Mixter Speaks About the Latest DDoS

ochinko writes, "This is an interview with the German programmer who wrote TFN and TFN2K. Basically he says that it's quite easy to launch such attacks but extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the initiators to be tracked." Suck.com has a pretty good article on the attacks, as well. Maybe I should take credit for the DDoS attacks and become an international superstar.

Comments

Ahh the moral vacuume of the hacker

[Yaruar]

No. The fact that I authored these tools does in no way mean that I condone their active use. I must admit I was quite shocked to hear about the latest attacks. It seems that the attackers are pretty clueless people who misuse powerful resources and tools for generally harmful and senseless activities just "because they can."

Reminds me of most weapons makers who dissolve themselves from blame as the creators by saying that theirs is a tool that is misused.

There is more than a hint of ego in this guys work (if indeed it was him) by putting it in a public forum (albeit for good reasons) he knew that people were going to abuse his creation.

Maybe he should have let the relevant people know abot the problem before putting the code in the public domain.

In many ways I suspect he wanted an attack to vindicate himself, show off his skills whilst remaining on the side of the light and generally bask in the publicity...

Method to Madness

[brunes69]

Does anyone but me see the goal behind these attacks? Think of the names... CNN (owned by Time/Warner) Etoys (obvious) Yahoo (corperatism ruined a once great story) etc.. all the targets are huge corperations that believed they were more powerful than the "hackers" and believe themselves above morality. Perhaps this will cath their attention... Maybe things like the Fox flash page, frivolous lawsuits, etc. will be diminished. Or not ;) I'm not saying this kind of behavior should be encouraged, or if it is even accceptable... it IS very poor advocacy. I'm just saying, i think i know where these guys are coming from... I'm practically there myself. In fact, I think alot of us are.

It was... this guy

[ajs]

Ok, I know who did it. It was my cousin's sister's broker's dealer's aunt's friend who told me that they knew a guy who happened to have the next ASN up from this girl who once exchanged Email with a cypherpunk who was loosely refered to in Cryptonomicon which was secretly a true story about this guy who towed my car for me.... um, where was I?

Oh yeah, Hemos did it. ;-)

Now that I've woken up.

[bons]

Situation: I have a home PC attached to acable modem that's always on (in my case, Seti - those who would prefer that I do distributed.net, sorry, but I've made my choice for my reasons.)
This PC happens to run windows (Yes. I know. I'm inherently evil and feeding the great satan. Just flame me and moderate me down for admitting it and get on with your lives.)
I installed a firewall (Zonelabs), mostly because it was free, and also because I decided that if I wasn't part of the problem yet, it was only a matter of time.

Results: I was getting probed at an average of once every 20 minutes from a variety of locations. Urk! (Please note, my ip starts with a 24, which tends to indicate an @home or roadrunner cable modem service)

Side note: If you want to test your machine, go to Steve Gibson's SheildsUP!. It's a bit slow at the moment (and posting this ain't gonna make it faster). Personally I wish I had known about this site before this insanity started.

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