Chinese Botnet As-A-Service Bypasses Cloudflare & Other DDoS Protection Services

A large botnet-as-a-service network originating from China was discovered, which comprises numerous domains, over 20 active Telegram groups, and utilizes other domestic communication channels. 

The infrastructure that supports this botnet, located in China, raises concerns about the potential for large-scale, coordinated attacks. Botnets are collections of compromised devices that attackers can remotely control. 

The attackers can then use the botnet’s combined processing power to disrupt operations, steal data, or launch denial-of-service attacks that overwhelm targeted systems with traffic, rendering them inaccessible to legitimate users.

Even if a target is using these well-known DDoS protection services, it is still at risk of being offline due to a denial-of-service attack because a group has developed strategies and a botnet that can bypass the most recent DDoS protection solutions from CloudFlare and other vendors.

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The technical particulars of how the methods and botnets operate are not known to the general public; however, it is evident that they are successful in evading the defenses that are currently in place. 

Malicious actors within online groups target European companies’ domain names across various sectors, which act as unique identifiers for company websites and online presence. 

By compromising these domains, attackers could potentially redirect users to fraudulent websites designed to steal data or spread malware, highlighting the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability. This infrastructure translates domain names into IP addresses. 

Protecting these domains and implementing stringent DNS security measures is absolutely necessary for European businesses to safeguard their online operations and customers’ trust. 

A report by EPCYBER alleges that a website was able to launch a DDoS attack against itself, successfully bypassing CloudFlare’s latest DDoS protection measures by raising concerns about a potential vulnerability in CloudFlare’s system. 

DDoS attacks work by overwhelming a target system with a deluge of traffic, rendering it inaccessible to legitimate users.

CloudFlare typically mitigates DDoS attacks by filtering out malicious traffic before it reaches the target website.

However, it suggests that the attacker may have identified and exploited a loophole in CloudFlare’s recent DDoS rule updates, and this loophole allowed the attacker’s DDoS traffic to bypass CloudFlare’s filters and reach the target website, ultimately causing a successful DDoS attack.

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