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:

  • Ransomware Attack Hinders Toll Group Operations

    February 4, 2020

    Australian transportation and logistics giant Toll Group said a ransomware attack is to blame for several key services being debilitated and delivery operations being delayed over the past week. Toll Group, a subsidiary of Japan Post Holdings, is a freight and delivery service company operating across more than 1,200 locations in 50 countries. The company is ...

  • Twitter API Abused to Uncover User Identities

    February 4, 2020

    Twitter said that malicious actors, with potential ties to state-sponsored groups, were abusing a legitimate function on its platform to unmask the identity of users. The social media giant said that on Dec. 24, 2019, it discovered a large network of fake accounts abusing a legitimate API (application programming interface) function on its platform that, when ...

  • U.S. Battleground County Website Security Survey

    February 3, 2020

    Today McAfee released the results of a survey of county websites and county election administration websites in the 13 states projected as battleground states in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. We found that significant majorities of these websites lacked the official government .GOV website validation and HTTPS website security measures to prevent malicious actors from launching copycat web domains ...

  • Only three of the Top 100 international airports pass basic security checks

    February 3, 2020

    Only three of the world’s Top 100 international airports pass basic security checks, according to a report published last week by cyber-security firm ImmuniWeb. The three are the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, the Helsinki Vantaa Airport in Finland, and the Dublin International Airport in Ireland. According to ImmuniWeb, these three “may serve a laudable example not just to the ...

  • TrickBot Switches to a New Windows 10 UAC Bypass to Evade Detection

    February 3, 2020

    The TrickBot trojan has evolved again to bolster its ability to elude detection, this time adding a feature that can bypass Windows 10 User Account Control (UAC) to deliver malware across multiple workstations and endpoints on a network, researchers have discovered. Researchers at Morphisec Labs team said they discovered code last March that uses the Windows ...

  • EKANS Ransomware and ICS Operations

    February 3, 2020

    EKANS ransomware emerged in mid-December 2019, and Dragos published a private report to Dragos WorldView Threat Intelligence customers early January 2020. While relatively straightforward as a ransomware sample in terms of encrypting files and displaying a ransom note, EKANS featured additional functionality to forcibly stop a number of processes, including multiple items related to ICS ...