Well, usually a few men gather in a dark room that is illuminated only by the light from the screens, or a cheap neon. Mandatory attributes: everyone in the room must wear a Guy Fawkes mask, because we are for complete anonymity. The dress code is dark jeans and a plain hoodie. And for the entourage, we can add gloves with cutouts for the fingertips. The number of monitors is automatically multiplied by x4 based on the number of hackers, a bunch of incomprehensible wires sticking out of the system blocks, and one flash drive with an inaccurately glued sticker on which says "never play this".
Next to the computers is an empty pizza box and an unpacked redbull block. Everything seems to be ready. It remains to determine, Whose usual life from today will forever change? Perhaps the victim will be an unsuspecting clerk from the London Stock Exchange, or a popular blogger, and perhaps even Donald Trump himself.
And if you bend the whole world at once and hack the servers of the Federal Reserve System? Then the effect is difficult even to imagine. And if you try to do something good? For example, hack the accounts of some terrorists from Igil or sites that distribute child pornography. Then we will definitely become heroes in the eyes of the public.
But, our protagonists choose a very mundane goal. How about hacking GitHub. What for? Just like that! We conduct brainstorming and analytical work. We find vulnerabilities and determine the best tool. And here it is. The DDos attack begins.
I hope you managed to completely immerse yourself in the atmosphere of hacker romance and a lot of interesting things await us ahead. But first, a little history and familiarity with the terms. The history of hacker attacks began almost from the very beginning of the launch of the Internet, because as we know, if there is a system, then there will always be craftsmen who will certainly want to break it.
The first type of hacker attacks is considered to be such a thing as mailbombing or the bombing of email addresses. As soon as e-mail was widely used in large companies in the mid-90s, the ancestors of modern hackers came up with an uncomplicated way to complicate the life of ordinary or not very ordinary plankton.
And the essence of the method was in banal spam. A lot of meaningless letters were sent to the mailbox of a particular person, which made it impossible to work with the mailbox itself. Roughly speaking, there were so many letters that a person could not find real ones among them and fell into a binge. Such attacks, of course, were carried out from anonymous mail servers, because of which the mail provider could not identify the real sender and limit the number of letters. Nowadays, of course, email clients have become an order of magnitude smarter, so this method has become less relevant, but nevertheless, it has fulfilled its fundamental role in the hacker craft.
With the development of the Internet, heaps of new attack methods have emerged, such as buffer overflows, the spread of viruses, worms and Trojans, social engineering, and more. But each of them deserves a separate material on our channel, so we will focus on the topic that interests the absolute majority. A topic that has become the main argument and punitive weapon of any self-respecting schoolboy-paladin, whose goal is to fight against everything unscrupulous, or just for the sake of entertainment and feeding his own Ego. As you may have guessed, we are talking about a DDoS attack, which has unlimited power in terms of position on the blades of the website of your native school or even your favorite Netflix service.
In this thread, there are two key terms DoS and DDoS, which stands for Denial of Service, in our opinion - Denial of Service. Now I will try to explain in simple words what it is.
The purpose of the Ddos attack is to "kill" the server, thereby making the site inaccessible or difficult to access for ordinary visitors. They lay down servers by overloading them, since each server has a certain capacity and a limited amount of memory that can handle a limited number of requests.
When using DDoS attacks, more requests are sent to the server than it can handle, then the site crashes or responds very slowly. The consequences are obvious. Broken site = loss of money and nerves by the owner.
The main difference between DOS and DDoS attacks is that DDoS attacks are executed simultaneously from a large number of computers, which allows attacking larger and more secure systems. But where do you get this large number of microwaves? Respectable colleagues of the DDoser have already taken care of this, happily infecting tens of thousands of computers of ordinary people with Trojans using social engineering and other techniques. Now all these devices are under the control of cybercriminals, and the owners are not even aware of anything. Trojan horses run in the background turning the device into a so-called zombie computer, which is under the control of hackers and is part of their zombie army.
If you look deeper, then DDoS attacks have many types, depending on the object of the attack. The most popular and classic one is Flood - overflow of system bandwidth. That is, an attack with a large number of meaningless or incorrectly formulated requests.
There are also many such attacks - from ordinary HTTP and Ping floods to more sophisticated Smurf attacks. Other interesting attacks include sending "heavy" requests - which strain the processors, overwhelm the server with log files, which will clog the entire hard disk later, as well as a fake attack of the second kind, which causes a false response of the protection system, which itself blocks the resource.
But in order to understand well all the subtleties and nuances of these attacks, you need to understand the principles by which the servers themselves function. Therefore, vote with your like and we will analyze this topic.
Let's summarize the intermediate results in order to assimilate the above information. DDoS attack is when many zombie computers send a bunch of requests to the server of a certain resource and force it to deny service. There are many types of DDoS attacks, which provides a powerful toolkit for hackers and allows them to find the right "key" to any door, and without leaving evidence.
This is why they are so popular and dangerous. But the question still remains open why people do it. Can't you just live together and enjoy the benefits of the Internet together? There are several reasons for this.
The grievance that led to one of the first well-known DDoS attacks on the FBI's Web sites in 1999, which put them on hold for weeks. And all because of the FBI raids on hackers. The political stance that made Wikileaks cancer and a whole bunch of government sites go wrong. The desire to make money, the consequence of which is custom-made DDoS attacks on the competitors of large companies, because in big business all means are good.
But the most repulsed hackers arrange attacks for no reason at all. As the saying goes: "Just for fun". Well, they like to watch how it "everything burns."
But there have been attacks in our history so large-scale that they have affected millions of people and generally endangered the entire modern Internet. They were trumpeted by all the world's media and we could not but share with you. One of the first was a major DDos attack organized by a 16-year-old schoolboy. Perhaps, just because of her, a similar destructive type of activity has become often associated with schoolchildren.
A dude with the nickname Mafiaboy for several weeks, with the help of 50 networks, put the sites of CNN, Ebay and Amazon. Our protagonist was lucky to avoid serious punishment just because he is not an adult. He received a condition and, for sure, the young talent was immediately recruited into cybersecurity.
The next case and even cases are related to the Anonymous group, about which, by the way, we have almost prepared the material, which you can check out soon. They are responsible for hundreds of DDos attacks, each of which is amazing in its scale. That's why they are the most famous hackers of our time.
Somehow in 2012, it took them into their heads to put the entire world Internet to hell. They were going to do this by hacking root DNS servers of which there are 13 pieces mainly in the USA, and they are responsible for them
large organizations. The entire DNS system is based on them, and DNS is one of the key data transfer protocols on the Internet. But alas, the guys did not succeed. There was a similar attack in the early 2000s, and, by the way, it was more successful. Then we managed to put 7 out of 13.
And the cherry on top is Memcrashed - the most powerful dudos of our time. There is such a program called memcached - it is good and caches data in RAM. Some craftsmen in 2018 discovered a number of features in it that allow you to use "open" servers with Shodan (and this is such a highly specialized search engine), first uploading data to them, and then redirecting requests for a response to the victim's server.
In short, it turned out to be a very powerful thing, which was formalized into a hacker attack method called memcrashed. The codes for launching it are still in the public domain, and anyone who is fumbling in the python language can now launch the most powerful DDoS attack. The most famous victim of memkrash is github - the main site of all programmers in the world. It dropped by as much as 9 minutes, and the attack power reached 1.35 TB / s.
You ask, how can you protect yourself from DDoS attacks? 100% nothing, so the DDoS attack remains one of the most effective at the moment. There are of course some methods of prevention, such as reverse DDoS, filtering and blackhalling and elimination of vulnerabilities, but this is all relevant for large organizations.
We, on the other hand, most likely are not in danger, it is better to worry about more mundane things such as phishing. Now you know what the threat of harassing means and I hope you don't run to download memcrashed to hack the Pentagon.
And finally, I'll tell you a short story about how my friends and I accidentally put the site of our teacher.
It was just memcrashed dawn. We were still students and were actively involved in IT startups. One day we had competitors with the same idea. They were one step ahead and ready to release their product. We naturally did not know about anything and our asses were notably burnt. We were filled with anger and decided to spoil our competitors. Since everyone was fumbling around in IT a little, DDos immediately came to our minds. And one of the comrades began to actively search the memcrashed forums. While he was setting it up, we decided that the method should be tried first. Therefore, we decided to put the site of our teacher, which was visited by two and a half people a month. Having successfully directed the memkrash server to the professor's website, we immediately began to feverishly access it from our smartphones. And lo and behold! At first, the site began to dull, and then completely fell. Our happiness knew no bounds, but then our gang felt a little ashamed and we immediately closed the laptop lid. The site let go, but we did not dare to attack our competitors. Here are the things.
