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Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

lawfareblog.com

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Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#21

Post by thomnottom »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

My guess would be that the American government has less reason to test what would take down some of these services. And not for benevolent reasons, but because they could more easily send in armed agents and simply unplug those services.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#22

Post by wtracy »

asclepi wrote: post #16

So how exactly is one entity, even a state entity, going to take down all 13 root servers, assuming that that is what Schneier is talking about since the man speaks in mysteries? What would it take to do that? Let's safely assume that these servers, every single one of them, are subject to DDoS attacks all the time and have at least some experience in handling them, and have a backup scenario ready for a serious atta…

Just a little heads-up, your account appears to have been shadowbanned.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#23

Post by squozzer »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

I don't think we should rule out the US, as they conduct defense drills all of the time.

In this case, they don't overtly control the assets under attack, but would still want to know how resilient our networks are "in the real world" -- not always as a "friendly" drill, a la Red Cell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Cell

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#24

Post by norea-armozel »

This is why I worry about the centralization of all communications as we've done over the entirety of human history. Letting the Internet be centralized as it has been might be make economic sense but as for sustaining the world economy through a potentially global conflict it doesn't make any sense to put all our eggs in one basket here. It's like I mentioned on the "napalm girl" post that we've become too complacent with having ease of use trump reliability of communication. This is just one of the larger consequences of our individual and collective choices coming to bite us in the butt. I hope this spurs people to get smarter and put together p2p solutions that can weather such a conflict at least for regional and/or city-wide communications.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#25

Post by phantom_oracle »

Blaming China or Russia is lazy writing. It could be just about anyone, including a rogue internal agency doing a spoof-attack to precisely cause the blame to go towards the obvious "state actors".

Cyber-warfare is the 'new' war and just like any war, misinformation plays an important role.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#26

Post by norea-armozel »

goda90 wrote: post #15

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a…

I'm definitely interested in such an idea. I might have to check around the MPLS area to see who's doing any sort of DIY electronics and other such meetups here.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#27

Post by compiledAtBirth »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

To think of the culprit of a potential action in terms of nationalism is weak logic, no offense to you or the author, of course, because the digital world transcends any national boundary more readily than virtually any other technology, thanks to its low energy overhead and high data throughput.

This internationalism amplifies the net's vulnerability, and when coupled with (as per the article posted a couple of days ago on the grid's susceptibility to overload and the resulting brown/black outs) the net's dependency on a huge infrastructure meshes quite neatly with those who don't give a shit who suffers as long as it's someone that might be responsible for their woes, so someone desperate enough to eradicate the bulk of digital information would likely be concerned with larger issues like debt, weapons manufacture, or something similarly transnational.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#28

Post by kej »

goda90 wrote: post #15

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a…

The amateur radio community already has the technical know-how and disaster readiness to do most of that, and I'd be willing to bet there's enough overlap between them and the meshnet crowd to take care of the rest.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#29

Post by m0nty »

phantom_oracle wrote: post #25

Blaming China or Russia is lazy writing. It could be just about anyone, including a rogue internal agency doing a spoof-attack to precisely cause the blame to go towards the obvious "state actors". Cyber-warfare is the 'new' war and just like any war, misinformation plays an important role.

> Blaming China or Russia is lazy writing

It's what the author is being told by the people he has spoken too. Maybe a lazy assumption on their part, but it's not lazy writing. And your point is directly addressed in TFA:

"The data I see suggests China, an assessment shared by the people I spoke with. On the other hand, it's possible to disguise the country of origin for these sorts of attacks."

It would be interesting to know the sort of resources needed for this kind of attack/probing. Is it limited to state actors, or could we all play? Is the objective simply to be prepared, or is there a plan afoot?

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#30

Post by wtracy »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

It depends on exactly what services Schneier is talking about here, but an awful lot of the infrastructure of the internet is hosted in countries that the US armed forces have easy physical access to.

Even if a cyber attack were the "plan a" for quickly and untraceably taking those systems out, the US has an easy enough "plan b" that testing "plan a" isn't going to be a major concern. Add that to the fact that the US has a lot more to lose if it gets caught attacking internet infrastructure than China and friends do (even just tests like this) and I would be surprised (honestly not shocked, but definitely surprised) if the USA is behind these shenanigans.

Actually, if the US wanted to test something like this on a service in a friendly country, I would expect the NSA to approach the infrastructure company and say something like, "We're concerned that $enemy_of_free_speech may be planning an attack on your service, and we would like to wargame that scenario with you. What time(s) would an outage have a minimal impact to your bottom line?"

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