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When multiple major tech companies go down in short order, it's generally reasonable to assume a state actor is responsible. There are only 3 countries with th
by gamblor956 6y ago
When multiple major tech companies go down in short order, it's generally reasonable to assume a state actor is responsible.
There are only 3 countries with the resources to mount attacks of this magnitude...
- monadic2 6y agoHow do you figure? Seems very optimistic to assume that these companies are incapable of this type of failure themselves.
- ponker 6y agoOr, that when one goes down, people overuse the services of the others, causing them to go down, causing a chain reaction. Not denying the existence of state actors but they are not a given.
- gamblor956 6y agoSure, that would be a possibility for a different set of tech companies going down, such as if they all shared the same network backbone or overlapping users. But they don't. We're talking about the largest companies in the world, with facilities geo-located around the world, all going down within a few days of each other.
- nixgeek 6y agoYet an attack that large was noticed by none of the major network providers or internet exchange points?
- ponker 6y agoAn attack on a large infrastructure is not necessarily a large attack. Social engineer into one account and disable some cron job somewhere and the infrastructure falls over.
- neom 6y agoCanada, Australia, South Korea? UK, Russia, German? France, Poland, Singapore? I can think of a lot of countries who have great technology resources.
- gamblor956 6y agoCanada, Australia, SK, UK, Germany, France, Poland, and Singapore have middling-to-great tech resources, but not the resources to take down global access to the 3 biggest companies in the world. Only 3 countries have the resources for that: the US, Russia, and China.
- aeyes 6y agoAnybody with access to a large enough botnet can take down services, it isn't rocket science.
- gamblor956 6y agoTrue. But a botnet large enough to take down Microsoft, Apple, and Google without being detected would have to be extremely large or well-hidden, so if it is a botnet, then it's even stronger evidence of a state actor.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoAnd yet many such botnets exist and are actively attacking all day long, yet aren't taking down the major professional services outside of tiny temporary corners.
- neom 6y agoI'm super curious why you think that? A 17 year old from Florida tweeted as Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Barack Obama. Why couldn't the Canadian government do it?
- Zren 6y agoObtaining Admin access on Twitter probably can't take down Twitter. Although, an admin might be able to run heavy tasks that a normal user can't access to DOS the service. That hypothetical would be even easier for sysadmin's to track down though since I believe only a single admin account was compromised.
- whalesalad 6y agoOr a major network interchange pushed a shitty routing change.
- eli 6y agoNo I don't think that's reasonable at all. What time frame is "short order"? Pareidolia seems like a better explanation.
- nemosaltat 6y agoI only recently learned that term extended more broadly to pattern recognition, in addition to “seeing faces in stuff.”
- gamblor956 6y agoWhat time frame is "short order"? Three days. Pareidolia Given that Russia and China have been identified as behind multiple previous outages, it's reasonable to assume they are behind these as well.
- eli 6y agoI bet if you made a list of all the major tech companies, estimated the average time between failure, and did a little math then you'd find that, statistically, you should expect to see multiple failures within a few days of each other just by chance.
- Dahoon 6y agoA lot more likely to be the NSA.
- champagnepapi 6y agoWho are the others that are down?
- ipsum2 6y agoThis is patently false and paranoid. Any one at most big tech companies can look into the internal report to see exactly which code change took down services by accident, and their remediation steps. For example, the Google issue this week was an internal routing issue caused by some SRE modifying some config files on load balancers.
- npunt 6y agoI agree its reasonable to speculate, given its a particularly vulnerable time in democracy with US election in 35 days and there's a lot to gain in disruption. Obviously MS/Apple/Google are all the juiciest targets for acquiring private communications, something that can (and possibly did) change the outcome of an election. I would expect this is an extremely active time in attack/defense in cybersecurity regardless of this incident. IF this is the case, what do we think this could be? What's common among the different outages? Google says 9/24's outage was traffic routing hardware. [1] Microsoft says 9/28's outage was authentication error due to a bug in a service update, deployment tooling error, and a bug in rollback [2] Apple's has affected many services including Apple ID but it isn't clear what root cause is. [1] https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1309313556328841216 https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1309313556328841216 [2] https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/ https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/
- jldugger 6y agoI promise you this is a self-inflicted wound.
- tpmx 6y agoYeah, of the end-of-a-quarter kind.
- jldugger 6y agoIDK if its even that.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoIt's just as silly to promise something you can't possibly know as it is to assume this is a state sponsored attack
- pugz 6y agoYou think state-sponsored attacks are just as likely a source of outages as programmer error? Either you think the world is a much more perilous place than it is or you give programmers much more credit than they deserve.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoI never said they were equally likely. I said it is just as silly to promise something you can't possibly promise as it is to suggest it is a state-sponsored attack. They easily could have said, "it is much more likely programmer error", and I would have 100% agreed. > Either you think the world is a much more perilous place than it is or you give programmers much more credit than they deserve It generally isn't a good idea to make this many assumptions like this about people you don't know. I think neither of those things.
- jldugger 6y ago> you can't possibly know I promise you I can possibly know this.