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Online Dispute Becomes Internet-Snarling Attack
- coditor 14y agoWhy can we not figure out how to shut down the computers participating in a botnet? It seems like a technology problem.
- joseph_cooney 14y agoThe phrase “These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” left me shaking my head....
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoI'm listening to The Last Train from Hiroshima[1] right now. These things are nothing like nuclear bombs. I hope we never experience anything remotely like nuclear bombs on this planet again. 1. http://www.amazon.com/Last-Train-Hiroshima-Survivors-Look/dp/1400115639 http://www.amazon.com/Last-Train-Hiroshima-Survivors-Look/dp...
- kefka 14y agoInterestingly enough, there seems to be questions regarding the book as a factual source. This is taken from the amazon link you provided: Recently, there have been questions about the accuracy of some parts of this book. At this time, Tantor Media will continue to make it available to our customers, but we wanted to make you aware of the issues. Here is a statement from the hardcover publisher of the book, Henry Holt and Company:"It is with deep regret that Henry Holt and Company announces that we will no longer print, correct or ship copies of Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima due to the discovery of dishonest sources of information for the book. It is easy to understand how even the most diligent author could be duped by a source, but we also understand that this opens that book to very detailed scrutiny. The author of any work of non-fiction must stand behind its content. We must rely on our authors to answer questions that may arise as to the accuracy of their work and reliability of their sources. Unfortunately, Mr. Pellegrino was not able to answer the additional questions that have arisen about his book to our satisfaction."The Last Train from Hiroshima offers listeners a stunning "you are there" time capsule, gracefully wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino's scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb's survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.At the narrative's core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand-the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American fliers in the air. Thirty people are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki-where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of the cataclysm at ground zero both times. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell in which Yamaguchi had been standing, placing him and a few others in a shock cocoon that offered protection, while the entire building disappeared around them.Pellegrino weaves spellbinding stories together within a narrative that challenges the "official report," showing exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki-and why.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoI'm taking everything I'm listening to with a grain of salt, anyway, just due to the effect of time on memories, especially during periods of traumatic shock. However, even if only 10% of what is in the book is accurate, I believe my point holds: a DDOS isn't anything like a nuclear attack.
- joseph_cooney 14y agoI've visited the a-bomb dome in Hiroshima, and agree 100%.
- adventured 14y agoIt's embarrassing the way the media tries to play up things like this. Like you suddenly might starve to death because of a DDoS and your car won't start, and wars will break out! Oh my the sensationalism! Arrest the criminals doing the vandalizing. It's very simple. Someone or some group causes millions in property damages or service disruptions, it's a serious crime and should be treated as such. They should be hunted down and arrested, whatever the rock they're hiding under.
- AnthonyMouse 14y agoHere's the thing that gets me. It's not the media describing things this way. It's us. We're the ones blowing this all out of proportion. The New York Times didn't describe it as "like nuclear bombs," the CEO of Cloudfare did. They're just quoting him. And I hate to say it but you're doing the same thing. Where did "millions in property damages or service disruptions" come from? A DDoS is an irritating annoyance. It rises to the level of a bunch of jerks who decide to climb up and rewire the traffic lights to be continuously red and cause a traffic jam. You can certainly arrest them when they do something illegal, but why does that require us to make them out to be a bunch of evil masterminds hellbent on causing a nuclear holocaust or financial Armageddon?
- yen223 14y agoFrankly, we are guilty of blowing anything computer-related out of proportion. Just observe the number of folks here who insist that software engineering is the most important field in the world! Edit: On second reading, it looks like the "nuclear bombs" quote by the CEO of Cloudflare was taken out of context.
- Xylakant 14y ago> Like you suddenly might starve to death because of a DDoS and your car won't start, and wars will break out! Oh my the sensationalism! Actually, given that my new phone connection is VOIP-only, an attack that saturates or damages[1] the respective part of the network could block an emergency call and quite possibly lead to problems down the line. It's hard to estimate how much we actually depend on the internet nowadays. [1] "damages" as in "put critical infrastructure pieces temporarily out of function"
- dkulchenko 14y agoWow. How big does your botnet have to be to provide 300 Gbps? Would be interesting to see an update from CloudFlare - AFAIK, the largest DDoS they've dealt with before has been a tad over 100 Gbps.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoHaving DNS reflection assist with a 100x increase in data certainly helps.
- rorrr 14y ago300 Google Fiber users
- uvdiv 14y agoCloudFlare's report (6 days ago): http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-knocked-spamhaus-offline-and-ho http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-knocked-spamhaus-of...
- jgrahamc 14y agoIt got much worse after that.
- gadders 14y agoCan someone explain the various layers of attack they mention please? Does that relate to the 7 layer OSI model?
- asdfaoeu 14y agoLayer 3 is the network layer, basically they mean the attack is just generating enough traffic at the network level to overload the target. Layer 7 is the application layer which means they are overloading the application. A web server connected to a 10gbit link won't be able to handle 10gbit of traffic if each request it has to do a complicated SQL query for each load. Layer 7 requires much less bandwidth though it depends on sending correctly formatted data. A layer 3 attack doesn't even get to the application so it doesn't matter what the data is which means they can use techniques like the Open DNS resolver reflector and hence can get much more traffic with a little amount of seed traffic. As well this hides the "original" source of the attack.
- gadders 14y agoThank you.
- losethos 14y agoGod says... furnish burden occasioned valley incorruptibly character lying grievest rude NO endeavouring clever Anon createst You_da_man gross-hearted belly items
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- adventured 14y agoThis isn't complicated. If someone or some group or some company vandalizes property (a 300gbps denial of service attack), you arrest and prosecute them for the crime.
- Tomdarkness 14y agoApart from it is complicated. You need to prove who is behind the attack and you are not going to be proving anything with a list of thousands of IPs running open dns resolvers which, as far as they are concerned, show that you were just requesting tons of DNS records yourself.
- freditup 14y agoExcept that according to the article, Cyberbunker admits to being the perpetrator of the attacks. They also brag about fending off SWAT teams in the past (which does seems unlikely).
- Tomdarkness 14y agoThe key part in the article which would imply this is not a direct quote nor can I find this online message they refer to. Both of which smell of potentially dodgy journalism to me and in any case is pure speculation without an official statement from cyberbunker.
- freditup 14y agoMy initial reaction to your comment was to say that it was an article form the NYT and should be reliable. But to be completely honest, it seemed like kind of shady journalism to me too, based more on rumor then anything substantial. It does reflect sadly on the state of the media these days though when even the NYT can't be generally trusted.
- codexon 14y agoI've filled reports to ic3.gov and the police. Haven't gotten a response from either one. Unless you are paying your hosts tens of thousands a month, they don't help you either and usually want to drop you unless you pay them extra.
- CurtMonash 14y agoWikipedia, for once, is instructive about a tech-related subject. Or perhaps it's just being entertaining. ;) The main Wikipedia page on Cyberbunker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker reminds us both that Spamhaus has gone after them before, including interceding with their ISP, and that Pirate Bay was at one point hosted there. The associated Wikipedia talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACyberBunker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACyberBunker suggests, among other things, that Cyberbunker has claimed to be an independent country (apparently on the theory that a former NATO base isn't actually Dutch territory).
- codexon 14y agoDNS reflected attacks need to be addressed NOW. The problem is getting worse every day. You can rent botnets that exploit this for as low as $5 on places like hackforums. Authorities won't deal with your problem unless you are as big as Mastercard. Your host will likely ask you for protection money (ddos protection is incredibly expensive) or just kick you out to protect their other customers. The sad thing is that when people talk about it on a hosting forum, the number one response is "who did you piss off"?
- rdl 14y agoThis is why I plan to be off-world by the time the average 14 year old kid is able to create a serious bioweapon in 15 minutes by following instructions from online.
- mr_spothawk 14y agoHells Yes. I'm right there with you.
- eksith 14y agoWe're already there, but it's not 15 minutes. You can buy bio-hacking equipment fairly cheap (maybe not allowance cheap, but "Hey, mom, dad, can you buy me a chemistry set?" cheap) including those used for DNA replication. I don't know how well they've tightened specimens for scientific study, but there was a scandal not too long ago where anyone who bothers to fill out paperwork could order anthrax and smallpox for research purposes from a lab.
- jrkelly 14y ago> but there was a scandal not too long ago where anyone who bothers to fill out paperwork could order anthrax and smallpox for research purposes from a lab. There's lots of problems in this post. But the idea that anyone could "order smallpox" is totally false. A journalist synthesized 1 gene from smallpox which is the scandal you were referring to. 1 gene != smallpox.
- dasil003 14y ago
- onemorepassword 14y agoJust FYI, Cyberbunker aka cb3rob aka Sven Kamphuis has been involved in scandals, conflicts, lawsuits and general mayhem for ages. He's a poor man's Kim Dotcom. It's a paranoid one man show that seems to be compulsively anti-everything, and especially anti-authority. However, on a technical level he seems to know what he's doing.
- psionski 14y agoParanoia? Anti-authoritarian behavior? Technical expertise? I have found my new hero ;)
- DanBC 14y ago> “Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet,” Mr. Kamphuis said. Nobody is forced to use the Spamhaus service. The people choosing to use the Spamhaus service seem to be happy with it.
- jiggy2011 14y agoGetting on one of their blacklists for an unknown reason can be a serious PIA.
- narad 14y agoThe heart of the problem, according to several Internet engineers, is that many large Internet service providers have not set up their networks to make sure that traffic leaving their networks is actually coming from their own users. Why the ISP networks are not doing their job? Isn't is very simple to filter?
- EwanToo 14y agoIt's not massively hard, but it's also not trivial either, and most ISPs have a "If it's not broke, don't fix it" policy for fundamental things on their network.
- geuis 14y agoPlease, stop linking to sites with pay walls. There's no way for the general public to access such sites. The publishers are free to monetize as they wish, but personally I do not believe pay walls are how to do it. Further linking to such articles is only going to continue to break the web.
- DanBC 14y agoThe article is not behind a paywall for me.
- mozboz 14y agoInterstitial ad != paywall
- jawns 14y agoI hate to destroy the New York Times' business model, but try viewing the link in an incognito window.
- geuis 14y agoThat's a good tip but I'm on my phone. I still feel that having to be sneaky to read an article means there's something fundamentally broken with their model. The only way to win is not to play. =)
- 16s 14y agoSome quotes from the article: “These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.” "He likened the technique, which uses a long-known flaw in the Internet’s basic plumbing, to using a machine gun to spray an entire crowd when the intent is to kill one person." The hyperbole here is astounding. DNS amplification attacks and generic DDOS attacks are nothing at all like that. Why do these silly articles continually relate them to war and weapons that kill humans? Edit: I read once in the monthly cryptogram that a DDOS is more like the Russians sending a million man army to go stand in line at the local DMV. They deny normal customers the service, they do not kill them. Denying access and killing are two very different things.
- jiggy2011 14y agoYou're right, it's a bad analogy but people always struggle with trying to analogise things like this that don't have a parallel in the physical world. If you had the Russian army attempt to blockade shops you would expect a response from the US Army and the shop to be unblockaded in fairly short order. The dangerous thing about DDOS is not that it's a particularly deadly weapon but that it's powerful enough to do a non-zero amount of economic damage with little/no risk for the perpetrator and that there is no effective counter-measure that doesn't involve throwing money away.
- sc68cal 14y ago> Spamhaus, one of the most prominent groups tracking spammers on the Internet, uses volunteers to identify spammers and has been described as an online vigilante group. The authors of this article have absolutely no idea what they're talking about - and what's worse is they sprinkle this kind of crap throughout the article. >Mr. Kamphuis said Cyberbunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for “abusing their influence.” >“Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet,” Mr. Kamphuis said. “They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam.” And this goes unchallenged? Honestly I can't believe they printed such bullshit! Everyone configures their MTA to use Spamhaus because it WORKS - nobody is forcing MTA admins to use it.
- kefka 14y agoAnd it seems rather close to blackmail. "If you dont stop behavior _I_ dont like, I'll submit you to a list so nobody can send or receive email from you." And the hope is that they act honorably.