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Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

independent.co.uk

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Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#241

Post by steve19 »

acegopher wrote: post #184
stevendgarcia wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solid advice. I had fail2ban installed and enabled. SSHD Root/password login turned off and only ssh key had access. My firewall was also airtight, or so I thought. Clearly I mucked up a config or setting somewhere because the odds of someone getting past all that are extremely low. One thing I had not prepared for was IP spoofing which I learned can be prevented with a few net.ipv4.conf tweaks. I also just purchased…

What was the vector by which they gained access? I have fail2ban, password login turned off, key access, airtight firewall, etc. and now am worried.

If they exploited a service or Web app they might have gotten shell access. The chance of gaining access through ssh with fail2ban is extremely unlikely, unless fail2ban was badly configured.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#242

Post by dharmab »

quibono wrote: post #190
jeromegv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata is always funny because I hardly know anyone that uses debit. Credit all the way.

Why is that? What's some advantages of having a credit card versus a debit one?

Customer protection- credit cards allow you to reverse charges on defective or fraudulent purchases if you are unable to find recourse with the vendor. They usually side with the cardholder as long as a basic paper trail of a good faith attempt to resolve the issue with the vendor is included.

Also, credit cards often include insurance on purchases. For example, one of my cards will reimburse my hotel/car rental/plane tickets in certain cases of trip interruption if I purchase those items on that card.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#243

Post by snazz »

stevendgarcia wrote: post #235
nickphx wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you were not seeing spoofed traffic. There are that many compromised machines actively scanning.

It's scary to admit this but you are probably right. The first thing these bots do is use server resources to scan ports and brute force their way into other machines. I don't want to think about how many machines are pwned like this. Very sobering!

This is also perfectly normal for the Internet, yes? If you have a server with an IPv4 address, expect many attempts per day.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#244

Post by senderista »

_8j50 wrote: post #208
the-dude wrote: 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 comp…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#245

Post by jmalicki »

eridius wrote: post #204
pfundstein wrote: post #167

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…

"a custom high-entry password that's different from the user's local password?"

You mean an RSA private key? (no really, that's exactly what it is... you can put your private key in your password manager and copy it to your computer)

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#246

Post by eridius »

jmalicki wrote: post #245
eridius wrote: post #204

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…

"a custom high-entry password that's different from the user's local password?" You mean an RSA private key? (no really, that's exactly what it is... you can put your private key in your password manager and copy it to your computer)

I can manually type in a 30-letter password that I can see from my password manager on my phone. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be manually typing in an RSA private key stored on my phone.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#247

Post by lopespm »

agoodthrowaway wrote: post #191

This outage coincides with FBs PSC (performance summary cycle) time. I wonder if this is folks trying to push features so they get “impact” for PSC.

Very good point. I wonder if the recent outages on other well known services could be heavily influenced by a similar phenomenon. If this holds water, it would be interesting to have an article or study around this issue. I certainly would be interested in reading it.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#248

Post by kevlawrence »

smt88 wrote: post #37
kevlawrence wrote: post #36

This gives me a lot of confidence in their crypto currency.

1) Cryptocurrency ops are so vastly different from running a social website that I can't even think of any overlap. 2) I hate Facebook as a company, but as a builder/scaler of web apps for many years, I'm continually blown away by the speed and reliability of their website. Their operations are mind-blowing. The only comparable apps (in terms of scale) are Gmail and YouTube, and Gmail is simpler in certain key areas…

I don’t have extensive knowledge of how crypto works, but for 1), most, if not all large-scale applications like FB operate with distributed systems somewhere in the chain (ex. image and video processing), which is the core of how ledgers work, and how mining works.

Their website tech is impressive, I’ll give them that. I still wouldn’t trust them with my money.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#249

Post by _8j50 »

senderista wrote: post #244
_8j50 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 comp…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law

Thank you,i think this has to do with higher order numbers' symmetry with each other

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#250

Post by ghostpepper »

stevendgarcia wrote: post #179
pfundstein wrote: post #167

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.

Solid advice. I had fail2ban installed and enabled. SSHD Root/password login turned off and only ssh key had access. My firewall was also airtight, or so I thought. Clearly I mucked up a config or setting somewhere because the odds of someone getting past all that are extremely low. One thing I had not prepared for was IP spoofing which I learned can be prevented with a few net.ipv4.conf tweaks. I also just purchased…

Did you have password login disabled for all accounts or just the root account?
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