MegaMedusa: A Powerful Web DDoS Tool Used by Hackers

RipperSec, a pro-Palestinian Malaysian hacktivist group that started on Telegram in June 2023, has quickly grown to over 2,000 members. They carry out cyberattacks like data breaches, defacements, and DDoS attacks, mainly using MegaMedusa, a simple but effective DDoS tool that evades detection with 10 randomization techniques. Despite its lack of advanced CAPTCHA-solving abilities, MegaMedusa, paired with RipperSec’s large and motivated community, represents a serious cyber threat.

MegaMedusa

RipperSec, a cyber threat actor, claimed 196 DDoS attacks from January to August 2024, mainly targeting Israel, India, the US, the UK, and Thailand.

Government and educational websites were the main targets, followed by businesses, societal organizations, and the financial sector.

The group uses MegaMedusa, a publicly accessible Node.js-based DDoS tool, to carry out attacks. When deobfuscated, MegaMedusa’s JavaScript code reveals a command-line tool that can efficiently manage numerous simultaneous network connections, making it a powerful DDoS weapon.

MegaMedusa is a quick-deploy DDoS tool on Node.js that uses randomization techniques, like IP spoofing and header manipulation, to evade detection and distribute attack traffic via open proxies.

Despite the author’s coding skills, MegaMedusa supports open proxies but lacks authentication for commercial and private ones. It offers basic proxy scraping and limited CAPTCHA evasion, relying on random HTTP headers, which are ineffective against modern security measures.

The tool lacks CAPTCHA-solving abilities and cannot locate origin server IP addresses, limiting its effectiveness. Though it uses proxies for obfuscation, RipperSec members likely have more advanced tools, as suggested by internal screenshots.

Advanced DDoS attackers’ cloud infrastructure

MegaMedusa’s native proxy support, without third-party libraries, highlights the group’s technical skill and suggests the tool may be a simplified version of their capabilities. Advances in HTTP protocols and vulnerabilities like HTTPS/2 Rapid Reset enhance attack efficiency, while using open and commercial proxies, often via compromised residential networks, further obfuscates and strengthens DDoS attacks.

According to Radware, advanced DDoS attackers use a hybrid infrastructure that combines botnets and cloud-based resources for scalability and evasion. Botnets, often using compromised IoT devices, enable attacks like DNS water torture and PRSD by exploiting trust relationships. Cloud-based infrastructure, including bulletproof hosting, offers anonymity and efficiency. Attackers obscure their origins with IP spoofing, proxies, and Tor, while shifting from IoT botnets to cloud platforms for better management and resilience.