Arbor Networks has been analyzing some of the malware used to launch DDoS attacks, in order to help educate organizations on the nature of code used to create and manage the DDoS botnets.
In a series of blog posts, Arbor Networks examines the operational abilities and design of the Armageddon, Khan, and PonyDOS botnets, or rather the malware that establishes them.
Since the first version of the code was released some time ago, Armageddon has undergone several changes. At present, the bot uses new crypto to hide some of the new features from passive code breakers, which include the ability to launch various types of DDoS attacks, based on the nature of the target. There is the standard Apache flood, but also controls for websites driven by vBulletin or phpBB.
Khan is a botnet that has one purpose, DDoS attacks. It’s a straightforward bot that attempts to generate floods that look like legitimate traffic. If Khan is able to pull the attack off, mitigations become highly difficult.
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“One of its techniques is to flood a victim with HTTP requests that appear to be crawler requests from search engines; this is presumably based on the quite reasonable expectation that the victim web sites will be terrified of filtering out web requests from such crawlers for fear of seriously impairing their page rankings at Google, Bing, etc., and thus becoming effectively invisible to potential customers,” Arbor’s Jeff Edwards wrote.
Pony on the other hand is newer, arriving on the Web in late 2011. Like the others, Pony is designed almost exclusively for DDoS attacks, using complicated encryption for communications.
“To date we’ve logged attacks against various target web sites hosted in the United States, Russian, and Luxembourg. The PonyDOS botmasters seem to favor the GET flood attacks, with almost half (94 out of 192 logged events) of its attacks being specified as attack code 0×01 (GET without server read) or 0×02 (GET with server read). TCP Connection Floods (code 0×00) and POST floods (code 0×03) were used less frequently,” Edwards added.
Earlier this week, SecurityWeek contributor Adam Rice discussed creating a DDoS attack action plan, including some basics to get things started. You can view his thoughts here.
