Emergency 112 number hit by DDoS Attack, warns EU cyber agency

Millions of people across Europe have faced disrupted communications in dozens of major outages, with many incidents affecting access to the 112 emergency phone service, the EU's cyber security agency has warned.
ENISA, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, said countries had reported 79 major outage incidents during 2012, almost 40 per cent of which had affected the possibility of dialling 112.
The incidents, which featured in the agency's annual report, were caused by a range of factors, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyber attacks, faulty upgrades, cable theft, and faulty software.
A range of telecommunications were affected by the outages, but mobile phones and mobile internet faced the most significant impact.
Professor Udo Helmbrecht, executive director of ENISA said: "The EU collaboration behind this report is key to improving the security and resilience of electronic communications networks in the EU, as well as for security in other critical sectors.
"Reporting major incidents helps us understand what went wrong, why, and how to prevent similar incidents from happening again."

DDoS diverts attention during Payment Switch takeover

DDoS attacks are an increasingly popular method for criminals to divert bank security staff attention while defrauding bank systems.
Until recently, most illegal money transfers were accomplished via account takeover of either customer or employee accounts when the fraudsters moved money from customer accounts to their mules and eventually their own accounts.
A new much more ominous attack type has emerged over the past few months – and uses DDoS as its cover. Once the DDoS is underway, this attack involves takeover of the payment switch (e.g. wire application) itself via a privileged user account that has access to it. Now, instead of having to get into one customer account at a time, the criminals can simply control the master payment switch and move as much money from as many accounts as they can get away with until their actions are noticed.
Considerable financial damage has resulted from these attacks. One rule that banks should institute is to slow down the money transfer system while under a DDoS attack.
More generally, a layered fraud prevention and security approach is warranted. See our research on the Seven Dimensions of Context Aware Security and the Five Layers of Fraud Prevention.