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Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

independent.co.uk

201–210 of 254 posts

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#201
post #6

I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.

Cloudflare's already stated that their outage yesterday was their own mistake: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage/

Sure but if there were some other weird conspiracy, they would still likely say something like this.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#202
post #49

Looks like Facebook image store is having issues. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp use the same image store, so all the services are affected.

My concern there is my understanding has always been that WhatsApp implements end to end encryption through the Signal protocol, how can images be stored and be considered end-to-end encrypted? So are only text messages end-to-end? Ignoring logs being uploaded to the cloud. I wouldn't send any sensitive pictures over WhatsApp then.

Because the actual data for those images, that is stored on Facebook's media servers, is just a blob of ciphertext. Only the sending and receiving clients actually have the keys, not the servers.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my VPS servers have been slammed in the last 5 days with bruteforce SSH attacks. I've never seen anything this aggressive. One of my servers got PWNed, which has never happened to me before. There's definitely some wild, shady shit going on.

I highly recommend installing fail2ban to automatically firewall IPs with consecutive failed attempts, or if possible, disable password authentication altogether and use key auth.

Best advice here!

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my VPS servers have been slammed in the last 5 days with bruteforce SSH attacks. I've never seen anything this aggressive. One of my servers got PWNed, which has never happened to me before. There's definitely some wild, shady shit going on.

I highly recommend installing fail2ban to automatically firewall IPs with consecutive failed attempts, or if possible, disable password authentication altogether and use key auth.

I don't trust key-only auth; what if I need to access my machine from a new computer I haven't done this with before?

Is there any way to configure SSH to use a custom high-entry password that's different from the user's local password? My local password is something reasonable for me to type regularly (e.g. for sudo prompts), but I'd love to have a super long password just for SSH that I have to copy from my password manager each time.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend installing fail2ban to automatically firewall IPs with consecutive failed attempts, or if possible, disable password authentication altogether and use key auth.

I don't trust key-only auth; what if I need to access my machine from a new computer I haven't done this with before? Is there any way to configure SSH to use a custom high-entry password that's different from the user's local password? My local password is something reasonable for me to type regularly (e.g. for sudo prompts), but I'd love to have a super long password just for SSH that I have to copy from my passwor…

This could be done simply by creating a new user with your super long password. Lock down ssh so you can only log in as this user, and let them `sudo su` into your normal working user.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend installing fail2ban to automatically firewall IPs with consecutive failed attempts, or if possible, disable password authentication altogether and use key auth.

I don't trust key-only auth; what if I need to access my machine from a new computer I haven't done this with before? Is there any way to configure SSH to use a custom high-entry password that's different from the user's local password? My local password is something reasonable for me to type regularly (e.g. for sudo prompts), but I'd love to have a super long password just for SSH that I have to copy from my passwor…

There are definitely cases where you might need to expose a an SSH setup where passwords are allowed to the World, but there is usually little reason to allow anyone to log in directly as root.

Set a long password for the user you log in as (correct horse battery staple-style passwords are perfect for such things), and make sure to put SSH on an alternate port to keep the more basic bots away and thereby reduce the noise.

Having to type a long password for sudo promts is a bit of a pain, but that trade-off is worth it from a security perspective.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust key-only auth; what if I need to access my machine from a new computer I haven't done this with before? Is there any way to configure SSH to use a custom high-entry password that's different from the user's local password? My local password is something reasonable for me to type regularly (e.g. for sudo prompts), but I'd love to have a super long password just for SSH that I have to copy from my passwor…

This could be done simply by creating a new user with your super long password. Lock down ssh so you can only log in as this user, and let them `sudo su` into your normal working user.

I mean, yeah, but I don't want to do that. Partially because I don't want the friction, and partially because that won't work with any other tools that tunnel over ssh (e.g. sftp).

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#208
post #6

I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.

"When it rains,it pours"

In my experience this is so true! The opposite applies as well,for some reason everything behaves quietly all at once and I turn up every leav and look under every carpet for a "problem" with the monitoring or something worse.

Probability is funny, for example I don't think anyone has explained exactly why numbers that start with '1' are so common. I think it's just geometric symmetry if complex event chains.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my VPS servers have been slammed in the last 5 days with bruteforce SSH attacks. I've never seen anything this aggressive. One of my servers got PWNed, which has never happened to me before. There's definitely some wild, shady shit going on.

I highly recommend installing fail2ban to automatically firewall IPs with consecutive failed attempts, or if possible, disable password authentication altogether and use key auth.

+1 for disabling password auth. On the other hand I find fail2ban pretty useless these days. Most attacks I see seem to come from botnets where you only get a few requests from each IP.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#210
post #6

I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.

Might be a desire to release new versions ahead of July 4th holiday.
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