Posted: April 26th, 2022

Denial of Service Attack

Denial of Service Attack
Computer Sciences and Information Technology.
Research via the internet and find recent news article regarding denial of service attack, or distributed denial of service attack.

Between 25th and 28th August 2020, the New Zeeland stock change (NZX) was hit by several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which knocked its services offline for at least four consecutive days (BBC, 2020). DDoS attacks are a common way cybercriminals use to disrupt specific servers by overwhelming them with internet traffic floods. The exchange claimed that these attacks came from overseas. NZX also claimed that the volumetric attacks came from offshore, and it impacted its system connectivity. Among the systems impacted included the Markets Announcement Platform and NZX websites. Consequently, the NZX had to halt its trading on its cash market, while operations in the debt market were also disrupted (BBC, 2020).
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are types of cyber-attacks where large computer arrays try to establish connections to an online service simultaneously, and overwhelming its capacity in the process (Haworth, 2020). These attacks often use devices compromised by malicious malware without the owners even knowing that they are a part of an attack. Although genuine traders in the NZX had challenges undertaking their business operations, it didn’t mean that any personal or financial information was accessed. However, according to Rizwan Asghar, a computer science professor at the University of Auckland, the first attack can occur anytime, but experiencing multiple attacks within four consecutive days raises some serious questions. Asghar’s real question regards the resources allocated and the threshold to safeguard against such attacks (Haworth, 2020).
In November, CertNZ, a New Zealand-based cyber-security organization, issued an alert that emails were being sent to various financial firms, threatening them with DDoS attacks unless ransom paid. These emails came from Fancy Bear, a well-recognized Russian hacking group. However, at the time, CertNZ said that these threats were never carried out beyond 30-minutes attacks, which according to experts; it was just a scare tactic. Nonetheless, these types of attacks demonstrate the severity of security concerns that modern organizations have to deal with today (BBC, 2020).
The CEO and founder of ImmuniWeb, a web security company based in Auckland, New Zeeland, argues that very little can be done to prevent well-prepared and large-scale DDoS attacks today. He further suggests that at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the overall price of buying a bot that is used to undertake DDoS attacks has fallen tremendously, a factor that has made them more affordable (BBC, 2020). As a consequence, many people can now access these bots quite easily. Under such circumstances, once millions of devices suddenly undertake massive attacks, it becomes an issue of network capacity and not security anymore. Nonetheless, according to Haworth (2020), web APIs and applications have to be audited regularly for any architectural security flaws or business logic that is likely to consume most of its CPU/RAM and immensely facilitate DDoS attacks.
From the preceding, DDoS attacks are a common way cybercriminals use to disrupt specific servers by overwhelming them with internet traffic floods. In the case of NZX DDoS attacks, it impacted its system connectivity. Among the systems impacted included the Markets Announcement Platform and NZX websites. Consequently, the NZX had to halt its trading on its cash market, while operations in the debt market were also disrupted. These developments demonstrate the seriousness of these attacks and their potential to derail normal operations in any organization. With the overall price of buying a bot used to undertake DDoS attacks falling tremendously, organizations should seek to enhance their network capacity and security to prevent these types of attacks in the future.
References
BBC. (2020, August 26). New Zealand stock exchange halted by cyber-attack. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/53918580
Haworth, J. (2020, August 26). New Zealand stock exchange hit by series of DDoS attacks. The Daily Swig | Cybersecurity news and views. https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/new-zealand-stock-exchange-hit-by-series-of-ddos-attacks

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