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Internet Backbone DDOS "Largest Ever"
wontonenigma writes "It seems that yesterday the root servers of the internet were attacked in a massive Distributed DoS manner. I mean jeeze, only 4 or 5 out of 13 survived according to the WashPost. Check out the orignal Washington Post Article here."
"when uunet or at&t takes many customers out for many hours, it's not a problem
With something like the root nameservers, if it was an important attack, you would have noticed. I run an ISP and we had zero complaints, even from the Everquest whiners who complain at the drop of a hat about anything.when an attack happens that was generally not even perceived by the users, it's a major disaster
i love the press"
Disclaimer, I work for VeriSign. This is a personal opinion, not company policy. The details of the disaster recovery scheme are of course confidential. However I can tell people that we did think about these issues during the design. We have always known that people might think the DNS was a single physical point of failure for the internet. That is why we designed it so that it is not.
There are multiple locations. The 'A root' is NOT a single machine. There are actually multiple instances of the A root with multiple levels of hotswap capability.
Incidentally it is no accident that the VeriSign root servers stayed up. They were designed to handle loads way beyond normal load. The ATLAS cluster is reported to handle 6 billion transactions a day with a capacity very substantially in excess of that.
Even if all the A roots were physically destroyed the roots can be reconstructed at other locations. Basically all that is needed is a site with a very fast internet connection. In the case of a major terrorist attack AOL or UUNet or even an ARPAnet node could be comandered. The root could even be moved out of the country entirely, British Telecom is a VeriSign affiliate, there are also several other affiliates with nuclear hardened bunkers.
Most Americans have only been thinking about terrorism since 9-11. VeriSign security was largely designed by people who thought about terrorism professionaly, unless of course they were in charge of securing nuclear warheads.
All a terrorist could do is to kill a lot of people, there is absolutely no single point of failure. Even if the entire constellation is destroyed it would result in an outage of no more than a day given the resources that would become available in the aftermath.
The attackers were idiots. They used ICMP echo requests (easily filterable, since the DNS servers don't _have_ to answer those) and quit after an hour. More publicity stunt than actual attempt to damage, IMNSHO.
I've been trying to publish a paper about exactly this (and how to redesign DNS to avoid the vulnerability) and I'm just pissed that they didn't tell me in advance so that I could do some measurements. :)
HACZBY : FADABOI
CORPZ : MVDOMIZN HELLO TO KOTARI ON UNDERNET
Well, this shouldn't take the FBI long. A quick Google search shows that Undernet's Kotari owns the domain www.kotari.com, which he's recently taken down but still shows whois records..
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Why?
It's really easy to setup a system which dumps your SQL database out to a TinyDNS file. TinyDNS is provably secure software. I would expect that you would use it on the root servers, since it's designed to work at very high levels of output/uptime, and be attack resistant to the point of being attack proof.
Say what you will about D. J. Bernstein, he does have a very capable DNS solution available.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most good routers are designed to have the ability (if you enable it) to look inside of the packets
Hmmm, last I looked at the Cisco feature set (or the like from Foundry and Nortel and what have you), it was a challenge to put in rules that
a) didn't take out significant "good" traffic, and
b) did take out significant "bad" traffic.
I agree that rate limiting ICMP traffic is an appropriate answer, especially in the light of this particular attack, but I'm appalled by the number of illitarate dorks who copy snippets titled "how to block all ICMP" from a textbook into their firewall without the slightest understanding of why ICMP was implemented in the first place.
I hate to think of what could happen if the 31334 hackers really start mixing attacks.
I positively _love_ wd40, but I will not apply it to reduce the squeeking of my cars brakes. Too many people use the Internet equivalent of WD40 on their network brakes.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
What my DNS server does is mandate an ACL (list of IPs allowed to make recursive queries; this can be set to "all hosts on the internet" if desired) if recursion (talking to other DNS servers) is enabled. Recursion takes a lot more work to do than authoritative requests; it is best to limit access to this.
Unlike Dan, I feel that a DNS server should be both recursive and authoritative because it allows one to customize the resolution of certain hostnames. The idea is similiar to /etc/hosts, but also works with applications which ignore /etc/hosts and directly perform DNS queries. For example, I was able to continue to connect to macslash.com when a squatter bought the domain and changed its official ip; I simply set up a zone for macslash.com, and made MaraDNS both recursive and authoritative.
SMTP servers have IP restrictions at the application layer because this gives people some idea why they can't send email to a given host. A firewall restriction gives a vague "connection timed out" message in the bounce email message; application-level filtering allows the bounce message to say something like "You're from a known Spam-friendly ISP; go away".
- Sam
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