111–120 of 263 posts
WL's Twitter has claimed it was WL supporters. Although no one can really confirm what's going on with them since the Ecuadorian embassy events the other day.
Irony alert: > "But technology providers in the United States could suffer blowback. As Dyn fell under recurring attacks on Friday, Mr. York, the chief strategist, said such assaults were the reason so many companies are pushing at least parts of their infrastructure to cloud computing networks, to decentralize their systems and make them harder to attack." Pushing your infrastructure to cloud computing is not decent…
Interestingly, in some ways this is a big selling point of AWS/Azure/Goog. The absolute scale they can handle is way up there. The downside of course, is that whilst their infrastructure can likely handle it, handling the bill associated with 'just scale up your service' could be worse than the attack itself.
If you want HA at local level you'd go with AWS AZs but if you need real HA you need can do the same at region-level.
Of course not everyone has the money/need to go down that route, but it's possible and even advised for some AWS services.
The U.S. has changed the rules of engagment to state that any cyber attack can be met with real military counterattack. If the Russians are behind it, after being emboldened by Ukraine and Syria, the United States has to respond. I'm not saying all out war but I am saying we have to show the Russians that this affects everything we are about. It affects our businesses, our elections, and our way of life. I am saying…
Sure. Respond to an cyber attack on infra by starting a physical war that will permanently remove all infrastructure. Its the equivalent of burning down your building because a neighbor cut your cable.
War should always be a last resort - only when all other options are exhausted. Especially nuclear war.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The energy spent for TCP/IP stack usage is negligible at best. Not true, especially en masse. Even less true for wirelessly connected devices.
Power consumption fluctuations need to be up in the billions of watts before power companies generally care and must do something about it. Wifi routers are limited to 1W output power, so you'd need a lot more than just the hundreds of millions of wifi routers bleating out TCP packets at the top of their lungs to take down the power grid. Also, what the power companies really care about are changes in consumption; on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their next move would be disconnecting the US. http://www.hisutton.com/Yantar.html What then?
I remember reading the same about american submarines installing unknown devices on underwater cables.
We seem to be needing more concerted action on what is a consumer minimum standard for an internet connected device. Consumer devices have to be more secure because if the low user skill level - and interest. I am always reluctant to say "there should be a law against it" but frankly if we cannot mandate minimum standards of uogradbility and security for devices we will just keep handing over our devices to the first…
Is that really confirmed or just the reporter writing gossip.
We seem to be needing more concerted action on what is a consumer minimum standard for an internet connected device. Consumer devices have to be more secure because if the low user skill level - and interest. I am always reluctant to say "there should be a law against it" but frankly if we cannot mandate minimum standards of uogradbility and security for devices we will just keep handing over our devices to the first…
The Internet has grown without proper planning using a lot of "quick and dirty" hacks (for example NATs, peering agreements) and today we just see the result. It reminds me of poorly designed email protocols that resulted in spam being the biggest part of email traffic.
Schneier wrote about related attacks just over a month ago in a post titled "Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet" ( https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/someone_is_le... )
I disagree with him on the point of "Who would do that?" He might be right about state level actors, but I think he discounts the motivations of crazy/disillusioned people, bored and curious people, and especially teenagers.
When I was a teenager, the Internet wasn't a thing yet, but we sure dreamed of all kinds of crazy schemes for taking out the phone company, power, anything really. We talked about anarchy and many "taboo" topics I can't mention here. The thing is we were good kids at heart and we had the discretion and morals not to act on those things. All of this happened in a time where our instant communication was the phone or meeting up in person. Today, it is infinitely easier to seek out like-minded people and to replace those who drop out. The ability to seek out confirmation and push is easier than ever as well.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of people that don't have that. Just because someone is a misguided teenager or crazy person does not mean they do not have intelligence, organization, and skills. Many of us certainly did our share of things and had the power, but I wonder what might have happened if we didn't stop ourselves in some cases. While perhaps the organization and probing nature likely hints at something else, it's really not that unusual for people to just mess around. Some people as they say also just want to watch the world burn. A couple of rough years in my teens, I certainly felt that way at times. I did plenty of things I'm not proud of, many people just have no shame and will take it that much further.
In the end I probably agree in terms of who is most likely, but I am kind of surprised that there were not more possibilities mentioned. Even 20 years ago, attacking Internet infrastructure seemed an obvious thing to do to us and we used to love talking about fun ways to ruin things over a burger at lunch. I mean is it really that hard to fathom people would think about attacking targets other than some organization, government, or other kind of company's servers?
Kind of makes me wonder - why let up? Can it be mitigated at all? Wouldn't they have done so by now. Be interesting if they just kept piling it on until they've got the whole internet on it's knees.