An FBI study has suggested that youngsters are behind many web attacks. The study scrutinized ‘booter’ providers that perform denial of service assaults.
The research presented at the Black Hat security conference investigated carrying out of assaults and sought to determine their operators.
It comes quickly after work by cost companies and safety researchers to make it more durable to run booters.
The name ‘booter’ was obtained as they were used by gamers to knock opponent’s offline who had bettered them in an online battle, said FBI special agent, Elliott Peterson. Since then many had diversified to offer "stresser" services that attempt to overwhelm a target website with data which is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Though the attacks are run by cyber gangs situated in Eastern Europe, the people behind the booters and stressers are located somewhere else.
The research involved paying many providers to attack a target website and then observing whether that booter did what it claimed to be able to do. Prices vary but the lowest tier of attacks is less than $20 (£15).
FBI noted that none of the booters lived up to their claims of bombarding a site with hundreds of gigabits of data per second.
Many services advertise on forums where hackers gather but few were good at concealing information for investigators.
The not so sophisticated young operators have a lot of paying customers.
Payment for booter and stresser attacks are often collected via Paypal.
Prof Damon McCoy from the New York University, who has also researched these services, has collaborated with Paypal in an attempt to stop one service getting paid via the payment firm's network.
The research presented at the Black Hat security conference investigated carrying out of assaults and sought to determine their operators.
It comes quickly after work by cost companies and safety researchers to make it more durable to run booters.
The name ‘booter’ was obtained as they were used by gamers to knock opponent’s offline who had bettered them in an online battle, said FBI special agent, Elliott Peterson. Since then many had diversified to offer "stresser" services that attempt to overwhelm a target website with data which is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Though the attacks are run by cyber gangs situated in Eastern Europe, the people behind the booters and stressers are located somewhere else.
The research involved paying many providers to attack a target website and then observing whether that booter did what it claimed to be able to do. Prices vary but the lowest tier of attacks is less than $20 (£15).
FBI noted that none of the booters lived up to their claims of bombarding a site with hundreds of gigabits of data per second.
Many services advertise on forums where hackers gather but few were good at concealing information for investigators.
The not so sophisticated young operators have a lot of paying customers.
Payment for booter and stresser attacks are often collected via Paypal.
Prof Damon McCoy from the New York University, who has also researched these services, has collaborated with Paypal in an attempt to stop one service getting paid via the payment firm's network.