Telephone DoS: Who Are You Gonna Call?

B. Ostergaard

Summary Bullets:

• Recent hacktivist attacks have been aimed at the corporate phone lines, criminal hackers will launch combined DDoS/TDoS attacks
• The good news is that MSSPs are bringing on TDoS mitigation solutions

On April 12, 2012 a hacktivist group with the ominous name ‘TeaMp0isoN’ targeted the UK counter-terror agency, MI6, claiming to be motivated by the recent decision at the European Court of Human Rights allowing suspected terrorists to be extradited to the United States. However, the attack was not the usual DDoS barrage against the MI6 Web presence. Instead, the group created a wall of phone calls for a period of 24 hours, which meant nobody else could get through. They used a script based on the Asterisk software with a SIP protocol to make calls to the agency’s offices non-stop, basically launching a telephone-based denial-of-service (TDoS) attack.