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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

#41

Post by rfrank »

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…

things along those lines are already happening in oakland and a number of other cities across the country.

https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#42

Post by reitoei »

falcolas wrote: post #6
angrydev wrote: post #3

Can anyone elaborate on what he means when he says that Verisign can 'go down' and take down most of the internet with it? How would a registrar going down affect anything to do with actual hosts?

If Verisign is running the nameservers for .com and .net, it will cause DNS problems across the board. We'd have to rely on DNS caches until new .net and .com nameservers come up. This would impact not only new domain registrations, but DR grade migrations, and DNSSEC. If coordinated with an attack against the root nameservers so we couldn't change the .com and .net nameservers, DNS would become a real disaster. If c…

Would there a use case for decentralizing DNS into blockchain, or for creating an alternative?

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#43

Post by rexfm »

matt4077 wrote: post #34
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…

There should be a term for "overprepping for disaster because it's so exciting to think about".

"Preppers" ?

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#44

Post by Florin_Andrei »

kej wrote: post #28
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.

KG6YHQ here. It's doable, but if the wired net becomes unusable and you have to rely wholly on the RF spectrum, bandwidth would be stupendously tiny. Forget about sending anything else but, basically, text-based messages.

Perhaps in an event like that a decision would be made to temporarily open up the spectrum, but even then there are only so many of us, only so many transceivers out there.

I feel the HAM net would be more useful after a natural catastrophe, where the infrastructure would be destroyed physically. Which is exactly what a lot of us are preparing for.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#45

Post by linkregister »

Zigurd wrote: post #8
sgnelson wrote: post #5

Makes me wonder if we'll ever see a "hot" war that starts off as a "cyber" war.

The start of every US war in the ME has featured attacks on communication and infrastructure, starting with hacking in to the telephone exchanges weeks or months before the hot war starts, and culminating with the takedown of critical physical infrastructure, like power, water, etc. as the first thing to go when the shooting starts.

Can you clarify this? I remember seeing some articles about this tactic in maybe 2010, but nothing before then. I recall the Gulf War and OIF/OEF infrastructure damage being primarily from aerial bombing, but it's possible I missed the articles about the hacking element.

I'm not doing the snarky "citations pls" thing; I don't dispute it happened. I just want to know more.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#46

Post by tptacek »

linkregister wrote: post #40

Although Schneier is probably correct in this instance, one of the most exasperating features of his computer security writing is an utter lack of citations or evidence to back up his claims. (His writing about cryptography should require no citations because he is an actual crypto expert.) After the significant inaccuracies and frequent unsubstantiated speculation in Schneier on Security , I don't think credible sec…

His writing about cryptography certainly should include citations.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#47

Post by linkregister »

tptacek wrote: post #46
linkregister wrote: post #40

Although Schneier is probably correct in this instance, one of the most exasperating features of his computer security writing is an utter lack of citations or evidence to back up his claims. (His writing about cryptography should require no citations because he is an actual crypto expert.) After the significant inaccuracies and frequent unsubstantiated speculation in Schneier on Security , I don't think credible sec…

His writing about cryptography certainly should include citations.

It might sound blasphemous but I (as a non-expert in crypto) would be satisfied if either you or Bruce didn't cite their writing about crypto.

Yes, appeal to authority and all that, but I don't have time to fully learn a field to find out if a cryptographer is mistaken.

Also, the point I was making is that if he wants to leave work uncited, it should at least be the work he has actual credibility in.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#48

Post by thinkmassive »

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 recently discovered a startup called Endless that appears to be working on the content/caching side of this problem. They're for-profit but seem to have good intentions between releasing their OS as open source and creating affordable hardware targeted at emerging markets.

https://endlessm.com/

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#49

Post by m0nty »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #38
m0nty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 interestin…

> Is it limited to state actors, or could we all play? Per the article, no, we can't all play. We don't have either the bandwidth or the expertise.

> Per the article

Not quite, it says "If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins" and "the size and scale of these probes—and especially their persistence—points to state actors" which is not quite the same as saying you need to own the bandwidth. For example, DNS amplification can be used "to turn initially small queries into much larger payloads, which are used to bring down the victim’s servers".

https://www.incapsula.com/ddos/attack-glossary/dns-amplifica...

So maybe there are other techniques which might allow for similar leverage. Neither is the article conclusive about "state actors", they are merely "pointed to". As for expertise ... I don't doubt there are people out there who have it or might acquire it. So it's still an interesting question imo.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#50

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

matt4077 wrote: post #34
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…

There should be a term for "overprepping for disaster because it's so exciting to think about".

engineering?
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