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Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

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Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#21

Post by amitparikh »

Macha wrote: post #11

Isn't their example of google that won't be affected? I was under the impression that very few DNS queries actually go to the root nameservers as ISP's and so on have it all cached. And since I highly doubt there is any ISP that has not had a user visit google.com in the last 48 hours, Google will still function for people? In fact, the only people I can see this affecting (in the unlikely event it does happen) are p…

The pastebin post says that 'While some ISPs uses DNS caching, most are configured to use a low expire time for the cache.'

(Just re-iterating the post for Macha... I don't personally believe that the expire-times for ISP DNS cache is as short as Anonymous is making it seem -- but I don't have any numbers off-hand)

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#22

Post by Jach »

fady wrote: post #3

does this mean, that even if we typed the IP address of a site, we would get an error? i'm not sure how all the protocols work, so any clarification would be great.

You might want to look into getting a DNS caching service which has other benefits besides being a guard against your main DNS going down. I'm not sure what options are available for Windows, but on Mac and Linux Dnsmasq fits that role just fine (and there are others).

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#23

Post by tomjen3 »

mcritz wrote: post #10

Let's assume they succeed. They take down the Internet at noon EDT (9AM PDT). What's the worst that could happen?

Well that all depends. First most requests don't go to the root servers -- they are far too important, second there is caching on the isps servers. To have any effect other than to make sys admins dehydrate anon have to keep the attack up long enough to have the caches empty (if they are indeed configured to flush even if they cannot connect to the root. They may not) and there are several layer deep caching (your isp is but one. Your local computer may also have one).

But assuming they can keep it running long enough for the DNS service to die(and they may very well, that flaw is pretty smart though they have to use the actual ip of the vulnerable DNS servers, which means that it can be filtered if the admins are smart enough)? Well goodbye internet -- you would just get an error, no matter which website you would try to access. A pretty grim situation, but not likely.

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#24

Post by eli »

> Q: What if all root name serves would stop answering queries?

> A: Now you are stretching it. How likely is that? The diversity in the system will prevent that from happening. But let's treat it as a hypothetical case: In that hypothetical case the Internet will not suddenly grind to a halt. If absolutely nothing is done to correct the situation every hour about 2% of all queries will not be answered, 2% at the end of the first hour, 4% at the end of the second hour and so forth until 48h after the root name servers stop answering queries no DNS names can be resolved anymore. However it is even more hypothetical to assume that nothing will be done to correct this hypothetical situation.

> Even in the hypothetically hypothetical case that the root name server operators would do nothing to correct the situation, the IANA, TLD operators, ISPs and others would have the motivation and the means to take corrective action.

> Again: this is very hypothetical. DNS failures outside the root name servers are much more likely. Name service for the vast majority of top-level domains is very much less redundant than that of the root name servers. Whole top-level domains and major corporations have been unreachable for significant amounts of time because of DNS failures. Name service for the root zone has always been available.

http://www.isoc.org/briefings/020/

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#25

Post by [deleted] »

gabaix wrote: post #13
sylvinus wrote: post #9

Most interesting bit : The principle is simple; a flaw that uses forged UDP packets is to be used to trigger a rush of DNS queries all redirected and reflected to those 13 IPs. The flaw is as follow; since the UDP protocol allows it, we can change the source IP of the sender to our target, thus spoofing the source of the DNS query. The DNS server will then respond to that query by sending the answer to the spoofed IP…

Where could we find more information about those 13 servers? Why are there only 13 of them?

[deleted]

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#26

Post by paulhauggis »

snsr wrote: post #8
paulhauggis wrote: post #2

hmm..and people here on HN say they aren't a digital terrorist group.....

While the DOS discussed in that link is quite obviously misguided, counterproductive, juvenile and likely criminal, 'terrorism' seems like a pretty strong word.

It's not just this. Every single time a new link is posted about Anonymous it's some form of digital terrorism.

It has barely a purpose and only serves to disrupt the masses. They even have made threats that they would do X if Y isn't done.

This is terrorism to me.

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#27

Post by astrodust »

Hominem wrote: post #6

I'm pretty sure every hacker group has gotten this idea at one point or another. Has anyone even come close to taking down all the root DNS servers at once?

With Anycast DNS there's actually more than thirteen servers even if there's only thirteen IPs.

It's going to be almost impossible to flood them all simultaneously. These are machines on multi-gigabit backbone connections, not some crappy back-water FBI or CIA web server.

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#28

Post by icehawk »

Hominem wrote: post #6

I'm pretty sure every hacker group has gotten this idea at one point or another. Has anyone even come close to taking down all the root DNS servers at once?

The last major attack was in 2007, and only two servers were rendered unreachable:

http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/news/industry-deve...

For anyone to actually notice, you have to take down all 13 for 48 hours, and it will be another 48 hours after that before there is a complete outage for everyone.

Re: Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?

#30

Post by jason_slack »

sespindola wrote: post #20
gabaix wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where could we find more information about those 13 servers? Why are there only 13 of them?

Here.[1] Most of them are not single-box servers, but cluster with multisite redundancy. That's why all attacks were unsuccessful in the past. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

So could organizations build their own Root NS cluster and be added to the 13 that already exist?

Do I misunderstand something as to why there are only 13, who controls them, etc?

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