US-CERT is continuing research efforts and will provide additional data as it becomes available.
Target selection, timing, and other attack activity is often coordinated through social media sites or online forums. The packets contained a message followed by variable amounts of padding, for exampleĦ6:6c:6f:6f:64:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 | flood. Prior to January 20, 2012, US-CERT observed additional DDoS attacks that consisted of UDP packets on ports 25 and 80. The "msg" field can be arbitrarily set by the attacker. "hxxp://The HTTP requests contained an "id" value based on UNIX time and a user-defined "msg" value, for example Please do not visit any of the links because they may still host functioning LOIC or other malicious code. The following sites have been identified in HTTP referrer headers of suspected LOIC traffic. The following is a sample of LOIC traffic recorded in a web server log: A binary variant of LOIC includes the ability to join a botnet to allow nodes to be controlled via IRC or RSS command channels (the "HiveMind" feature). An attacker can access this variant of LOIC on a website and select targets, specify an optional message, throttle attack traffic, and monitor attack progress. One variant is written in JavaScript and designed to be used from a web browser.
US-CERT has reviewed at least two implementations of LOIC. Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) is a DoS-attack tool associated with previous Anonymous activity. US-CERT has evidence of two types of DDoS attacks: one using HTTP GET requests and another using a simple UDP flood.