This seems so out of the blue, the last attack was targeting krebs for exposing extortionists. Who is being attacked this time and why? There is a lot of talk of iot botnets but little to no evidence. This seems too vague and up in the air. If all it takes is script kiddies and random extortionists to generate such large 1 Tbps scale attacks then we appear to be reliant on an unbelievably fragile base. There is a gro…
Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
131–140 of 263 posts
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's espionage, not necessarily an act of war. The US government is threatening to strike back with more espionage. (If they haven't already...)
Espionage is stealing data. Disrupting utility services is an act of war, whether it is shutting down an electricity power plant, cutting communications, or any other act of sabotage.
This is true, but in fun hypothetical talks with various tech friends over the decades, we often talked about in relation to Internet services in particular, taking down services and such can actually help with hacking (i.e. stealing data) efforts. How? Why? Firstly, probing as the article mentions does yield plenty of valuable intel which is the core for espionage.
Secondly, we often joked that companies have such flawed backup and response procedures that triggering these things has a funny effect. More specifically, a lot of times in our experiences, we saw things like backups, up-scaling servers, etc. go noticeably unmaintained or poorly attended. A lot of people, especially years ago never did a great job of testing their backup systems, failovers, scaling, etc. and kept them up-to-date and secured as well as the main stuff. It's more interesting in some ways in this world of containers and VMs. One would assume things are updated, patched, and deployed exactly inline with the mainline stuff, but that's not always the case. It often takes only one slip-up and this is where a ton of people make mistakes for so many reasons. And sometimes it's easier to manipulate the protection systems to be the vector itself than the systems they are protecting.
That is to say, messing around with services sometimes can be a way of creating an open front or back door. Especially if there's malware and things that can be planted that will be less likely to be caught in the panic or otherwise deployed as a result of the panic response.
Of course all of this is more unlikely, but it's fun to think about in the same way stupid schemes that are similar in heist movies are fun.
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to fight a war purely with defense is usually a dangerous strategy. The only long-term solution is to find the attackers and take them out.
That's irony, right? I can't even tell anymore.
I do remember something about a virus that patched the computers it infected. White hat virus!
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#134> It is too early to determine who was behind Friday’s attacks, but it is this type of DDoS attack that has election officials concerned. They are worried that an attack could keep citizens from submitting votes. > Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow internet voting for overseas military and civilians. Alaska allows any Alaskan citizens to do so. I had no idea any states allowed voting online. I wond…
If they're absent T ballots, they're not counted until several weeks later (unless the total amount of absent T ballots is larger than the margin between any candidate to ballot measure).
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#135Is this the end of the Internet that news.com predicted back in 1995?
Are you talking about this Newsweek article?
http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#136> It is too early to determine who was behind Friday’s attacks, but it is this type of DDoS attack that has election officials concerned. They are worried that an attack could keep citizens from submitting votes. > Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow internet voting for overseas military and civilians. Alaska allows any Alaskan citizens to do so. I had no idea any states allowed voting online. I wond…
If they're absent T ballots, they're not counted until several weeks later (unless the total amount of absent T ballots is larger than the margin between any candidate to ballot measure).
What does the T stand for?
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#137> It is too early to determine who was behind Friday’s attacks, but it is this type of DDoS attack that has election officials concerned. They are worried that an attack could keep citizens from submitting votes. > Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow internet voting for overseas military and civilians. Alaska allows any Alaskan citizens to do so. I had no idea any states allowed voting online. I wond…
If they're absent T ballots, they're not counted until several weeks later (unless the total amount of absent T ballots is larger than the margin between any candidate to ballot measure).
"Absent T"
Is this a reference I'm not getting, a speech-to-text error, or a simple misspelling of "absentee"?
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#138Is this the end of the Internet that news.com predicted back in 1995?
I have no doubt we'll see the end of the global internet in the next couple decades, but it's going to take quite a few more of these before we get there.
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also what amazed me is that he would casually threaten to strike Russia. It seems that no one considers these attacks as an act of war. But that's what they are.
NATO's new position as of July 2016: http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_78170.htm In July 2016, Allies reaffirmed NATO’s defensive mandate and recognised cyberspace as a domain of operations in which NATO must defend itself as effectively as it does in the air, on land and at sea. The technical verbiage used is "domain of operations" and "security domain". This article says that "massive" cyber attacks can lead…
Well that is potentially huge.
Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites
#140It's fashionable to blame Russia these days, but what country manufactures the most IoT devices, and has the type of government that could mandate backdoor access?
What "backdoor access" are you talking about? These botnets spread via static admin passwords.
I think what the OP is implying is that these static admin passwords were put as a deniable backdoor. If it was a Chinese gov scheme it is quite clever as a real backdoor would have been obvious, while this just looks like total incompetence.