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Widespsread Cyberattack Takes Down Sites Worldwide

ajn678 said:
Someone that is dedicated to doing this(the people that do it against top companies) aren't going to be dissuaded by doing something as simple as a shutdown.
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Arguably the shutdown is the ultimate goal of the DDoS attack. The sniffers will just remain looking for the IP to come back online and then resume the attack.

And it does no good to change IP address either because a site like Netflix needs to publish their IP in DNS for customers to be able to find it... cluing the attackers where to redirect the attack.
 
grip said:
You can hide your IP's behind a firewall or a proxy server.
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Doesn't matter. A DDoS attack specifically targets these filtering systems by giving them more requests than they can handle. It is the high volume of denied requests that choke the system or network.
 
Widespsread Cyberattack Takes Down Sites Worldwide
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this is the real story of the day, not who farted most recently in this ridiculous farce of an election. we had better get our **** together when it comes to cyber security. you can build the best military hardware / software in the world, but it won't mean anything if someone else has a backdoor into it.
 
Some of the large players in the ISP market offer DDOS protection, at a price.
It is supposed to work like this.
A DDOS attack has timing signatures different from normal traffic, The distributed infected attackers repeat the request
too fast. The ISP special software, identifies and black holes the offending addresses.
Supposedly the occurs faster than the DDOS virus can grow.
I wonder is any of the sites hit were so protected?
 
Helix said:
this is the real story of the day, not who farted most recently in this ridiculous farce of an election. we had better get our **** together when it comes to cyber security. you can build the best military hardware / software in the world, but it won't mean anything if someone else has a backdoor into it.
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Did we witness the result of a counter attack brought on by the execution of a cyber attack the Obama Administration threatened?
 
ocean515 said:
Did we witness the result of a counter attack brought on by the execution of a cyber attack the Obama Administration threatened?
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No one has claimed responsibility so it could be a state actor. These kinds of attacks are not difficult to do so it could be anyone. If it's a State then I'd guess North Korea.
 
Napoleon said:
No one has claimed responsibility so it could be a state actor. These kinds of attacks are not difficult to do so it could be anyone. If it's a State then I'd guess North Korea.
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This kind of thing is beyond my level of knowledge, so I leave the nuance to the experts. I am curious to the timing, given the ramping up of threats.
 
longview said:
Some of the large players in the ISP market offer DDOS protection, at a price.
It is supposed to work like this.
A DDOS attack has timing signatures different from normal traffic, The distributed infected attackers repeat the request
too fast. The ISP special software, identifies and black holes the offending addresses.
Supposedly the occurs faster than the DDOS virus can grow.
I wonder is any of the sites hit were so protected?
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The various sites like twitter etc weren't hit, it was the actual infrastructure of the internet (one of the the DNS server) itself that was.

The DNS servers are essentially single points of failure, as multiple websites use them to manage their DNS info (DNS is what turns the www.debatepolitics.com that you type in your browsr into an IP that your computer can understand).

One mitigation tool is for websites to use DNS redundancy, that is subscribe to multiple DNS providers. Some websites did this, and they didn't go down yesterday.
 
Helix said:
this is the real story of the day, not who farted most recently in this ridiculous farce of an election. we had better get our **** together when it comes to cyber security. you can build the best military hardware / software in the world, but it won't mean anything if someone else has a backdoor into it.
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Not to mention, the US govt has purposefully not disclosed backdoors to private US companies. Make no mistake, the NSA have thus far been perfectly happy that we're surfing on vulnerable devices with vulnerable protocols. It gives them easy access.

Thing is, if the NSA have easy access, so does anyone else who can find that same backdoor.
 
ocean515 said:
Did we witness the result of a counter attack brought on by the execution of a cyber attack the Obama Administration threatened?
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Aside from the "i burned my eggs today. thanks, Obama" stuff, if you want my opinion, it's this : we should not be ****ing around with the rest of the world either militarily or otherwise unless it becomes absolutely necessary. we should have a fearsome defense capability, and it should be used for only that. i understand that a certain amount of intelligence gathering is unavoidable. in the meantime, we should be concentrating on rebuilding infrastructure and working on bold things like changing our energy model so that we're not continuously dragged into the Middle East again and again.
 
Nilly said:
Not to mention, the US govt has purposefully not disclosed backdoors to private US companies. Make no mistake, the NSA have thus far been perfectly happy that we're surfing on vulnerable devices with vulnerable protocols. It gives them easy access.

Thing is, if the NSA have easy access, so does anyone else who can find that same backdoor.
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very true. i wonder which country builds our military electronics.
 
Helix said:
Aside from the "i burned my eggs today. thanks, Obama" stuff, if you want my opinion, it's this : we should not be ****ing around with the rest of the world either militarily or otherwise unless it becomes absolutely necessary. we should have a fearsome defense capability, and it should be used for only that. i understand that a certain amount of intelligence gathering is unavoidable. in the meantime, we should be concentrating on rebuilding infrastructure and working on bold things like changing our energy model so that we're not continuously dragged into the Middle East again and again.
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There was no "it's Obama's fault" implied in my question. He is on record at threatening it, and I'm hopeful if it were to take place he would break from his tradition and not announce when. I simply asked if this significant incident were an indicator that threat had been carried through.

As to the rest, I share your view.
 
ocean515 said:
There was no "it's Obama's fault" implied in my question. He is on record at threatening it, and I'm hopeful if it were to take place he would break from his tradition and not announce when. I simply asked if this significant incident were an indicator that threat had been carried through.
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i'm sure that we're ****ing around all over the place when it comes to hacking and cyber attacks. i hope that we're spending more time making sure our own **** is nailed down tight, though. i tend to doubt it.

ocean515 said:
As to the rest, I share your view.
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thanks. unfortunately, those who are making the decisions don't agree. it's always escalate, escalate, escalate. then you get major states like Russia doing blatant hacks, and everyone wonders how we got here.
 
Helix said:
i'm sure that we're ****ing around all over the place when it comes to hacking and cyber attacks. i hope that we're spending more time making sure our own **** is nailed down tight, though. i tend to doubt it.

thanks. unfortunately, those who are making the decisions don't agree. it's always escalate, escalate, escalate. then you get major states like Russia doing blatant hacks, and everyone wonders how we got here.
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The political class is hopelessly technologically illiterate, unfortunately.

I can't see that changing with the incoming candidates, either.
 
grip said:
You can a do a temporary reboot, which disconnects the DDoS addresses and resets the IP's.
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Only if you have dynamic IP addressing. Large sites have static IP's, and rebooting the systems doesn't change the IP addresses. The attacks will merely continue. A DDoS attack is a large number of people sending large numbers of packets to specific IP addresses. There is no way to defend against this kind of attack. All you can do is log the events and investigate. Usually, a few of the attackers are not too sophisticated, and fail to hide their own IP address when sending their packets. Those, you can prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, but only if it is in an area where law enforcement has some kind of jurisdiction.
 
Nilly said:
The political class is hopelessly technologically illiterate, unfortunately.

I can't see that changing with the incoming candidates, either.
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me neither.
 
ocean515 said:
Did we witness the result of a counter attack brought on by the execution of a cyber attack the Obama Administration threatened?
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Good question. Bet we never hear the whole story it it was.
 
danarhea said:
Only if you have dynamic IP addressing. Large sites have static IP's, and rebooting the systems doesn't change the IP addresses. The attacks will merely continue. A DDoS attack is a large number of people sending large numbers of packets to specific IP addresses. There is no way to defend against this kind of attack. All you can do is log the events and investigate. Usually, a few of the attackers are not too sophisticated, and fail to hide their own IP address when sending their packets. Those, you can prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, but only if it is in an area where law enforcement has some kind of jurisdiction.
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Attackers often configure their botnet to operate automatically to overwhelm a target IP with data, to take the network entirely offline. As long as the target IP remains active the DoS software will run but if the IP(s) is disconnected with a TCP reset it can cause the hackers software to reset. It's a temp fix that often doesn't stop anything for long but can allow for better filtering. There's a company called Staminus that provides some software solutions and I believe they work with Homeland Security. Besides filtering for packet inspection and changing the IP's, Network flooding is such a hard thing to defend against with all its varieties...

TCP SYN + ACK
TCP FIN
TCP RESET
TCP ACK
TCP ACK + PSH
TCP Fragment
TCP, UDP & ICMP Floods
HTTP URL GET/POST Floods
Malformed HTTP Header Attacks

Slow-HTTP Request Attacks
SYN Floods Against SSL Protocols
Malformed SSL Attacks
SSL Renegotiation Attacks
SSL Exhaustion
SIP Request Floods
IGMP
Brute Force
Connection Flood

Spoofing / Non-Spoofed
Mixed SYN + UDP or ICMP + UDP flood
Ping of Death
DNS Cache Poisoning Attacks
DNS Amplification
Smurf
Reflected ICMP and UDP
Teardrop
Botnets

Blackenergy, Darkness, YoYoDDoS, etc…
Slowloris/Pyloris and Pucodex
Sockstress and ApacheKiller
Voluntary Botnets
HOIC, LOIC, etc…
Application Layer Attacks
Zero-day DDoS attacks
Apache and Windows vulnerabilities
 
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