Denial of Service Attacks: Case Studies

This assignment analyzes Denial of Service (DoS) attacks through real-world case studies involving Lloyds and Barclays banks. It delves into the technical aspects of these attacks, highlighting how they disrupt services and impact users. The paper also examines the legal ramifications of DDoS attacks and explores international efforts to combat them.

Article Review of Denial of Service Attack
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Recent denial of cyber-attacks has been done on Lloyds and Barclays banks as has been reported
by theguardian. Briton Daniel Kaye has been extradited from Germany for purpose of
blackmailing these banks (www.theguardian.com, Retrieved on 23rd September 2017). The
mastermind in these cyber-attacks has disrupted 20 million accounts hence will face charges in
the UK. On January 11th to 13th, Llyods, Halifax along with Banks of Scotland were faced with
millions of requests that aimed to grind group’s system to halt, which is more popularly referred
to as denial of service attack (DDoS). Lloyds had to be paying GBP75,000 in bitcoins for calling
off the attack, but it did not pay the same. Barclays was faced with similar charges in same
month (Lawson, 2010).
Charges for such attacks had been investigated by National Crime Agency (NCA) with support
from Germany’s BKA which is its federal investigatory police authority. Kaye remained in
custody and he will be facing charges at Westminster magistrate. In this attack the perpetrator
made banks resources unavailable to its end users by disrupting service to the host connection to
the Internet. Incoming traffic flooded the bank from varied sources generating millions of
requests (Armando, 2012). Blackmailing was the sole reason for this denial of cyber-attack that
led to bank’s disruption in service. Last year November Lonestar Cell MTN had also
experienced a series of repeated attacks of DDoS. This crime was cross border and complex in
nature, where team of cybercrime officers had to analyze reams of data. These cybercrimes
targets various victims often impacting lives of millions. Mirai botnet was a type of malware
which used to conscript internet-connected devices forming botnets that could easily be
controlled in a centralized manner. Lloyds Banking Group highlighted that their subsequent
DDoS attacks have been defended successfully but resulted in temporary as well as intermittent
service issues for their customers (Raymond, 2008). Bank’s systems could not be accessed easily
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which resulted in service issue for customers as certain accounts had been compromised. These
banks have shared their data related to findings from such attacks that could lead to better and
enhanced prospects for the financial institutions. Interruption in services resulted in confusion for
customers initially as it prevented legitimate user of accounts from using services provided by
the bank. Perpetrator had made use of more than one IP address almost thousands of them for
typically making it impossible to track victim. The victim in this case had targeted application
layer of OSI model. They exercised specific functions of the bank making it almost impossible to
access those functions and disabling them. It is separate from a network attack as distracts IT
personnel and security people form such security breaches.
Recently a lot of jurisdictions have made DDoS attacks as illegal as for example in the US,
DDoS attack is a federal crime. In European countries it leads to arrests. Countries and their
jurisdictions are now developing a series of codes along with regulations such that attacks on
their systems can easily be controlled.
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Reference Lists
Armando, A. M. (2012). Would you mind forking this process? A denial of service attack on
Android (and some countermeasures). Information Security and Privacy Research, 13-24.
Lawson, J. W. (2010). U.S. Patent Application No. 12/900. 368.
Raymond, D. R. (2008). Denial-of-service in wireless sensor networks: Attacks and defenses.
IEEE Pervasive Computing.
www.theguardian.com. (Retrieved on 23rd September 2017). Alleged mastermind behind bank
cyber-attacks extradited to UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/30/alleged-mastermind-daniel-kaye-
lloyds-bank-cyber-attacks-extradited-uk.
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