Rent to Pwn: Analyzing Commodity Booter DDoS Services
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, the practice by which a malicious party attempts to disrupt a host or network service, has become an increasingly common and effective method of attack. In this article, we summarize what we have learned while investigating the phenomenon of what are called booter or stresser services. These booter services began as a tool used by video-game players to gain an advantage by slowing or disrupting their opponents’ network connection for a short period of time; however, as these services have become increasingly commercialized, they have morphed into powerful, reliable, and easy to use general purpose DDoS services that can be linked to several attacks against non-gamer Web sites.
We begin with an overview of DDoS techniques. We then outline the common capabilities and infrastructure used by these booter services supported with information found on underground forums that market and review such services. Finally, we present empirical measurements of one particular booter, known as TwBooter, based on a publicly leaked dump of their operational database and our own measurements of their attack capabilities.
Download Article:
Article Section:
SECURITY
;login: issue: