Brazilian Anti-DDoS Firm Compromised? The Irony of ISP Attacks
Just saw the writeup on Krebs regarding that Brazilian Anti-DDoS firm. Apparently, their infrastructure was allegedly weaponized to facilitate a massive botnet campaign against local ISPs. The CEO is claiming it was a breach by a competitor to tarnish their reputation, but honestly, that sounds like a deflection playbook.
Regardless of the intent (malicious insider or external breach), this highlights a massive risk in relying on third-party scrubbing centers. If the "clean" pipe becomes the attack vector, your internal monitoring might be too slow to react because you've whitelisted that traffic as "friendly protection."
From a detection standpoint, we should be treating scrubbing centers as untrusted zones. If you're peering with an MSP or DDoS provider, you need granular alerts on their egress traffic patterns. Here is a basic KQL query I use to hunt for anomalies in "trusted" high-volume sources:
let HighVolumeThreshold = 50000; // Adjust based on your baseline
let TrustedScrubbingCIDRs = dynamic(["192.0.2.0/24", "203.0.113.0/24"]); // Replace with your provider IPs
NetworkEvents
| where TimeGenerated > ago(4h)
| where IPv4Address in (TrustedScrubbingCIDRs)
| summarize PacketCount = sum(PacketsReceived), DistinctDestinations = dcount(DestinationIP) by SourceIP, bin(TimeGenerated, 15m)
| where PacketCount > HighVolumeThreshold or DistinctDestinations > 100
| order by PacketCount desc
Has anyone here implemented "Zero Trust" monitoring specifically for their DDoS mitigation providers? It feels like a blind spot in many architectures.
We actually stopped relying solely on cloud scrubbing last year. We moved to a hybrid model where we keep an inline appliance on-prem. If the cloud provider starts dumping garbage or gets compromised, we have a local rule to drop traffic from their GRE tunnel immediately. It's saved us twice when the provider had configuration errors, let alone a malicious attack.
The 'competitor did it' excuse is getting old. Even if true, it shows a lack of internal segmentation. If a competitor can breach your network and use your customers' bandwidth for attacks, your own security posture is non-existent. It’s like hiring a bodyguard who leaves their gun on the table for the bad guys to find.
Good post. For those running Linux edge routers, you can add a simple tc (traffic control) filter to police traffic coming from your scrubbing center. This prevents a 'pipe burst' from taking down your link even if the provider fails.
tc qdisc add dev eth0 root handle 1: htb default 10
tc class add dev eth0 parent 1: classid 1:1 htb rate 10gbit
tc class add dev eth0 parent 1:1 classid 1:10 htb rate 9gbit ceil 10gbit prio 0
# Police traffic from scrubber IP
tc filter add dev eth0 protocol ip parent 1:0 prio 1 u32 match ip src 192.0.2.0/24 police rate 8gbit burst 10m drop flowid :1
Just remember to swap the IP ranges.
Visibility is just as critical as filtering. We deployed an independent ntopng instance to monitor the 'sanitized' traffic specifically looking for anomalies like high entropy or unusual port usage that the scrubber might miss or maliciously introduce.
# Quick check for top talking IPs post-scrubber
nfdump -r /var/log/nfcapd/current -o "fmt:%ts %sa %da %pr %byt" | sort -k4 -rn | head -n 20
This creates a sanity check layer, ensuring the 'clean' pipe is actually delivering what was promised.
This reinforces the necessity of strict egress filtering. Even if your scrubber sends malicious traffic, your perimeter should be configured to drop invalid outbound packets. This prevents your infrastructure from being weaponized if the trusted pipe is compromised.
You can use a simple iptables rule to drop invalid packets leaving your network:
iptables -A OUTPUT -m state --state INVALID -j DROP
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