Evil DoS Attacks and Strong Defenses

DEF CON 21

Presented by: Sam Bowne, Matthew Prince
Date: Friday August 02, 2013
Time: 14:00 - 14:45
Location: Track 1
Track: Track 1

On the attack side, this talk will explain and demonstrate attacks which crash Mac OS X, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and Web servers; causing a BSOD or complete system freeze. The Mac and Windows systems fall to the new IPv6 Router Advertisement flood in thc-ipv6-2.1, but only after creating a vulnerable state with some "priming" router advertisements. Servers fail from Sockstress--a brutal TCP attack which was invented in 2008, but still remains effective today.

On the defense side: the inside story of the DDoS that almost Broke the Internet.

In March 2013, attackers launched an attack against Spamhaus that topped 300Gbps. Spamhaus gave us permission to talk about the details of the attack. While CloudFlare was able to fend off the attack, it exposed some vulnerabilities in the Internet's infrastructure that attackers will inevitably exploit. If an Internet-crippling attack happens, this is what it will look like. And here's what the network needs to do in order to protect itself.

Sam Bowne

Sam Bowne (@sambowne) has been teaching computer networking and security classes at CCSF since 2000. He has given talks at DEFCON, BayThreat, LayerOne, Toorcon, and lightning talks at HOPE on Ethical Hacking, and taught classes and seminars at many other schools and teaching conferences. He has a PhD & lot of industry certs but still no CISSP.

Matthew Prince

Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) is the co-founder & CEO of CloudFlare, the web performance and security company. Matthew wrote his first computer program at age 7 when his mom would sneak him in to university computer science courses. After attending law school, he worked as an attorney for one day before jumping at the opportunity to be a founding member of a tech startup. He hasn't looked back. CloudFlare is Matthew's third entrepreneurial venture. CloudFlare was named a 2012 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and selected by the Wall Street Journal as the Most Innovative Internet Technology company for the last two years running. Today, CloudFlare accelerates and protects more than 120 billion page views for over a million customers and more than 1.5 billion web visitors every month. Matthew holds a degree in English and Computer Science from Trinity College. He graduated with highest honors from the Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. He earned a JD from the University of Chicago and is a member of the Illinois Bar. He teaches technology law as an adjunct professor at the John Marshall Law School where he serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. He is also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse. On the side, Matthew is a certified ski instructor, a former mountain guide, and a regular attendee of the Sundance Film Festival.


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