Anonymous Sudan

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 







About Anonymous Sudan

They are a hacker group involved in a variety of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against a variety of targets in Sweden, Denmark, America, Australia, etc., in 2023. They claims to be based in Sudan, and attacks the so-called "anti-Muslim activity." However, their actual origin is not clear and according to researchers, they might be linked to Russia.

Origin and Motive

Some of the attacks of this threat actor are as follows:
  • Anonymous Sudan attacked many websites in Sweden and Denmark in 2023, allegedly because of a Swedish and Danish far-right activist who publicly burned a copy of Quran.

  • They attacked various Israeli websites in 2023 due to the country's military activity in Palestine.

  • This hacker group also attacked a fan-fiction website AO3 in July, 2023, due to religious objections to the content of their website.

  • Anonymous Sudan and Killnet jointly attacked a series of Australian universities, hospitals, and airports. 

  • Trio of Anonymous Sudan, Killnet, and the attack group ReVIL also threatened to attack the critical banking infrastructure due to Russia-Ukraine war. 

Tactics of Anonymous Sudan

Their attack pattern includes:
  • Launches HTTP attacks- They send Floods of HTTP traffic, designed to overwhelm the target infrastructure. 

  • Uses paid infrastructure- Reportedly, they do not use a botnet of infected personal and IoT devices to attack. Instead, they use a cluster of rented servers capable to output more traffic than personal devices to launch attacks. 

  • Make threats via public announcements and propaganda- They often threaten their targets before launching an attack. However, sometimes they were just empty threats done to gain public attention for their ideological motives and sow uncertainty amongst potential targets. 

Protection & Mitigation

The following practices can help in protecting against Anonymous Sudan:
  • Use dedicated, always-on DDoS mitigation- DDoS mitigation service uses a large bandwidth capacity, analyze the network traffic continuously, and customizable policy changes to absorb DDoS traffic. It also stops the traffic from reaching a targeted infrastructure.

  • Using a Web Application Firewall (WAF)- It can use customized policies to filter, inspect, and block malicious HTTP traffic between web applications and the Internet.

  • Configuring rate limit- It can easily restrict the volume of network traffic over a specific time period, securing the web servers from getting overwhelmed by requests from specific IP addresses. 

  • Cache content on a CDN- Cache can store copies of the requested content and serve them in place of an origin server. It can reduce strain during a DDoS attack.

  • Establish internal processes to respond the attacks- This one involves understanding the existing security protection and capabilities, identifying unnecessary attack surfaces, analyzing logs to look for attack patterns, and having processes in place form where to look and what to do when an attack begins. 































































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