1. Attackers Vs. Defenders: Restoring the
Equilibrium
Ron Meyran
Director of Security Marketing
January 2013

2. AGENDA
Cyber security Statistics
About 2012 Global Security Report
Key Findings
ERT Case Studies
2013 Recommendations

3. Cyber Security Study
• A research study by Ponemon & Radware
• Surveyed 700 IT & IT Security Practitioners
• Non Radware customers
• Release date: November 12th 2012
3

4. Cyber Security Business Priorities
Ranking of cyber security objectives in terms of a business priority objective
5 = Highest Priority to 1 = Lowest Priority
5 4.7
4.5 4.4
4
3.5
3.5
3 2.8
2.5
2 1.9
1.5
1
0.5
0
Interoperability Confidentiality Integrity Compliance Availability
4

5. DDoS Attacks Frequency
How many DDoS attacks experienced in the
past 12 months?
of organizations had an
65% average of 3 DDoS
attacks in the past 12
months
5

6. Average downtime during one DDoS attack
25%
22%
20%
16%
15%
13% Minutes average
10%
10%
54 11%
downtime during
9%
one DDoS attack
5%
10%
5% 4%
0%
Less than 1 11 to 20 minutes 31 to 60 minutes 3 to 5 Cannot
minute hours determine
6

7. Cost of Downtime
Cost per minute of downtime
25%
21%
20%
15%
12%
$22,000
15% 15%
Average cost per minute of downtime
11%
10%
8%
7%
5%
1%
$3,000,000 5% 5%
0% Average annual Cost of DDoS Attacks
7

8. AGENDA
Cyber security Statistics
About 2012 Global Security Report
Key Findings
ERT Case Studies
2013 Recommendations

9. Information Resources
• Radware Security Survey • ERT Survey
– External survey – Internal survey
– 179 participant – Unique visibility into attacks
– 95.5% are not using behaviour
Radware DoS mitigation – 95 selected cases
solution • Customer identity remains
undisclosed
ERT gets to see attacks in
real-time on daily basis
9

10. AGENDA
Cyber security Statistics
About 2012 Global Security Report
Key Findings
ERT Case Studies
2013 Recommendations

11. Organizations Bring a Knife to a Gunfight
• ”Someone who brings a knife to a gun fight”
– Is someone who does prepare himself for the fight, but does not
understand its true nature
• Organizations today are like that
– They do invest before the attack starts, and conduct excellent
forensics after it is over,
– however, they have one critical blind-spot – they don't have
the capabilities or resources to sustain a long, complicated
attack campaign.
• Attackers target this blind spot!
11

12. Attacked in 2012
They had the budget
They made the investment
And yet they went offline
12

13. Organizations Deploy Two-phase Security Approach
Industry Security Survey
How much did your organization invest in each of the following security
aspects in the last year?
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
Procedures
20%
Human skills
15%
Equipment
10%
5%
0%
Before During After
Only 21% of company efforts are invested during the attack itself,
while 79% is spent during the pre-attack and post-attack phase. 13

14. But attacks today have 3 phases
14

15. Attacks last longer
21%
23%
14
21%
12 12%
10
8
2011
2012 6
11%
4 12%
2
20
0 12
1-2 days
20
Half a week 11
1 week
Attacks last longer: The number of DoS attacks lasting over a week had doubled in 2012
15

16. And become more complex
ERT Cases – Attack Vectors
29%
29%
16%
30%
25%
20%
15%
16%
10%
4%
5%
0% 7%
5-6
7-8
Complexity 9-10
2011 2012
Attacks are more complex: 2012 DoS/DDoS attacks have become more sophisticated, using
morecomplex attack vectors. Note the number of attacks using a complexity level of 7-10.
16

17. Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Do you consider Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
a solution for a DoS/DDoS attack?
70% Yes
30%
No
70% of the companies who use CDN believe the CDN is a solution for DoSDDoS attacks.
17

18. Attacks Evade CDN service
GET Legitimate requests
www.exmaple.com are refused
Legitimate users
Internet Backend Webserver
• In recent cyber attacks the CDN was easily bypassed
– By changing the page request in every Web
GET
www.exmaple.com/?[Random]
transaction
Botnet • These random request techniques force CDNs to “raise
the curtain”
– All the attacks traffic is disembarked directly to the
customer premise
– More complex to mitigate attacks masked by CDN CDN service
18

19. Attackers are well prepared
• By definition the defenders loose the battle
• Equilibrium has been disrupted
19

20. The good news (1)
Industry Security Survey
How likely is it that your organization will be attacked by cyber warfare?
Possible
37%
Organizations start understanding
Unlikely
45%
the risk of DDoS
Very likely Likely
10% 8%
Over half of the organizations believe their organization is likely
to be attacked by cyber warfare. 20

21. The good news (2)
Industry Security Survey
Which solutions do you use against DoS attacks?
40% 45%
40%
32% 32% 35%
27% 30%
Organizations start understanding 25%
20%
12% 15%
Firewall and IPS cannot fight DDoS
5% 5% 5%
8%
10%
5%
3%
8%
2%
5% 10%
1% 5%
attacks 0%
2012
2011
21

22. Conclusions
• Today‟s attacks are different
– Carefully planned
– Last days or weeks
– Switching between attack vectors
• Organizations are ready to fight yesterdays‟ attacks
– Deploy security solutions that can absorb the first strike
– But when attacks prolong - they have very limited gunfire
– By the time they succeed blocking the first two attack
vectors, attackers switch to a third, more powerful one
22

23. A different approach is needed
• A team of security experts
– Acquire capabilities to sustain long attacks
– Train a team that is ready to respond to persistent attacks
– Deploy the most up-to-date methodologies and tools
– 24 x 7 availability to respond to attacks
– Deploy counterattack techniques to cripple an attack
23

24. AGENDA
Cyber security Statistics
About 2012 Global Security Report
Key Findings
ERT Case Studies
2013 Recommendations

25. US Banks Under Attack: from the news
25

26. US Banks Under Attack: Operation Ababil
• Publication of the „Innocence of Muslim‟ film on YouTube invokes
demonstrations throughout the Muslim world
• September 18th- „Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Al Qassam‟ announced
an upcoming cyber attack campaign against „American and Zionist‟
targets.
26

27. Attack Summary
• Attack targets
– Bank of America
– New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
– Chase
– Wells Fargo
• Attacks lasted Sep 18-21, 2012
• Multiple attacks‟ waves on each
target, each wave lasted 4 to 9 hours
• Victims suffered from temporary outages
and network slowness
• ERT was actively involved in protecting
the attacked organizations
27

28. Why it was so challenging?
UDP Garbage flood on ports 80 and 443
Multi-vulnerability attack campaignLarge volume SYN flood
• Mitigation nearly impossible
Business
• Attackers look for the blind spot SSL Client Hello flood
HTTP flood attack
28

29. Recent updates
• HTTP flood was carried from compromised hosting servers
– Highly distributed attacks
29

30. AGENDA
Cyber security Statistics
About 2012 Global Security Report
Key Findings
ERT Case Studies
2013 Recommendations

31. ERT recommendations for 2013
• Acquire capabilities to sustain a long sophisticated cyber
attack
• Attack tools are known. Test yourself
• Carefully plan the position of DoS/DDoS mitigation within
network architecture
– On premise capabilities
– In the cloud capabilities
31

32. Thank You
Ron Meyran
ronm@radware.com