small Finnish bank, not one of the big tax-haven transfer banks like UBS. It also has no political connections/owners.
The attack also has no way of obtaining any useful info, as all banks in Finland use one-time passwords for login.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
No. You login as AC over http.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
It's time we started charging those who launch DDOS attacks with "terrorism". They impact the entire public community of their target, with widespread damages and effects to both the user and provider of the DDOS'd services. Lock the bastards up when they're caught for far, FAR longer than happens now. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
More than you'd even know. If it wasn't for blasted NDAs... let's say the Finns are in good company.
Technical fix... well, there are a few things that we could do to make such DDoSs harder to pull off.
First, if it's a DoS that relies on flaws in software or configuration (Slowloris et al), there's an easy fix for that: Hire an admin who knows what he does, patch the crates, install the relevant mods and don't use crappy default configs.
Let's move on to the more difficult to handle stuff, i.e. what we usually think of when hearing DDoS: Lots and lots of computer clogging the pipe. While seemingly there is little you can do about it, there's actually quite a bit that could make such attacks harder or more costly to the attacker.
These attacks usually rely on reflected amplification. You send from your machine a small packet that requests a large one from the reflector which is then sent to the target. Sounds complicated to pull off but isn't. Essentially what is (usually) done is to spoof the IP address of the target in a DNS request. DNS requests are tiny, the replies can be huge if you ask for all the info (and of course you do). Now, of course DNS is by far not the only route you can go, pretty much anything that doesn't require a complete TCP handshake can do as long as a small request leads to a huge reply. Some games are guilty of the same kind of behaviour where a client asks a server about its setup and the server sends back a load of crap.
Mitigating this it technically of course possible, but completely unfeasible: Forgoing UDP and moving every service using it to TCP. Now, where is the interest for the service owner? He's not the one under attack. Why would he want to foot the bill? Not to mention that we're talking about completely rewiring DNS. Not some obscure little protocol that 3 people use but one of the backbone services of "the web".
So yes, there are technical solutions to that problem. But no, it won't happen.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now, that's harsh.
It's enough to ban the people using it. It's not the OSs fault when users give dancing pigs higher priority than security.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.