Akamai Technologies, today released a new cybersecurity threat advisory alerting enterprises about a high-risk threat of powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from the Spike DDoS toolkit. With this toolkit, malicious actors are building bigger DDoS botnets by targeting a wider range of Internet-capable devices.
“This summer Akamai mitigated huge multi-vector DDoS attack campaigns that we traced to bots controlled by the new Spike DDoS toolkit,” said Stuart Scholly, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Security Business Unit, Akamai. “This DDoS kit is designed to build botnets from devices and platforms that system administrators may not have thought to be at risk for botnet infection in the past. Enterprises need system hardening to prevent initial infection and DDoS protection to stop DDoS attacks from the Spike bots.”
The multi-vector toolkit can launch infrastructure-based and application-based DDoS payloads. Attacks include SYN flood, UDP flood, Domain Name System (DNS) query flood, and GET floods. Several campaigns have been reported against hosts in Asia and the United States. DDoS attack campaigns launched from the botnet have targeted Akamai customers. One DDoS attack campaign mitigated by Akamai peaked at 215 gigabits per second (Gbps) and 150 million packets per second (Mpps).
According to the advisory, “The Spike DDoS toolkit runs on a Windows system, but it can communicate and execute commands to Windows, Linux and ARM-based devices infected with its binary payloads. The ability to generate an ARM-based binary payload suggests that the authors of this malicious tool are seeking to control devices such as routers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices (i.e., smart thermostat systems and washer/dryers). The capability to infect and control a broader range of devices could allow DDoS attackers to propagate botnets in a post-PC era.”
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