DDoS-Sniper: sophisticated attacker analyzed

99% of DDoS-DFIR (primary the forensic part) consist of botnet-analysis and dealing with the „usual suspects“ like booter-services and smaller botnets.

But every once in a while we come across an interesting attack like this with attackers who either play tricks with the Os-people or are able to attack efficiently.

as in this case, which we want to report on here, where the attacker:

1. shut down the VPN-gateways to deny access for tech and ops
2. shut down the inter-datacenter routers/transfer-routers
3. shut down the authoritative dns-infra that affected all clients

all within minutes.

The attacker used his OSINT-FOO to get the information needed for steps 1 and 2, and was able to achieve his goal through a small but fatal misconfiguration. But more on that later.

Disclaimer: All screenshots were taken with the help of our DDoS analysis platform, with which we are able to analyse log files (firewall, sflow, web/access logs) and evaluate them from a DDoS point of view. For an overall view and assessment of the attacker, it is always important to know: what happened when, how and why, and in what order, especially when you need to know if an attack happened by a scriptkiddie or an advanced attacker.

dissecting a DDoS-attack, identifying targets and attacktimes

Prelude 1st Wave: Attack on the VPN dialins and corerouters

In the first wave, neuralgic points were attacked:

• the VPN gateway for the service staff
• 2 corerouters, which were responsible for the data transfer between the individual locations/datacentres of the company.

With this attack, the service staff was quickly incapacitated, as 70% of the technicians work from home and were dependent on the VPN endpoint.

In addition, „shooting down“ the corerouters prevented any intra-DC data traffic, so rerouting and using fallbacks from the backup DC and many other things did not work.

How did the attacker get this information? Insider? crystal ball?

The first impulse would be „insider knowledge“.

Well, as we have seen in the State of DDoS-Summary 2021, there are more and more attackers with a professional approach, such as recon and enumeration via OSINT and clever target selection.

Because in this case, attacked systems and approach can be easily clarified by the following assumption:

• it was a targeted attack
• the actual target is to remain disguised
• maximum impact needed

Since there was no blackmail letter or ransomnote, but the attack otherwise did not give the impression of a sledgehammer method, we assumed a targeted attack by an experienced attacker. And experienced attackers know Recon and target selection.

So we performed a mini-recon ourselves, checked all the IPs available online via shodan and then had reverseDNS for all IPs and parsed for „[fw|gw|vpn]“, et voila!

rDNS reveals target-selection

In total, we found more than a handful of firewalls and VPN gateways, but these could be assigned to customers rather than directly to the data centre, and a total of 4 from the datacentre itself.

This clarifies the first point, how the attacker could potentially obtain the information regarding the VPN endpoint for technicians.

The second point, how the corerouters used for the inter-DC traffic could be identified, is similarly easy to answer; we will use a traceroute from Hetzner as an example.

Here you can see the EdgeRouter „versatel-gw.hetzner.com“, then the intra-DC corerouters between Frankfurt (fra) and Nuremberg (nbg), which shouldnt normally be reached or pinged.

traceroute shows corerouter

But in the case of the attack we analysed, it did. And so the attacker was able to limit the ability to act for the technical staff and the intra-DC communication in a very short time, headshot!

2nd Wave: Attack on the Authoritative DNS Infrastructure

The second wave hit the DNS infrastructure, and since the datacentre utilizes CNAMES heavily and is the Auth-DNS for more than 30,000 domains, this part of the attack affected all customers.

Successful DDoS attacks on DNS infrastructure always have devastating effects.

Nothing more to say here, except that, due to the 1st wave, technicians couldnt mitigate the attack as fast as execpted.

That Little Misconfig-Detail

This post does not end here. Continued here.