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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."
it's supposed to withstand a nuclear war?
...when someone calls up and says "Is the internet down?" you can finally say, "It was." not just to simplify it to the level that your callers can understand, but because its the truth.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I mean jeeze, only 4 or 5 out of 13 survived according to the WashPost.
I'd say this just goes to show how reliable the root name servers are. I didn't notice any dns problems yesterday. In fact, I don't remember any root name server problems since the infamous alternic takeover.
Anything that is so important that it can't be disturbed during transmission is already taken off the Internet and on its own network cable.
You don't think the military puts any critical systems on the Internet, do you?
From the article: "UUNET is the service provider for two of the world's 13 root servers. A unit of WorldCom Inc., it also handles approximately half of the world's Internet traffic." Only two servers for half the world's internet traffic? That is scary. What are the specs on those babies?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
If the servers can withstand the attack without going compleatly down, I guess they know they did something right.
Article:
"Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected, experts said."
All I can say is that if you think of this as a test, I'm happy it passed.
(Insert joke about Beowulf cluster of DDOS attacks / the servers ability to withstand the slashdot effect.)
"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"
Now I know why my Tribes 2 experience lagged last night.
I'm going to beat the crap out of that 12-year-old as soon as I find him; he made me look like I had no skillzzz.
The root DNS servers are required to go from the TLD to the actual TLD's nameservers, eg to go from ".com" to the .com root nameservers. As a result, although critical, their results are cached with very, VERY long cache timeouts (TLD DNS servers seldom change).
.su.
Thus the hour long attack was not enough to meaningfully disrupt things, as most lookups would not require querying the root, unless you were asking for some oddball TLD like
Change the attack to be several hours, or a few days, and then cache entries start to expire and people are unable to look up new domain names. But that attack would be harder to sustain, as infected/compromised machines could be removed.
It is an interesting question who or how this was achieved. THere seems to be a lot of scanning for open windows shares (Yet Another Worm? Who knows) also going on in the past couple of days, but there is no clue if it is related.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I'd love to see a breakdown of what networks the attacks came from and what the OS distribution was... pie charts optional.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Well we can laugh about it now (What DOS? my instinct when I read about this was to flip the unsuccessful hax0rs the bird) but my concern is that this could be a test run for something more unpleasant.
Maybe to cause a false sense of security, maybe to analyse how those crucial networks cope with DOS attacks so as to be more successful next time.
Whether these people were Bin Laden's boys or garden variety hax0rs don't get too comfortable. The worst is yet to come.
-- INTX Grouch. http://www.midnightblue.net
It Couldn't have been...
I was using the computer in Afghanistan to surf pr0n.
The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever
I've never considered DDOS all that sophisticated myself. It's seems to me that "wow a script kiddie got more systems under his control than usual" more than "a great cracker is on the loose". Though I suppose if it were a great cracker then they could have been proving themselves by predicting the attack.
I doubt the root servers run on Windows.
And *nix systems are infinitely more scriptable, so I think it's more likely those were used for the attack (if I remember correctly, unsecured Linux where used for the big DDOS attacks on Yahoo and Ebay etc some years ago).
Je ne parle pas francais.
" I couldn't load ESPN.com yesterday at school, now I know why!" ...Because you got high, because you got high, because you got high...
(It can't just have been me!)
graspee
I know I shouldn't have pressed this button...
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
Which could happen if these guys tried again:
:)
We'll have to rely on IP addresses, obviously, so start changing your bookmarks now!
http://64.28.67.150/index.pl
instead of
http://slashdot.org/index.pl
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected, experts said.
Indeed, no traffic slowdown, no more than usual support calls. The system works as expected, even under attack.
Worth a read: Caida DNS analysis, and more specifically those graphs. It would be interesting to know which DNS sustained the attack, in regard to the graphs.
have you been defaced today?
Maybe they were attacking root servers but those server failing couldn't cause all the DNS records to get lost. Some people might have had temporary problems, some might have not.
If you really want to, build your own root server
So how often do YOU utilize the internet without using DNS? Not often, I bet.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Hi,
::
I'm at JpNIC & JPRS we manage the Japanese servers here. The attack progressed through our networks and effected 4 of our secondary mapped servers (these servers are used as a backup and in no way are real root servers). The servers were running a suite of Microsoft products (Windows NT 4.0) and security firewall by Network Associates.
Here is a quick log review:
Oct20: The attackers probed our system around 2100 hours on Oct 20 (Japan). We saw a surge in traffic onto the honeypot (yes these backups are honeypots) systems right around then.
2238: We saw several different types of attacks on the system, starting with mundane XP only attacks (these were NT boxes). We then saw tests for clocked IIS and various other things that didnt exist on our system.
2245: We saw the first bind attacks, these attacks were very comprehensive. We can say they tried every single bind exploit out there. But nothing was working.
Attacks ended right then.
Then on the 22nd they resumed (remember we are ahead)
22nd: A new type of attack resumed. The attack started with port 1 on the NT box, we have never seen this type of attack and the port itself responding was very weird. Trouble started and alarms went off, we were checking but couldnt figure out what happend, then we saw a new bind attack. The attack came in and removed some entries from bind database (we use oracle to store our bind data)..
The following entries were added under ENTRI_KEY_WORLD_DATA
HACZBY : FADABOI
CORPZ : MVDOMIZN HELLO TO KOTARI ON UNDERNET
Several other things were changed or removed.
Till now, we have no idea what the exact type of hack this was, we are still looking into this. The attack calls himself "Fadaboi", and has been seen attacking other systems in the past.
We are now working hard with network solutions.
Thank you.
I am not an expert but surely these servers connect to the net through some sort of router/hub whatever. The servers are made to handle a lot of traffic but what about the connecting hardware. If the routers were attacked directly wouldn't the DDOS attack still be succesful without touching or alerting the dns servers themselves.
It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't quite work like that. The routers we're talking about here (I imagine that most of the root servers are on 100BT or Gigabit Ethernet LANs which then plug into one or more DS-3s [45 Mbps] or more likely OC-3s [155 Mbps]) are designed to be able to handle many, many times more traffic than the servers are. Your average Cisco 7xxx or 12xxx router is built to handle far more traffic than any given server might see. Think about it ... you generally have many servers being serviced by one router, not the other way around. Additionally, each root server is most likely connected to multiple routers (say, they're hosted at an ISP with three DS-3s to different providers and each DS-3 is plugged into a different Cisco 7500).
Also I doubt that the routers are setup to recognize any kind of attack as they are just relays between the net and the server. Possibly the attack could go on for quite some time before any one realized what was going on.
Actually, it's the other way around. Most good routers are designed to have the ability (if you enable it) to look inside of the packets that pass through them and filter out "bad" ones based on various criteria. Thus, routers are actually perfectly suited to stopping attacks like this, while servers are expected to burn their CPU cycles doing other things (yes, servers can do this sort of filtering, but they generally have something more important to do). The only real problem is that it's often very difficult to tell the "good" packets from the "bad." After all, how do you distinguish automatically between a distributed flood of HTTP malicious requests and a Slashdotting? You get the idea.
"95% of all Slashdot
In other news, Slashdot posted a story about the internet yesterday. as a result, the internet had been completely obliterated within 5 minutes.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
A certain mil/gov organization I consult with was jumping through their own asses worried about this. The funny thing is, ummm... NOTHING CHANGED! We experienced NOTHING. I think they wanted us to do something... ANYTHING.
You know... next time this happens, I'm setting up my own root servers... errr... wait...
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Quite often, in fact. I only visit a few sites daily (Slashdot, El Reg, and the rest) and my box caches the domain names, therefore I never touch DNS. Couple that with leaving my computer on 24/7, and I have effectively eliminated egress DNS traffic.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
-Kevin
I think I can. The US Army-operated root server looks like it took the brunt of the attack, as opposed to the JPNIC servers, which seem to have had a much lower rate (perhaps because most of the attacking hosts were US-based?).
"The Domain Name System (DNS), which converts complex Internet protocol addressing codes..."
And I suppose the person who wrote this article would consider arithmetic a complex system of digits and symbols.
come on fhqwhgads
I'm not too sure I'd call the USA the most democratic nation in the world, but that's a discussion for a totally different time and place.
The Internet's roots have nothing to do with democracy. Quite the opposite, your military wanted a communications network that could survive a nuclear holocaust so that it would be the first to rebuild and conquer the world when the evil reds launched the first nuke.
Most of the TLDs are in the USA because the DNS system was created in the USA, and was largely hosted by US providers. It's too much trouble to move them, and of limited benefeit. If they ever decide to add new ones, it's likely that they'll put at least one in Japan, and probably a couple in Europe.
Even so, though, the main reason for their dispersal is to survive a nuclear attack that takes out one or two. I don't know if you've looked at a map recently, but the USA is big. It's not like all 13 of the TLD servers are located in a trailer in rural Kentucky. You'd have to carpet bomb the entire USA to be sure of taking out all 13 of them, and frankly, if somebody had the resources to turn the entire country into a self-illuminating glass-floored parking lot, the Internet would be the least of my worries.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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.
Root-servers.net
The legendary cymru.com data.
I haven't looked yet but LINX mrtg charts might show something interesting.
Of course, even if someone could knock all the root servers over, the net as we know it wouldn't stop working instantly. That's what the time to live value is for :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
piddly and unintelligent
Fine, so the attack was unintelligent. What will happen when someone attacks MAJORLY and INTELLIGENTLY?
This gets my panties in a knot. A piddly attack brought down 65% of the root name servers! A good attack would have brought them all down! That doesn't that worry you?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The stats for the h.root servers are available for the time period of the attack. Seems as though the h servers were taking in close to 94Mbits/second for a while.
More links to server stats can be found at Root Servers.org and some background is available at ICANNWatch.
There's only one critical file? Hey, just email it to me, I'll keep it on my hard drive. If anyone needs it, just shoot me an email.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
How do you plan on enforcing this, sir?
Seriously. How do you plan on enforcing this? Not only is it a huge expenditure of resources to track down the number of computers used in the attacks, to track down their IP addies, to obtain the needed court orders to obtain their ISP's logs, the resources to parse those logs to find out who was logged on, and *then* go about prosecuting the offenders, what would it accomplish?
If Code Red taught us anything, it's that the dumb won't change a thing about the way they work, regardless of how much the internet community ridicules them. It's also completely nuts to punish the ISPs for this... where does it stop? I'm pretty sure that some AOL clients were responsible (and while I wouldn't complain about no AOL'ers for a while, I bet they would). How about people who buy their access directly from UUNet? Gonna block out UUNet for a month?
Even if you could implement that punishment of the ISPs, it wouldn't accomplish much. It wouldn't hurt me at all if I was blocked from direct access to the TLD servers, because inside my network I'm running a mirror. My ISP is running a mirror. I know of a dozen open DNS servers on the internet. I'm betting I could find at least one that wouldn't block me.
Seriously, though. It's great to say we should punish these people for not securing their systems, but you have to understand just how many computers would be needed for this attack. The TLD servers aren't running on 64k ISDN: they're on OC48 at least. There's 13 of them. The kind of bandwidth needed to adequately DoS them is obscene. You either do it the dumb way and use 50 computers running on the fastest connection available, or you use *hundreds* of computers, possibly thousands or tens of thousands.
Looks great on paper, but realistically there's not much point in ranting like this. Besides... if it wasn't for the article, I'm betting that most of the world wouldn't have noticed.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The attack only lasted an hour or so, didn't affect all the servers, and if most of the sites you were looking at were in your ISP's DNS caches, you wouldn't have hit the root servers anyway. If you're looking for google.com, your ISP's cache has it because somebody else looked at it 2 seconds ago - it's when you want really-obscure-domain.com that you need to hit the root servers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I hope for your sake that Slashdot doesn't change it's IP address any time soon then.
One would assume you still have to check periodically to see if the IP address from DNS is the same as your cached one. Either way, you are not the majority of Internet users, so for most everyone, DNS going dead == Internet going dead.
Determining whether or not kicking the majority of users off the Internet is a bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.
I only noticed it because I use my own DNS server to resolve requests; and pay close attention whenever I see any problems resolving host names (there is the possibility of it being a bug with my software).
The person who orchastrated this attack is not very familiar with DNS. Attacking the root name servers is not very effective; all the root servers do is refer people to the .com, .org, or other TLD (top-level-domain) name servers. Most DNS servers remember the list of the name servers for a given TLD for a period of two days, and do not need to contact the root servers to resolve those names. While some lesser-used country codes may have had slower resolution times, an attack on the root servers which only lasts an hour can not even be felt by the average end user.
In the case of MaraDNS, if a DOS (denial of service) is happening against the root servers, MaraDNS will be able to resolve names (albeit more slowly for lesser-used TLDs) until every single root server is sucessfully DOS'd.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It's just change propagation that's a bitch.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
..memorising the slashdot servers IP address in case of total DNS meltdown? Seriously, if the DNS system was totally destroyed, would you be able to think of any IP addresses by memory to get you in contact with other net people?
Smaller isp's dont'cache info from larger ones... most dns servers simply use the root servers directly. There is no heirarchy beyond that with regards to caching.
It is heirarchial with regards to namespace, but not so much with regards to lookups.
Actually that is not the reason. By the time DNS came along the Internet was already international. And never confuse the claim that the US invented the Internet with the idea that the US invented computer networking. Lots of countries had computer networks, the idea of protocol design to overcome the political problems of connecting disparate networks was what came out of the US.
The DNS servers are where they are because they are expensive to maintain and are run on a volunteer basis. Most of the people prepared to provide the necessary resources happened to be in the US. This is the reason why 9 of the root servers went down you cannot expect someone to pay for multiple OC3 or above connectivity to support a volunteer effort.
As far as geography goes China and Russia should have a root server. There should also be servers in Australia, south America and northern and southern africa. This is actually likely to happen when it becomes feasible to turn on use of anycast. At present there is a hard limit of 13 root servers. Some of those servers are multiple machines in fault tolerant configurations but they are still bound by the IP assumption that an IP address is served at a single location.
With anycast we simply fiddle the router tables so that there are multiple servers arround the world all responding to the same IP address. This will make it possible to have 50 sites serving each of the 13 root DNS addresses. In practice it is likely that only one of those addresses will need to be anycast and the BIND software tweaked to favor it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
That be funnier if it didn't really happen...all the time. I work at a University and I get at least one call a day: "Is the server down?" There are many many servers on campus and it is (almost) never the server causing the problem. Users wank up their software configuration and then blame it on "the server" instead of their own ignorance (notice I didn't say stupidity, I said ignorance. many of these people are very intelligent...just in fields without a technical basis). Some basic user education on the technology that is an integral part of their jobs could go a long way.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
For the most common 2LD names, any major ISP will have cached the addresses for them, and won't need to hit the .com server until the typical 1-week or 24-hour cache timeout periods. If your nameserver is ns.bigisp.net, somebody there will have looked up google.com in the last 2 seconds, even though nobody at your ISP has looked up really-obscure-domain.com this week - but even that one may be in the cache because some spammer was out harvesting addresses. An obvious scaling/redundancy play for the root servers and for the major ISPs would be to have them cache full copies of the root server domains to keep down the load and reduce dependency. It's not really that much data - 10 million domains averaging 30 characters for name and IP addresses is only half a CD-ROM. An interesting alternative trick would be for the Tier 1 ISPs to have some back-door access to root-level servers for recursive querying.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
4711 Mission Rd. - Westwood, KS (sub. of Kansas City), Tel: (913) 432-5678
Good enough for a lot of professional athletes, and they straightened me up after my car wreck.
But I don't think they can fix uunet.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Original Washington Post article was: "Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever"
/.
Followup article, after slashdot story, was: "Attack on Washington Post Called Largest Ever".
Ah.. behold the mighty power of
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
Until your favorite website's IP address changes. Then you're screwed. I mean you can always "find" an IP address, you just route to it.
At a hosting company for example, let's say they have two class Cs 1.2.3.0/24 and 4.5.6.0/24, now let's say the first one is used for webhosting and the second one is used for other company services. Okay, great, except they decide to restructure. Now www.knittingforoldladies.com used to be 1.2.3.4, and Granny bookmarked it and her browser oh-so-intelligently caches the IP. Except now the company restructures, and www.knittingforoldladies.com is now 4.5.6.7. 1.2.3.4 is now some other random customer website. Oh, crap, what happened to the knitting? Sure, the browser could check and note that the connection it has made does not respond for 'knittingforoldladies.com', but why even go that far? DNS is meant to provide access to a rapidly changeable hierarchial database of names which map to addresses. Doing bogus cacheing on the client end for any length of time is not sane.
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
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.
In the world of Winblows users and Linux newbies, you don't have to have the most secure machine in the world, it just has to be more secure than 50% of the machines in the world.
It is like the joke about 2 people running from a bear. You don't have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun your friend.
Why bother cracking an almost insecure machine, when you have thousands of completely insecure ones to do your bidding?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
A warrant
--Joey
You're right, you wouldn't want to block all queries, but you can do almost as good: you can block all queries except the queries for the domains that you're hosting. In fact, doing so is generally considered a very good idea, since it protects you against some forms of cache poisoning attacks.
Check out the allow-recursion command in the named.conf (5) man page, which does exactly what I describe.
To provide caching, use DNScache. If your box is exposed to the internet, you likely don't want to be doing cache requests for the world. You can easily configure DNScache to broker for several internal (TinyDNS) systems. Note that only TinyDNS will set the authoritative flag; DNScache will not.
For dynamically updating zones, I use a small Perl DBI script which dumps zones from the DB into a directory. All files in the directory are sorted (via sort) into a main text file, which is hashed into data.cdb. I also have a big text file from the other DNS server scped over and included in the hash. The entire system is dynamic, with every important entry controllable from within an easily backed-up (and restorted) SQL server. Adding things like DynDNS to this setup would be trivial (all I'd need is another table for actual accounts, which allow people to modify their own zone files).
Best of all, because there is an order of magnitude less code running, TinyDNS is a lot easier to inspect for correctness. You can spend a couple of evenings reading over all the code for the package (even if it's not the best looking C code in the world), and really understand it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You'd be surprised just how large my /etc/hosts file is.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Ethernet is a physical transport, while TCP/IP is a protocol. In fact, TCP (transmission control protocol) sits on top of IP (internet protocl). There is also UDP on top of IP (but no one says UDP/IP that I've ever heard) and ICMP on IP. UDP are short messages that are sent without creating a link, and ICMP is for things like Ping, tracerout, etc. You can create your own protocol and use it on the internet.
You can use any physical layer: ethernet, a modem, a cell phone, wifi, bluetooth, firewire, USB, power lines, etc with IP, and similarly you can use may other protocols with Ethernet or any other link Such as IPX, NetBui, Apple talk, etc.
TCP, UDP, and ICMP are tied to IP and wont work with anything else.
Then there are higher level protocols that sit on top of TCP or UDP, for example DNS sits on UDP, FTP, telnet, gnutella and others sit on TCP. Interestingly HTTP should work on other protocols as long as you can establish a link between a server and a host on it. And you have software that implements it on these other links.
There's also Ipv6, which is a newer version of IP.
Lonely?
Find love on the internet
And that's just a little fragment of it. I'm really worried about these guys taking over the internet!!
If someone could kindly point me to the person or persons who launched this latest DDOS attack, I would certainly appreciate it. I hold the patent on Distributed Denial-Of-Service Attacks By Electronic Means, and I will get my day in court, and royalties due to me.
But, yeah, some of the attacks aren't much different than using a loudspeaker to announce "Free Beer at Victim.com"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The caching nameserver pdnsd does something like this -- if it can't manage to get a new record, it uses the old (stale) copy. So you have a cached copy of Slashdot's NS for a long, long time.
If root DNS went down, you'd have to have Slashdot's DNS move as well.
May we never see th
Those of you who actually took the time to read my essay, "Cyberwar: How Terrorists Could Defeat the U.S., and Why They Won't," (requires Acrobat 5, not 4.) might get chill running up your backs when you read this. I'm still sticking to my original thesis, however: The Internet won't be brought down by terrorists because corporations and governments need it, and the terrorists serve the interests of corporations and governments. Regardless, I hope this DNS attack isn't a prelude to a bigger operation. Note how they say that it just ran for an hour and then stopped! Note this story, which detailed the creation of attack zombies with P2P capabilities, allowing them to be targetted at will. Also note that a top infrastructure protection analyst was just killed by the Maryland area sniper! And within a couple of days we see the largest DDOS attack on root DNS systems ever!? (Long Pause) Keep a sharp eye out for weirdness, folks, something BIG might be coming down:
Here's what I wrote back on September 14, 2002:
Maybe the terrorists start taking out some or all of the thirteen root domain name server systems (I think there are still 13) or interrupting communications to those root servers [today's DDOS incident]. (Thankfully, a couple of these systems are located in places that have people with guns guarding them.) These root servers are used by thousands of other lower level domain name systems and receive about 300 million requests per day.
Domain name systems are used to translate human readable URLs, like www.cryptogon.com into machine usable IP addresses like 209.115.132.59. There is much concern about the root DNS systems. Many articles on this topic are easily accessible. Much of the concern, however, is focused on hackers DOSsing the root servers. Again, this misses the point.
What is the physical security like at the non-military root DNS facilities?
I've driven by one of the buildings hundreds of times because I used to live near it. It looks just like any other small office building. How long would this place hold up against a few armed terrorists who were willing to die TO BRING DOWN A ROOT DNS NODE? Think about it. The same goes for the data centers mentioned previously. Surely these places should have armed security. But even if they did, are they prepared to stop terrorists who have no intention of ever getting out alive?
Here's what just happened:
The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever, starting late Monday, according to officials at key online backbone organizations.
Around 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, a "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attack struck the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications. Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected, experts said.
FBI officials would not speculate on who might have planned or carried out the attack.
David Wray, a spokesman for the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), said the bureau is "aware of the reports and looking into it."
DDOS attacks overwhelm networks with an onslaught of data until they cannot be used. According to security experts, the incident probably was the result of multiple attacks, in which attackers concentrate the power of many computers against a single network to prevent it from operating.
"This was the largest and most complex DDOS attack ever against the root server system," said a source at one of the organizations responsible for operating the root servers.