Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
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Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#2Funny story from the Hosting company[1]:
"Before the break of dawn on a morning in April, a full SWAT team was sent to execute a search warrant on CyberBunker's property."
"It must not have occurred to the officers that the blast doors were designed to withstand a 20 megaton nuclear explosion from close range. When the SWAT team realized that the door was not being opened for them, they throw flashbangs and take other actions to draw attention."
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And from the NYT article:
“Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force,” the site said. “None of these attempts were successful.”
Haha, this is too funny.
More detailed article on NYT[2]
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[1]http://cyberbunker.com/web/swat.php
[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/technology/internet/online...
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#3I don't have much time to write this comment. But before I head to school I'd like to posit that these sorts of attacks are largely our fault.
When I say "our", I mean the loose knit group of sysadmins, self proclaimed "computer people", hackers, phreakers, security experts, and government officials trying to quell the increasing lurch of botnets and malware that has gone on since the Eternal September.
Botnets get big because users don't know any better, users don't know better partly out of laziness, partly because they feel they can't know any better. I don't know of a single site I can point to and say "If you really give a shit about not getting your credit card data stolen, go here." Instead as far as I can tell the majority of users in this demographic have their needs "met" by fraudsters selling bogus antivirus packages and weird proprietary utilities.
If you want a computing environment that can survive open, it needs users who can use open.
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#4"These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second).
Is that around like 3000 compromised computers? Maybe 2-5 botnets worth? I might be a bit off on the prices here, but that sound like maybe ~$1k/day on the market? would be nice to get a price tag on the "'biggest attack in history'".
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#5I don't have much time to write this comment. But before I head to school I'd like to posit that these sorts of attacks are largely our fault. When I say "our", I mean the loose knit group of sysadmins, self proclaimed "computer people", hackers, phreakers, security experts, and government officials trying to quell the increasing lurch of botnets and malware that has gone on since the Eternal September. Botnets get b…
I agree, the problem however is that threats are constantly evolving and getting more complicated. Even most IT people don't understand the threats properly (I know I struggle).
It used to be that could just tell people to install a security suite on their computer and they'd be mostly OK. I don't think that's really true any longer.
You could also partly lay the blame at Microsoft's door in getting users to start connecting to internet with an OS designed without any reasonable security (Windows 95).
Now that we have operating systems with better security it's hard to change people's usage patterns to take advantage of that.
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#6The main problem is that some people decide what's good and what's not online and paint with the broadest brush possible. Spamhaus, sadly I say, is used by a lot of providers as gospel and a lot of innocent sites are hurt.
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#7"These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second). Is that around like 3000 compromised computers? Maybe 2-5 botnets worth? I might be a bit off on the prices here, but that sound like maybe ~$1k/day on the market? would be nice to get a price tag on the "'biggest attack in history'".
3000 computers means each one is putting out a full 100Mb/s, which unless those 3000 computers are in data centers seems unlikely.
Seems like 30,000 nodes at 10Mb/s would be more likely?
But I don't have experience in botnets, just curious.
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#8I don't have much time to write this comment. But before I head to school I'd like to posit that these sorts of attacks are largely our fault. When I say "our", I mean the loose knit group of sysadmins, self proclaimed "computer people", hackers, phreakers, security experts, and government officials trying to quell the increasing lurch of botnets and malware that has gone on since the Eternal September. Botnets get b…
I agree, the problem however is that threats are constantly evolving and getting more complicated. Even most IT people don't understand the threats properly (I know I struggle). It used to be that could just tell people to install a security suite on their computer and they'd be mostly OK. I don't think that's really true any longer. You could also partly lay the blame at Microsoft's door in getting users to start co…
If she has Microsoft Security Essentials installed, doesn't run unknown software, and doesn't give out her password, what more could my mother, as a layman, reasonably be expected to do? I understand there are all sorts of complicated steps she could take if she had good intuition about sniffing out bad guys, but she doesn't. Isn't the problem with the crappy software, not her?
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#9Funny story from the Hosting company[1]: "Before the break of dawn on a morning in April, a full SWAT team was sent to execute a search warrant on CyberBunker's property." "It must not have occurred to the officers that the blast doors were designed to withstand a 20 megaton nuclear explosion from close range. When the SWAT team realized that the door was not being opened for them, they throw flashbangs and take othe…
You stopped before the best part!
"On the other side of the blast doors, no one inside the bunker noticed anything unusual."
According to that story, nobody even realized that a SWAT team had tried to break their door down until hours later!
Re: Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
#10Funny story from the Hosting company[1]: "Before the break of dawn on a morning in April, a full SWAT team was sent to execute a search warrant on CyberBunker's property." "It must not have occurred to the officers that the blast doors were designed to withstand a 20 megaton nuclear explosion from close range. When the SWAT team realized that the door was not being opened for them, they throw flashbangs and take othe…
Note that "close range" in this case is a 20Mt explosion 5km away:
http://cyberbunker.com/web/bunker-specs.php
Having said that, in the case of 20Mt nukes I suspect 5km does count as "close range".