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'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

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Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#21

Has anyone besides RTM ever successfully dropped the majority of the network?

The name escapes me for the moment, but there was a famous computer virus which I believe did almost to do that. They key wasn't that it was particularly clever and the attack vector it used had been patched by MS months before.

The key was that the attack happened over UDP which meant that there was no handshake, no congestion control, no need to worry about dropped packets, etc. The only limitation was the bandwidth of the infected host -- the virus itself was less than 500 bytes (not kilo, just straight bytes) so a single host could infect tens of millions of computers.

It was a pretty fascination piece of malware.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#22
I'd love to see a few prominent sites (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and so on) get together secretly and agree to have, say, a 10 minute outage at the same time during this--just to see what these "hackers" do if they think for a bit they actually succeeded.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#23

Why attack DNS? BGP is more vulnerable and receives less scrutiny (remember Pakistan bringing youtube down for the entire world via a misconfigured censorship attempt?). Go look at the references from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking for some horror stories.

L0pht testified before Congress claiming that they could shut down the Internet globally in 30 minutes back in 1998. If I recall correctly, it was through attacks against BGP/BGMP. I can't find a non-broken source link, though.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#24

I cannot think of a better way for this group to hurt their cause and garner the animosity of much of the world. It seems to endlessly repeat throughout history- groups with an axe to grind (whether in power or rebelling against it) use blunt force to try and further their cause. They're either too lazy or not competent enough to use a scalpel so they blow up the patient to get rid of a tumor. After the majority of t…

Or it's an opposing group using its name to discredit it.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#26
post #21

Has anyone besides RTM ever successfully dropped the majority of the network?

The name escapes me for the moment, but there was a famous computer virus which I believe did almost to do that. They key wasn't that it was particularly clever and the attack vector it used had been patched by MS months before. The key was that the attack happened over UDP which meant that there was no handshake, no congestion control, no need to worry about dropped packets, etc. The only limitation was the bandwidt…

Code Red http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) did a lot of damage, but I believe it was an attack on IIS, therefor TCP based.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name escapes me for the moment, but there was a famous computer virus which I believe did almost to do that. They key wasn't that it was particularly clever and the attack vector it used had been patched by MS months before. The key was that the attack happened over UDP which meant that there was no handshake, no congestion control, no need to worry about dropped packets, etc. The only limitation was the bandwidt…

Code Red http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) did a lot of damage, but I believe it was an attack on IIS, therefor TCP based.

It wasn't code Red. It was latter and attacked a database discovery service for MSSQL.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#28
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code Red http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) did a lot of damage, but I believe it was an attack on IIS, therefor TCP based.

It wasn't code Red. It was latter and attacked a database discovery service for MSSQL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#29
post #23

Why attack DNS? BGP is more vulnerable and receives less scrutiny (remember Pakistan bringing youtube down for the entire world via a misconfigured censorship attempt?). Go look at the references from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking for some horror stories.

L0pht testified before Congress claiming that they could shut down the Internet globally in 30 minutes back in 1998. If I recall correctly, it was through attacks against BGP/BGMP. I can't find a non-broken source link, though.

Should be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJldn_MmMY
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