400G Ethernet, My Observation Notes

I saw a post about Cisco has announced 400G Ethernet switch products.

400G Ethernet means the bit rate can be up to 400 Gbps. Here are some of my observation notes on 400G Ethernet products.

Bank lost 1 million US Dollars because of outdated routers

A recent news was about hackers hacked into a Russian bank because of outdated routers. When I saw the keyword “router”, I felt that I must dig further about what really happened.

What I have understood now

The victim is PIR Bank. One of the suspects is MoneyTaker. After the breach, PIR Bank hired company Group-IB to do the clean-ups, recovery, and investigating how the hackers got into their internal network.

Up to this moment, Group-IB disclosed hackers exploited the outdated routers of PIR Bank. The model of the routers was Cisco 800 series routers, which was already declared publicly that the End of Support date would be someday in Year 2016, by Cisco. The running Cisco IOS version was 12.4.

BGP Injection instead of Leak, my observation notes for MyEtherWallet incident

After reading articles by Doug Madory, and by Louis Poinsignon, here are some notes I observed and learned.

[What happened in this incident?]

Hackers somehow made some BGP routers of “eNet” to falsely announce that they own the following 5 IP subnets, which are indeed NOT belonging to “eNet”. The true owner is Amazon. To be more specific, they are for Amazon’s Route 53 DNS name resolution services.

• 205.251.192.0/24
• 205.251.193.0/24
• 205.251.195.0/24
• 205.251.197.0/24
• 205.251.199.0/24

The registered domain server for domain “MyEtherWallet.com” is hosted on Amazon Route 53.

Hackers also somehow embedded malicious DNS server (or servers, I really don’t know) also inside service network of “eNet”.

After that, any affected clients’ DNS query for domain “MyEtherWallet.com” would hit hacker’s malicious DNS server. Of course, malicious DNS server would respond with false IP addresses, and those false IP addresses are indeed hacker’s own web servers.

At this moment, clients thought they were accessing “MyEtherWallet.com”, and they indeed were accessing hacker’s web servers.