Pierluigi Paganini
May 26, 2016
The Freelancer-finding site Fiverr is offering DDoS attacks-as-a-service for just five dollars. The site connects professionals that offer any kind of services to buyers. If you are searching for a developer to hire, Fiverr is the right place for you.
Technically, these services are called booter or stresser services and could be sold as would-be legitimate tools for security professionals that need to test the resilience of their infrastructure to cyber attacks or their capacity to support a high-volume of traffic.
In March, Dennis Schwarz, Research Analyst on Arbor’s ASERT Team, explained that a DDoS attack that costs US$60 per day could inflict as much as US$720,000 in damage to the victim organisation.
Exactly one year ago, experts from Incapsula analyzed the 20 most common stresser services revealing that the average price was $38 per hour, and went as low as $19.
Now the Incapsula experts Igal Zeifman and Dan Breslaw confirmed the availability of stresser and booter services on Fiverr website at very affordable prices.
At this point, the researcher decided to investigate the intent of such services and discovered that they can be used against any website, except against critical infrastructure and government websites.
“As you can see from the image above, the ads we found were pretty incriminating—especially the skull and bones image that offered to “Massive DDoS Attack your Website”. Not wanting to rush to judgment, we decided to investigate and see if the users were the innocent stress testers they claimed to be. To do so, we created an account on Fiverr and asked each of the stresser providers the following question: “Regarding the stress test, does the site have to be my own?”” states the duo in a blog post.”
“Most had the good sense to ignore our message. One suggested that we talk on Skype. In the end, it was skull-and-bones guy who spilled the beans, saying:
“Honestly, you [can] test any site. Except government state websites, hospitals.””
“This just goes to show that even DDoSers have some moral compass, as well as a healthy fear of the government,”
The five-dollar price requested for an hour of DDoS attack services is worrying and represents a new record low. Experts speculate that a so cheap service likely leverages on hacked devices, including SOHO and IoT devices.
The Freelancer-finding site Fiverr has already removed three of the commercials for stresser services, including the one used by the researchers.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/secbloggerwards2016
Thank you
Pierluigi
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(Security Affairs – Fiverr, DDoS for hire)
