Ba 632 76 Information System: Assessment Answers

Article Review - Denial of Service

Answer:

Recent denial of cyber-attacks has been done on Lloyds and Barclays banks as has been reported by theguardian. Briton Daniel Kaye has been extradited from Germany for purpose of blackmailing these banks (www.theguardian.com, Retrieved on 23rd September 2017). The mastermind in these cyber-attacks has disrupted 20 million accounts hence will face charges in the UK. On January 11^th to 13^th, Llyods, Halifax along with Banks of Scotland were faced with millions of requests that aimed to grind group’s system to halt, which is more popularly referred to as denial of service attack (DDoS). Lloyds had to be paying GBP75,000 in bitcoins for calling off the attack, but it did not pay the same. Barclays was faced with similar charges in same month (Lawson, 2010).

Charges for such attacks had been investigated by National Crime Agency (NCA) with support from Germany’s BKA which is its federal investigatory police authority. Kaye remained in custody and he will be facing charges at Westminster magistrate. In this attack the perpetrator made banks resources unavailable to its end users by disrupting service to the host connection to the Internet. Incoming traffic flooded the bank from varied sources generating millions of requests (Armando, 2012). Blackmailing was the sole reason for this denial of cyber-attack that led to bank’s disruption in service. Last year November Lonestar Cell MTN had also experienced a series of repeated attacks of DDoS. This crime was cross border and complex in nature, where team of cybercrime officers had to analyze reams of data. These cybercrimes targets various victims often impacting lives of millions. Mirai botnet was a type of malware which used to conscript internet-connected devices forming botnets that could easily be controlled in a centralized manner. Lloyds Banking Group highlighted that their subsequent DDoS attacks have been defended successfully but resulted in temporary as well as intermittent service issues for their customers (Raymond, 2008). Bank’s systems could not be accessed easily which resulted in service issue for customers as certain accounts had been compromised. These banks have shared their data related to findings from such attacks that could lead to better and enhanced prospects for the financial institutions. Interruption in services resulted in confusion for customers initially as it prevented legitimate user of accounts from using services provided by the bank. Perpetrator had made use of more than one IP address almost thousands of them for typically making it impossible to track victim. The victim in this case had targeted application layer of OSI model. They exercised specific functions of the bank making it almost impossible to access those functions and disabling them. It is separate from a network attack as distracts IT personnel and security people form such security breaches.

Recently a lot of jurisdictions have made DDoS attacks as illegal as for example in the US, DDoS attack is a federal crime. In European countries it leads to arrests. Countries and their jurisdictions are now developing a series of codes along with regulations such that attacks on their systems can easily be controlled.  

References

Armando, A. M. (2012). Would you mind forking this process? A denial of service attack on Android (and some countermeasures). Information Security and Privacy Research, 13-24.

Lawson, J. W. (2010). U.S. Patent Application No. 12/900. 368.

Raymond, D. R. (2008). Denial-of-service in wireless sensor networks: Attacks and defenses. IEEE Pervasive Computing.

www.theguardian.com. (Retrieved on 23rd September 2017). Alleged mastermind behind bank cyber-attacks extradited to UK. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/30/alleged-mastermind-daniel-kaye-lloyds-bank-cyber-attacks-extradited-uk.