News Insights: FBI Warns of DDoS Attack on State Voter Registration Site

News Insights:

James McQuiggan, Security Awareness Advocate, KnowBe4

“Denial of Service (DoS) attacks still remain a popular attack vector for criminals against organizations to remove the availability of their internet access and thus preventing people the ability to access their website. Since UDP is a connectionless protocol, it can easily be spoofed, which makes it an easy attack vector against the websites. The FBI recommendations in the Private Industry Notification are a good start for every organization to implement to protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.  

Complementing the PIN, there are additional tactics to consider for an organization’s robust security program to protect against DoS. These include the ability to not allow unsolicited DNS responses, which can prevent against reflection attacks. With these query floods constantly hitting the DNS servers, organizations can configure their DNS server to not respond to the same queries if a response was recently sent, as a real request will not send the same query over and over if it’s been resolved. Finally, the servers can be configured to force the DNS requests to prove they are not spoofed, and therefore drop those requests if the request is unable to do so. 

While there is technology readily available to support organizations from these DoS attacks, they are unable to spend the resources to implement measures against the risk they accept in the event of an attack and possibly the loss of productivity; and further, most likely an impact to their bottom line”