Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites • Hacker News Board

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#61

Post by smegger001 » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 11:59 PM UTC

gamegod wrote: post #45

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…

The cloud can be more decentralized but it more expensive, Done properly having redundancy across multiple clouds aws, rackspace, google, azure, in geographically different areas with different internet service providers it can be done in a very distributed decentralized fashion, just no one actaully does that. Instead they throw everything on one provider and pray its is backed up and secured by that cloud provider better than the IT guy down the hall they just laid off.

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#62

Post by thomasthomas » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 11:59 PM UTC

kylelibra wrote: post #3

Can't recall ever seeing the NY Times embed tweets in a story, is this a first? edit: apparently it's because I mostly read the site within the app.

why i think adding an edit feature to twitter is thorny issue

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#63

Post by fowlerpower » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:00 AM UTC

palunon wrote: post #56

fowlerpower wrote: post #46

Why? Let them invade another country, let them hack our infrastructure next such as our water supply? You think letting it go or doing nothing is the answer? This guy Putin is no different than Hitler, let him do this sort of thing and you will have much bigger problems in a couple of years.

This guy Putin has nukes. Lots of them.

That's a mute point.

We do too.

Do you not think Hitler scared the whole world? If you let this guy scare you into inaction then he's already won.

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#64

Post by Crito » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:00 AM UTC

rfrank wrote: post #53

cm2187 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about say, stealing a map of secret military installations? Can stealing certain pieces of data be considered an act of war?

> Espionage is stealing data.

You tell me. Under their classification system, is stealing map data espionage?

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#65

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:00 AM UTC

adamiscool8 wrote: post #49

It'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?

[deleted]

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#66

Post by bdamm » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:00 AM UTC

msane wrote: post #30

laurentdc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Modern botnets are mostly made of devices that are operating 24/7 already, such as compromised IP cameras, set top boxes, SOHO routers, IoT devices, etc. The energy spent for TCP/IP stack usage is negligible at best, even when pushing those embedded CPUs to 100%.

> 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; once they've adjusted the grid parameters to compensate for an increase in power consumption, they're happy until the consumption drops off. Using wifi or any internet traffic to destabilize the grid is just not going to work because there just isn't enough raw drain available, even if the attackers could get their timing absolutely flawlessly perfect so every wifi model popped on at once.

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#67

Post by meowface » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:00 AM UTC

jonlucc wrote: post #42

meowface wrote: post #36

Earlier 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...)

I think it could be either. Destruction vs information gathering would seem to be the line to me.

Hence not necessarily.

What Russia is trying to do with us (whether it's to influence our election or just make us seem weak) is very bad and should be met with a proportional response, but calling it an act of war seems a bit too far.

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#68

Post by traskjd » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:01 AM UTC

gamegod wrote: post #45

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.

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#69

Post by duaneb » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:01 AM UTC

gamegod wrote: post #45

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…

It's orthogonal to centralization. Abstracting your infrastructure allows you to easily replicate infrastructure providing the same services.

This is only ironic if you expected moving to the cloud to be what provides the redundancy.

Re: Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

#70

Post by ozaark » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:02 AM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #15

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…

If only there were an app for consumers to securely scan their own network for unspoken traffic in these connected devices.

The amount of consumer IoT currently connected with default and often outdated device settings is beyond belief.