In 2012, the Dutch National Research and Education Network, SURFnet, observed a multitude of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against educational institutions. These attacks were effective enough to cause the online exams of hundreds of students to be cancelled. Surprisingly, these attacks were purchased by students from websites, known as Booters. These sites provide DDoS attacks as a paid service (DDoS-as-a-Service) at costs starting from 1 USD. Since this problem was first identified by SURFnet, Booters have been used repeatedly to perform attacks on schools in SURFnet's constituency. Very little is known, however, about the characteristics of Booters, and particularly how their attacks are structure. This is vital information needed to mitigate these attacks. In this paper we analyse the characteristics of 14 distinct Booters based on more than 250 GB of network data from real attacks. Our findings show that Booters pose a real threat that should not be underestimated, especially since our analysis suggests that they can easily increase their firepower based on their current infrastructure.

No abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an increasing threat on the Internet. Until a few years ago, these types of attacks were only launched by people with advanced knowledge of computer networks. However, nowadays the ability to launch attacks have been offered as a service to everyone, even to those without any advanced knowledge. Booters are online tools that offer DDoS-as-a-Service. Some of them advertise, for less than U$ 5, up to 25 Gbps of DDoS traffic, which is more than enough to make most hosts and services on the Internet unavailable. Booters are increasing in popularity and they have shown the success of attacks against third party services, such as government websites; however, there are few mitigation proposals. In addition, existing literature in this area provides only a partial understanding of the threat, for example by analyzing only a few aspects of one specific Booter. In this paper, we propose mitigation solutions against DDoS-as-a-Service that will be achieved after an extensive characterization of Booters. Early results show 59 different Booters, which some of them do not deliver what is offered. This research is still in its initial phase and will contribute to a Ph.D. thesis after four years.

Abstract-Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an increasing threat on the Internet. One of the reasons is that websites selling attacks for prices starting from $1.00 are becoming popular. These websites, called Booters, facilitate attacks by making transparent the needed infrastructure to perform attacks and by lowering the knowledge to control it. As a consequence, any user on the Internet is able to launch attacks at any time. Although security experts and operators acknowledge the potential of Booters for DDoS attacks, little is known about Booters operational aspects in terms of users, attacks and infrastructure. The existing works that investigate this phenomenon are all restricted to the analysis of a single Booter and therefore provide a narrow overview of the phenomenon. In this paper we extend the existing work by providing an extensive analysis on 15 distinct Booters. We analyze their operational databases containing logs of users, attacks, and the infrastructure used to perform attacks. Among our findings we reveal that (i) some Booters have several database records completely equal, (ii) users that access Booters via proxies and VPNs performed much more attacks than those that accessed using a single IP address, and (iii) the infrastructure used to perform attacks is slightly different from what is known through existing work. The contribution of our work is to bring awareness of Booter characteristics facilitating future works to mitigate this phenomenon.

The expansion of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)-for-hire websites, known as Booters, has radically modified both the scope and stakes of DDoS attacks. Until recently, however, Booters have only received little attention from the research community. Given their impact, addressing the challenges associated with this phenomenon is crucial. In this paper, we present a rigorous methodology to identify a comprehensive set of existing Booters in the Internet.Before presenting our methodology, we illustrate the benefits of a set of booters on monitoring users from the Dutch NREN, SURFNet, from 2015 to 2017. Our methodology relies on well-defined mechanisms to generate a Booter list, from crawling suspect URLs to characterizing and classifying the collected URLs. The list obtained using the methodology presented in this paper has a classification accuracy of 95.5%, which is 10.5% better compared to previous work.Int J Network Mgmt. 2018;28:e2008.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nem

The expansion of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) for hire websites, known as Booters, has radically modified both the scope and stakes of DDoS attacks. Until recently, however, Booters have only received little attention from the research community. Given their impact, addressing the challenges associated with this phenomenon is crucial. In this paper, we present a rigorous methodology to identify a comprehensive set of existing Booters in the Internet. The methodology relies on well-defined mechanisms to generate a Booter blacklist, from crawling suspect URLs to characterizing and classifying the collected URLs. The list obtained using the methodology presented in this paper has a classification accuracy of 95.5%, which is 10.5% better compared to previous work. We also demonstrate the usage of our methodology applied by the Dutch NREN, SURFNet, which started using our blacklist to extend their Booters' activities monitoring.

Abstract. Dependable operation of the Internet is of crucial importance for our society. In recent years Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have quickly become a major problem for the Internet. Most of these attacks are initiated by kids that target schools, ISPs, banks and web-shops; the Dutch NREN (SURFNet), for example, sees around 10 of such attacks per day. Performing attacks is extremely simple, since many websites offer "DDoS as a Service"; in fact it is easier to order a DDoS attack than to book a hotel! The websites that offer such DDoS attacks are called "Booters" or Stressers", and are able to perform attacks with a strength of many Gbps. Although current attempts to mitigate attacks seem promising, analysis of recent attacks learns that it is quite easy to build next generation attack tools that are able to generate DDoS attacks with a strength thousand to one million times higher than the ones we see today. If such tools are used by nation-states or, more likely, terrorists, it should be possible to completely stop the Internet. This paper argues that we should prepare for such novel attacks. Current DDoS attacksCurrent DDoS attacks are often performed by youngsters via websites that offer "DDoS as a Service". Such websites, which are called "Booters" or Stressers", are able to generate attacks with strengths of many Gbps. A simple Google search shows that hundreds of such Booters are currently active; the costs to perform a series of attacks is typically a few dollars [1][2]. In general Booters do not attack their targets directly, but use one or two levels of intermediate systems to strengthen and anonymise the attacks. The first level is formed by botnets that start the attack once they receive specific commands from the Booter. The second level is used to amplify the attack and can, for example, involve a set of DNS or NTP servers that react upon the reception of relatively small requests by sending large response packets. The ratio between response and request message size is the amplification factor; in practice we find factors between ten and hundred. Particularly popular for amplification attacks are socalled open DNS resolvers, which are basically misconfigured DNS servers that answer DNS queries irrespective of their origin. To target a specific victim, the

No abstract