Bonets Attack U.S. Banks

Evidence collected from a website that was recently used to flood U.S. banks with junk traffic suggests that the responsible parties behind the ongoing DDoS attack campaign against U.S. financial institutions — thought by some to be the work of Iran — are using botnets for hire.

The compromised website contained a PHP-based backdoor script that was regularly instructed to send numerous HTTP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) requests to the websites of several U.S. banks, including PNC Bank, HSBC and Fifth Third Bank, Ronen Atias, a security analyst at Web security services provider Incapsula, said Tuesday in a blog post.

Atias described the compromised site as a “small and seemingly harmless general interest UK website” that recently signed up for Incapsula’s services.

An analysis of the site and the server logs revealed that attackers were instructing the rogue script to send junk traffic to U.S. banking sites for limited periods of time varying between seven minutes and one hour. The commands were being renewed as soon as the banking sites showed signs of recovery, Atias said.

During breaks from attacking financial websites the backdoor script was being instructed to attack unrelated commercial and e-commerce sites. “This all led us to believe that we were monitoring the activities of a Botnet for hire,” Atias said.

“The use of a Web Site as a Botnet zombie for hire did not surprise us,” the security analyst wrote. “After all, this is just a part of a growing trend we’re seeing in our DDoS prevention work.”

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