Review of the "Operation Hong Kong" Cyber Attack Campaign
The most extensive cyber attack in Hong Kong
From October 1 to the end of October, an international hacker group "Anonymous" has declared a cyber attack campaign called Operation Hong Kong (OpHongKong) against Hong Kong websites. It was the most extensive and longest territory-wide cyber attack in the history of Hong Kong, targeting websites of government departments, critical organizations, political organizations, press & media, and some non-government organizations.
The attack calmed down on around 20-Oct with only isolated attacks carrying on afterwards.
The attackers were quite high profile. They announced their target websites on social media websites and they openly recruited volunteers to join the attack. They even provide one-click DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack tools so that people without technical know-how could participate.
There were mainly 3 types of attacks in the campaign: web defacement, DDoS attack and intrusion of information systems respectively. For DDoS attack, attackers used web application attacks, malformed network protocols, SYN flood, volumetric attacks and Wordpress pingback as the means.
According to HKCERT's statistics (/my_url/en/blog/14102201), from Oct 2 to 22, there were 38 non-government websites defaced and 23 non-government websites attacked by DDoS. All of them have resumed to normal operation.
Response actions of HKCERT
HKCERT had proactively and promptly responded to the incident in the following ways:
- worked closely with the Government and Police round the clock to exchange information and monitored the target sites
- informed the public of the attacks immediately and advised them how to secure their systems
- informed the victims and advised them on how to recover the affected websites
- informed the hosting companies of targets to prepare for the attacks affecting their network
- issued takedown requests to administrators whose servers were hosting DDoS attack scripts
- warned Internet users not to participate in any cyber attacks.
Some of our blog articles were republished in some IT blogs and discussion forums in Hong Kong to let more people know. HKCERT would like to express our gratitude to the kind assistance of these blog and forum administrators.
Do Better Security with Lessons Learnt
HKCERT likes to share with you some lessons learnt. Hope you can prepare better for cyber attacks.
- Hactivism, hacking attacks arising from ideological conflict, is no longer a myth in Hong Kong. There are a lot of collateral damages in cyber attacks related to hacktivism. For example, when attackers flood the target with huge amount of network traffics, users at the network proximity of the target also suffer network performance degradation. So users should not view themselves just as a bystander in a cyber attack, they should be more prepared for the adverse consequence of the attacks.
- Most victims should not have been compromised, or the impact should have been more limited if they had applied the latest security update to their software and applied proper security defense.
- Some users found their computers being utilized to launch attack, causing the network bandwidth being exhausted. Should they have secured their system and configured their system properly, the impact would have been avoided or more limited.
- Some citizens clicked on hyperlinks of DDoS attack tools and became an attacker. They were later tracked back by law enforcement and even be legally liable. Citizens are reminded not to attempt to participate in cyber attack which is a criminal offence.
- The bright side of the story is, some victims recovered much faster than others. They have incident response plans in place. Some put their DNS server and web server behind security service providers and could activate the protection service to mitigate the impacts of security attacks and large volume of flooding traffics.
Here are HKCERT blog articles on the “Operation Hong Kong” cyber attack campaign:
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