NSA warns “fast flux” threatens national security. What is fast flux anyway?


A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.

The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure.

Read more…
Source: ArsTechnica


Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.


Related:

  • Battling COVID; a cyber Airman’s story

    June 26, 2020

    Tech. Sgt. Brandon Ibanez, a cyber intelligence analyst with the 854th Combat Operations Squadron here, doesn’t wear a helmet to work, nor does he wear a sword or shield. As a Gladiator in the 960th Cyberspace Wing, it’s not a requirement to don the traditional uniform of ancient Roman fighters, and it would be impractical because ...

  • DarkCrewFriends Returns with Botnet Strategy

    June 26, 2020

    The hackers-for-hire group DarkCrewFriends has resurfaced and is targeting content management systems to build a botnet. The botnet can be marshalled into service to carry out a variety of criminal activities, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, command execution, information exfiltration or sabotage of an infected system. Researchers said they observed DarkCrewFriends exploiting an unrestricted file upload ...

  • Threat Assessment: EKANS Ransomware

    June 26, 2020

    Unit 42 researchers have observed recent EKANS (Snake backward) ransomware activity affecting multiple industries in the U.S and Europe. As a result, we’ve created this threat assessment report for the activities of this ransomware. Identified techniques and campaigns can be visualized using the Unit 42 Playbook Viewer. EKANS, which was first observed in January 2020, has relatively ...

  • 23 IS conducts virtual PAI training

    June 25, 2020

    Reserve Citizen Airmen from the 23rd Intelligence Squadron organized and executed a first-ever, unit-wide Publicly Available Information (PAI) training session June 6, 2020. The goal of the training was to educate 23 IS Airmen with PAI best practices and highlight the capabilities that PAI brings to intelligence operations. The training was part of the squadron’s ...

  • Lucifer: New Cryptojacking and DDoS Hybrid Malware Exploiting High and Critical Vulnerabilities to Infect Windows Devices

    June 24, 2020

    On May 29, 2020, Unit 42 researchers discovered a new variant of a hybrid cryptojacking malware from numerous incidents of CVE-2019-9081 exploitation in the wild. A closer look revealed the malware, which we’ve dubbed “Lucifer”, is capable of conducting DDoS attacks and well-equipped with all kinds of exploits against vulnerable Windows hosts. The first wave of the ...

  • Magnitude exploit kit – evolution

    June 24, 2020

    Exploit kits are not as widespread as they used to be. In the past, they relied on the use of already patched vulnerabilities. Newer and more secure web browsers with automatic updates simply do not allow known vulnerabilities to be exploited. It was very different back in the heyday of Adobe Flash because it’s just ...