Slashdot Mirror
A Peek At Script Kiddie Culture
Brian Bruns writes "NewsForge is covering an article on the Script Kiddie Culture, in an interview with my co-admin Andrew Kirch. It provides insight into a culture that not many people fully understand, or get to see."
Search, copy, paste.
Woho! Im leet!
..or want to see.
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
...or care about.
Are people looking for some Gibson-esque secret cabal of script kiddies, who are building operating systems at age 8, can speak in hex, and have secret h4X0r access to everywhere?
I think people watch too many movies. Or is defining 'script kiddies' as a culture an attempt to rationalize the level of ignorance we experience when trying to comprehend all of computing technology? Since nobody can be good at everything, is it a mental safety valve to create uber-computer users, who 'get it', who can do 'cool things', who are 'in the know'? Isn't this the same thing as creating Gods to explain otherwise unknown natural phenomena?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The most amusing implications are:
a) Its a culture.
b) Someone would actually want to see it.
10 years ago I did the script kid thing for a bit (before having a life). Its a bunch of kids who's parents are not really involved in their lives, and have nothing better to do than look for a digital mate by typing "A/S/L?!?!??! and talking about their privates.
I could seriously care less.
The quote that says young adolescents have no social life is pretty damn funny.
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
_xXx_h4x0r3rZer0_xXx [#31337] d00d sl4shd0t p0st1d 0ur sh1zzl3 m4h n1zz73
XxX-|-Ne()-|-XxX [#31337]
XxX-|-Ne()-|-XxX [#31337] l4m3rz!@_!@
MoFscker
Look no further.
where they mention that "no one wants to download grsecurity" or "tru64 is where it's at" or "some kiddies target Solaris and Irix because that usually means a big pipe".
Try a little reading comprehension first.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
From what I understand of script kiddies they mostly do stuff from sheer boredom (what ever happened to the good ole outdoors?) and for the extra pseudo attention they get from it. Surely by attempting to interview and do articles on this 'culture' they are just pandering to the desires of these script kiddies. And rather than helping them to realise that they need to grow up etc, the extra attention is only going to make them have a greater desire to wreak havock with their 'leet skills'
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Back in my day, we didn't have computers. We would see how long we could balance on a flagpole or we would see how many goldfish we could fit in a telephone booth. Hell, once I danced the Charleston on a flagpole for 12 hours. Won me a brand new LaSalle. Now, pranks and mischief are all electronic, done with them newfangled computers by them so called script-kiddies.
Takes the fun out of being a kid if you ask me. Hmmmpphh
Unknown host pong.
Is this guy just making stuff up as he goes along. I swear he comes off like Gibson at GRC for christ sake. Secret groups of anti-social 11 year olds taking down whole isp's because their male "competition" for the heart of an equally dysfunctional haxo4 chica is a subscriber.
From an admin's perspective, a DDoS is the scariest attack of all. There's nothing you can do to prevent it, and nothing you can do to stop it.
An admin whose network is being DDoSed really doesn't have much hope of doing anything. Their inbound communication line to the outside world is being flooded with so much garbage information, the signals that they want to get over that line are simply drowned out. Incoming connections can't get a turn going down the pipe, so they time out. He's powerless, everything in his shop is nice and secure, but can't function without geting any useful requests. That poor admin can call his ISP... but there's really not much the ISP can do from their side of the line.
The real problem in a DDoS attack is not that the final victim's security has gone wrong, but the security of other computers elsewhere on the Internet have been compromised, and they've been turned into zombies contributing to the DDoS flood. The DDoS will not subside until nearly all those machines are all patched, but that's not something the victim's people can do. They have to wait for the Anti-Virus providers and software providers to knock down the flamethrowers that are all being shot in the same direction.
Any time you're relying on third parties who don't work for you to save your business, you're really up a creek and are throwing yourself on the mercy of the tech world. Hopefully they'll save you in time, because there's really not much you can do from your own datacenter.
We had a script kiddie (didnt know it at first) trying desperatley to hack several of our servers, I reckognized the IP block he was on and called up my buddy who was the sysadmin for the ISP he was connected from, Soooo he gave mne his name and address. Me and my dad Im 6'2 230 lbs and my dad looks like george carlin on steroids, well we knocked on the door of a very nice house at about 4:00 pm , to the door comes a pimpled faced rugrat about 14, I told him we were here about the hacking attempt on our server, the kid turned purple, andd I honest to gfod thought he was gonna piss himself , we had a nice little discussion and told him the next call was to the FBI for attempted bank robbery as we hosted several credit unions, never had anymore problems from this fellow. We did take a baseball bat along just in case he was bigger than we were , This was going back some time 96 or so.
I think I have a comparison to sum this up.
Script Kiddies is as much a Culture as 1337 5p34k is a Language.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
"Dude that DOS attack was so seven-three-three-plus sign!"
I noticed that microsofts statment that (if|when) Linux gains as much popularity as Windows, we will find that it is not inherintly more secure because "Using Linux does not make you defacto smarter"
Reading this I knew that SOMEONE would bring it up, so I might as well be the first
I think that as linux sits right at this moment, it does make one smarting to be using it, simple because it requires the user to be more aware of their system. I do not see this changing in the near future either, not because of the technical inability of linux to emulate Windows automagic configuration, but because the people who write the software do not seem to want that (I know I don't).
So does this mean Linux is more secure by default? I would have said yes if you asked me a week ago, but this last weekend I was at a LAN party and installed Linux on several machines of friends who were interested in learning about it. What I saw made me realize that in the hands of an average (l)user, Linux can be LESS secure
The thing is, even after my lecure I still had people choosing root passwords like "poopoo" and "iforgotit". Not only that, after a brief tutorial on how to do basic system administration through YaST (I installed SuSE 9 on their boxen), I had at least 3 people go in and turn on every single network service that was offered. One of these people even set up his box as an anonymous FTP server with read and WRITE priviliges to the root directory!
At the same time I had another guy logging on to IRC as root and downloading files, while I was taking care of these machines someone else had already created a user account and given the user name and password out to several people in his AIM buddy list.
I'm the last person to say that we should include less software with a distrobution. I think the fact that most distorbutions contain a complete operating environment is a good thing, but with a little bit of knowledge these people had already made their system much much less secure than a windows box with the security updates applied would have been.
The whole point of that rant being (other than just getting that off my chest), as linux becomes more popular I can easily see scripts writen to take advantage of clueless linux users just the same as there are scripts to take advantage of clueless windows users.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
After reading ths, you do start to think what would happen if someone big like CNN or MSNBC ran a story on the FBI not bothering with a bunch of kids who seem to be more dangerous then Al Queda. Honestly, do you expect another 5 or 6 terrorist attacks tomorrow? What about 5 or 6 people cracking into servers, messing with corperations, DoSing government servers...
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
Like "terrorists," "script kiddies" and other "h4x0r" types just do this sort of shit for the notority and publicity. Unlike terrorists, they have no real goal. Therefor, once the publicity, which creates a justification for the activity, disapears the activity will become unprofitable in the sense that fame is a comodity which is worth something.
It'd be better just to ignore the little fuckers until they grow up and go away. At least, that is how it seems from where I sit.
No, it qualifies you for MENSA.
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
the point of Dexter's laboratory. Some kid driven to demented acts of violence and creativity by the inane action of his older sister.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Krikey... here we see the script kiddie in his native habitat, his parents spare room... look at how he asks for warez and 733t scriptz in AOL chatrooms...
We musn't approach too quickly or we'll startle the little feller...
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Everyone please take the time to configure your gateways to drop outgoing packets with spoofed source addresses. This doesn't take long and potentially saves everyone else a ton of grief. Logging these funny packets is also a good way to tell if a machine on your network has been compromised.
...is that some of these kiddies seem to strive to bring down the one thing that gives them any sense of purpose.
Like the attacks on the root servers, well done, bring the domain name system down, now update your hosts file by hand when you want to visit a website/chat on irc to your mates about how 31337 you are.
I am NaN
...the interviewed party sounds like he's making things up as he goes along for greater exposure and interest. There is nothing there that jumps out to me and says "liar", but at the same time, I think that the interviewee might have been, er thinking about this topic too much and might be blowing things out of proportion just a little bit.
Do people on IRC attack conference line services? Oh yes, I've seen it being done several times, and FoF is something of a wheel in this scene. Are said hijacked conference lines used for neferious purposes? I'm sure once in a while, but really they are mostly used for the purposes of socialization... same as has been the case with phreaking the past.
What do people do the first time they phreak? They call a faraway place and talk to someone just because it is neat to talk to someone in England, or Fiji or somewhere far away without cost.
What is the primary use of these phreak'd conference lines? Socialization, a way for people who are geographically distant who have got to know each other on IRC to talk to each other without cost. Believe you me, the content of these conversations is far more likely to contain dreary e/n stuff rather than Plots To Take Over The World.
The intimation that this culture could somehow be for sale to nefarious people and powers is frankly outrageous and hysterical at the very same time.
-- benton.
Back in my day, we had to walk our packets to and from the server, uphill, BOTH ways.
I know this is just asking to get flamed, but if these kids had some proper motivation and direction, they could probably do some pretty impressive stuff.
I know script kiddies are the bottom feeders of the hacker/cracker world, but most are still very young. But they obviously have enough technical knowledge to cause alot of trouble, and channeled in the right direction they could probably grow up to be fairly proficient developers and really become an asset to the tech community.
But then maybe I'm just being naive and optimistic.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
In Blair's UK, the scripts kid you
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
Wow...these people exchange nude photos of each other, exchange phone numbers and other important data, get fucked over by all their "friends" they've never met, and then try it again. I'll stick with video games, thanks.
There are operators on [major IRC network] who dedicate a large part of their time to finding and deleting these drones and drone servers, along with contacting providers whose machines are putting out the binaries. It should be noted however that this activity is ILLEGAL and viewed by the authorities as a violation of computer crimes laws. As a rule of thumb, unless you have paperwork from a judge saying you can touch a compromised machine, or you own the machine in question, don't touch it.
Picking up and putting your fingerprints on a gun found in the street is unwise. So vigilantism or "policing your network" or server is illegal. If you touch those compromised boxes, you go to jail; if you don't, the kiddie, seeing you, might very well turn around and packet you. It's not a good situation.
Anyone have an example of someone doing this and getting busted?
Crikey!
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
Here is a much better site portraying script kiddie culture on a daily basis
And here I thought the article was about youth Shakespeare groups!
I'm betting that the kiddies play a role, in much the same way the messenger does for the author of the letter.
And like the messenger, they are more likely to get shot by the good guys when the let a hack loose into the wild.
Could it be that a few black (and possibly white) hatters find that they serve a purpose?
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
didnt = didn't
reckognized = recognized
mne = me
Im = I'm
andd = and
gfod = god
Damn... I sure as hell hope you're not a programmer at your job. If so, I'd love to see some of your code
#!/usr/been/purl
opin(INFILE,"/etc/paswd") || die("Fil naught fownd");
Sorry about making fun of you, please don't bring your dad to my house.
Hmm... I never was a script kiddie, I could very well be, I'm of the right age, heh. Maybe because the fact that I know several ways to screw up routers and computers I have always thought that creating something is much better then distroying something.
Though from I see in the article most of these so-called Script Kiddies probably have more skills then I do, or at least more will to find remote holes and such.
The key to stoping these people is to teach them that creating a program, or using their knowledge to fix the security problems they find will pay a lot better then simply attacking remote systems and downloading/writing damageing scripts and worms. Maybe not a perfect solution, but I think such reconditioning would certianly stop the majority of them.
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
Wonderful. Now the vandals have a culture. Charming. Let's next do an article on the graffiti "artists" who spraypainted my brother's garage. How about the spamming "free speech activists?" Or the good souls at NAMBLA?
Vandalism is vandalism, and crime is crime, no matter how you dress it up. Criminals have a long history of pretending to walk to the beat of a different drummer, being misunderstood, put-down, trod on, etc.; but at the end of the day, they're just fucking criminals looking for a scapegoat instead of taking responsibility for their crimes.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
A Peek At Script Kiddie Culture
Posted by timothy on Saturday March 06, @06:03PM
We all know "5cr1p7 k1dd13z" don't have much of a social life, so there should be plenty of them around to comment on this article on a Saturday night. The Slashdot editors are smarter than a lot of people want to give them credit for.
Rank Presidents by th
Paul Vixie quoted in the article (via a link)
'Recommendation: upgrade your peering requirements to include language like:
Each peer agrees to emit only IP packets with accurate
source addresses, to require their customers to do likewise,
and to extend this requirement to all other peers by $DATE.
Where DATE = (now() + '6 months') or some other negotiated value.
Peering agreements are so thick with political BS, they can't even stop ISP's like UUNet who are the biggest spam friendly ISP's around.
Basically everyone is trying to use standards for protocols to correct this, engineers trying to correct political problems.
Kids do all sorts of anti-social stuff, but, even when they're mostly minding their own business, they get pissed on. I love it how everyone expects *teenagers* to spend their free time caring for puppies and the homeless.
Here in a decent-sized city in the (yay) midwest, the evening activities available to those under eighteen are: bowling, cruising, wandering the streets aimlessly, and, ummm, well that's pretty much it.
Everything in town closes at 9:00. *Public* parks close. There's a constant crackdown on 'cruising' for some reason. There's an 11:00 curfew for everyone under-18.
So, the choices for a kid growing up around here are: 'sit in your room all evening with your computer' or 'break some sort of law'. Apparently, now our fearless leaders have found a way to make 'sitting in your room' against the law as if they would rather these kids be roaming the streets vandalizing cars and buildings. Great.
At least, this way, they are actually learning some things about computers and causing *very* little damage in the process. I think we all need to be a little more realistic: kids cost money and destroy things. The fact that *the internet* isn't a little more kid-proof should be of more concern to everyone than the slightly-less-than-moral decisions made by a bunch of teenagers.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If Joe Average's cable modem bandwidth is getting sucked up by some kiddie script, he should care. Especially when his ISP sends him a warning letter saying hes using up too much bandwidth when the most graphic intense site he's visited that month is CNN.com.
Bob Businessman definately should care as well. That dedicated T3 line he uses at work is being used to get information to his consumers. If the site starts to get slow due to a worm causing him to download hundreds of gigs of pr0n, not only will his consumers get angry but his employees may suffer in effeciency...
who simply cut and pasted code and then tweaked it a bit to see what happens.
Bah, back in my day, i had to copy it by hand from a book into qbasic on windows 3.11. None of this fancy copy and paste bs. An i liked it.
but his employees may suffer in effeciency...
because they are wanking off to said 'pr0n'
The only insight here is a load of pre-pubescent kids will continue to act pre-pubescent online. They can be just as obxnoxious in the cyberscape as they are in real life, the only difference being you can't reach out and slap them in the face.
The sad part is people SHOULD care. Everyone from Joe Average to Bob Businessman should take notice of this.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, I know we're all techies here, but lets break out of our shells for a second. This matters to people who make over 40k a year. Joe Average works in a factory and lets his kids use the internet for schooling. Do you think Joe Average, who was raised on libraries and encyclopedias, cares even for a second about whether his ISP goes down for 6 hours? Joe Average has to deal with bills, healthcare, school, drugs, gangs, crime, etc. etc. Joe Average needs tax dollars spent ensuring the welfare of our society, not the welfare of Bob Businessman's T3 lines so profit margins remain high.
Putting feds on the case of script kiddies is taking away from money and manpower that our society desperately needs. We need more concern over corporate accountability and less for corporate profits.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
the only thing I did find sad about the article is that no one cared about them much... just like "oh let's just throw them all in jail, they are dumbfucks anyways!"... it's a kinda sad state of affairs, instead of thinking on how to divert their attention to something more useful and perhaps trying to help them with getting a social life... my posts are useless... hehe
Joe Average needs tax dollars spent ensuring the welfare of our society, not the welfare of Bob Businessman's T3 lines so profit margins remain high.
Generally I agree, except...
Bob Businessman is Joe Average's boss's boss's boss. When his T-3 line for the site that sells whatever widgets Joe Average is putting together gets sucked dry, it costs the company money. Six months later, when they have a shareholder meeting coming up, that expensive worm might cost Joe Average his job in a layoff.
It's important to recognize that the resources needed by some people aren't the resources needed by everyone. But by the same token, it's also useful to recognize when the resources sucked up by one abuse end up costing others important resources down the line.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Anywho...with that said here's my $.02:
I think that everyone posting above me has their own valid points which I shall paraphrase here.
1. We don't want money being thrown away to fight a battle that may or may not be won, if winning is even a real possibility.2. We can agree that the actions of these "script kiddies" is to some degree detrimental to business. Seeing as how s#it rolls down hill, it can also have an impact on us blue collar folks. I think it's accurate to say that the negative impact will grow and become more noticeable as time passes.
So, what kind of happy medium can be found amidst the viewpoints which say either "It's a waste of resources to fight." or "Something must be done."?
Should officials not try to trim the fat from current programs and then allocate the new resources to fight this growing problem? I'm responding here off the cuff so I sheepishly admit I don't have a prepared list of potential candidates for severence. But, therein lies my question; Where is the government and general law enforcement concentrating that is perhaps irrelevant.
I know plenty of people here can come up with a long list of things our government wastes money on. Furthermore I'll bet'cha we can get over half those involved in the discussion to agree to the slashing of this or that. What say ye pantheon of knowledge?
---
Every hour wounds. The last one kills.
I remember being in a friend's dorm room about 8 years ago and watching him show me how he floods people off of irc with a CTCP flood. This was the beginning of the DoSnets. His bot was linked up to about 400 others that would all send commands to a specific user at once. I can only imagine the technology change in the last 8 years. From the sounds of it though, it's the same old crap, just using different protocols.
I also remember when winnuke came out. It was nearly impossible to use the internet for about 6 weeks, until microsoft got a patch out. I put a linux machine up as a firewall and logged all of the attempts. It was like people were just winnuking all of the available ip space. After winnuke, it was teardrop, then smurf. I'd never seen a windows machine crash so fast.
ahh...the good old days. I'm suprised this is just now getting attention. It was no big deal when single computers would crash all over the internet, but when CNN.com or AOL.com gets attacked, it's a big deal all of the sudden.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Everyone from Joe Average to Bob Businessman should take notice of this.
Add to that list the front-line TSRs and CSRs who are often the first to hear of new discoveries and ignore them.
Imagine this: a young marginal power-user stumbles upon an unintentional feature that is repeatable. She can either seek approval from the software publisher, whose *SRs who aren't allowed to break from the script to actually respond to the problem properly (or they don't have the time to understand potential exploits/bugs explained in non-technical terms by a kid), or she can tell a slightly more/less skilled user and brag about it. This gathers approval and self-esteem for everyone involved in sharing but keeping the secret, which encourages the finding of more secrets, and the development of skills related to doing so.
This slow and informal spread of the bug itself, and the skills required to see/use/expolit it can go on for *months* before it reaches someone with the correct skillset to recognise the security problem, and is able to communicate that problem to someone who can actually fix it (see: malformed C strings, DOS device names, a number of Hotmail... issues, which were in the wild and reported multiple times before vendors took notice).
So yes, being aware that there are people out there who are seeking popularity, approval, etc by _finding flaws in others' work_ (not an unfamiliar concept in meatspace) is useful to the bottom line.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
(Not to be confused with 'punk rock', the style of music that embraces the point of view: "This is shit, everything is shit, life is shit, you are shit, I am shit".)
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
From an online search, cf is an abbreviation for confer (Latin for compare).
As I understand it, the citation form "see" would have been a better choice for the parent as it is used to cite to a source out of which a comment made directly follows. For example, the parent's comment that script kiddies seem quite technical (which follows from the article's discussion of kiddies having exploits before anyone else).
As authority, I used the much-maligned "Bluebook", infamous with law students.
Hmm. In good /. tradition, I had not read the article. After reading the parent post, I had to read the article to satisfy my curiosity as to what citation form was best. Good job!
This young white dude, computer programmer family man is found shot dead. In his house. With an exotic WW-II German pistol.
The crack team of Briscoe and Green do their leg work, and they come across an old black dude who is somehow connected to the young white dude in a financial scam. The cops think "salt and pepper" team and one crime guy turning on his partner.
The D.A.'s office goes to work on this and what finally emerges is 1) the black dude is an upstanding citizen and a war hero (hence the WW-II war trophy gun), 2) the white dude lost his job and turned to cybercrime to support his family, 3) the black dude had no connection to the white dude apart from that the white dude picked a random victim to scam for identity theft, 4) the black dude, finding all of his net worth was scammed, used his charm and his war hero "street smarts" to get the ISP to give up the address of the guy who ripped him off.
Like many Law and Order episodes, the whole thing is Hollywood and little connection to real cops, victims, and criminals. On the other hand, the writers are not that creative and probably use some news stories as a jumping off point.
Like the better of the Law and Order episodes, it makes you think. What right did the white dude have to pick a random victim and take all his money? What right did the black dude have to get his revenge as murder? What right does society have to put an 80 year old man (the black dude) away for seeking his own justice?
But to me the moral of this episode along with the baseball bat incident is what goes around comes around. No, I don't think threatening a 15 year old with a baseball bat is a good idea, and the 15 year old and parents can get in a lather about their "rights." But a 15 year old with access to a computer (and the parents of said 14 year old) could appreciate that if one could hack into someone's server, owner of such server could hack back to track you down, and such owner could be meaner, tougher, better connected, or in a much worse mood than you. And somehow going after people who threaten 15 year olds with bats under those circumstances doesn't seem like the highest priority for the courts.
Interesting!
Until now, the idiocy of the school yard jerk was something you had to put up with when you were a kid, but thankfully left behind when you graduated. But now juvenile crap overflows into the 'real' world, and can affect even the most insulated ivory tower type. Is this the first time?
I remember bullies and morons in school. The 'play'ground held a unique undercurrent of threat and horror for me as a kid. Going to school included genuinely believing that every day there was the possibility that you might be tortured and murdered by some half-wit big kid with a cruel streak, and that the safe world of adult supervision was unaware of most of the hells being perpetrated. Being a kid was a horror in many ways.
So what can be done about the skript-kiddie 'threat'?
Zip. Let the adult world suffer, I say. Think of it as payment for forcing kids through such a horrific 'education' system. There are only two other institutions which are so similar in structure and ideology, and they are the military and the penal system. School sucks, and aside from the handful of friends I made there, I hated nearly every aspect of it. The most valuable lessons I learned were how to survive it. Little else was of much use except shop class, typing class, art class and any time where there happened to be one of those very rare adults who inspired. You know the ones I mean. The good teachers who somehow defied the system and taught you valuable lessons in the face of all the state-ordained mind control. (Learn how to Obey and be Bored out of your mind doing repetetive tasks. A robot factory cranking out Perfect Workers.)
I also think it's neat that the Skript Kiddies are the geek version of 'Moe' type bullies. There's an ironic balancing in effect there somehow. .
-FL
This is a Newsforge article. It's part of OSDN, just like Slashdot. In other words, the chance of Newsforge getting slashdotted is only slightly better than the chance of Slashdot being slashdotted.
Mt dew is a great agar for growing script kiddies...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
It's easier to sell companys, government agentcys and cable modem users on using reasonable security precautions with half a million children running around with viruses and such looking to screw with anyone who gives them half a chance than it is to sell them on the notion that the 6 big bad nasty terrorist black hatters will crush them like a grape if they make the sligtest mistake.
People will assume they are safe from the big time terrorist dude becouse "I'm not a sereous target".
DDoS attacks against major targets use hacked cable modem users desktops.
Spammers use Worms to establish a spamming network.
ID theft resulting from the simplist of mistakes.
That stuff happening today.
When telling people how important security is:
With out script kiddies
"Why would anyone attack me?"
"Your system can be used as a launching point for all sorts of attacks"
"Yeah right."
It's hard for a person to picture how "they alone" could be be a target and they'd be right becouse they aren't alone. But the details sound like SiFi to most people and they tune you out.
With script kiddies.
"Why would anyone want to attack me?"
"Becouse your an easy target. Script kiddies need no other reason"
I don't actually exist.
Kow know I feel pretty strong as I am giving up mod point to reply but.... NO.
Think of all the good things that upstream useage is for. Just running a small game server/hosting Multiplayer for a weekend will pretty kill a 512k line. To say nothing of SSH to the box at home, VNC/Xterm/Terminal Services, (legit or grey) file sharing. The real challeng is making your border routers work for you. Not cheap but it will pay off in the end.
The only reason I can see ISP's wanting to cut upload is control or power. I get the felling that as far as comcast/verizon/other big telecom are concerned we are consumers and the only reason we need more bandwith is to consume more not produce content on our own.
Having said that I think that in the next 3-5 years we will have a real two-teir system 256up/768down NAT'ed lite connection for consumers, and a 3meg up/down for techies.
What we really need to figure out is how to combine QoS, packet filtering, transparent proxies, and local mirrors and good ISP hosting solutions to really cut down on traffic. Imagine Joe User. He runs kazza, plays some online games, a fair amount of web browsing, and downloads game patches, and has a pretty good pr0n habit. He also has a server that he uses to show a love of cats and host games. He also has 3meg up/5 meg down line, however the traffic is limmited to 512/1.5 meg at the border router.
The QoS caps his P2P at 128/384, more that enough to get what he want without killing the network. His web browsing goes through a transparent proxy using Policy based routing, cutting the traffic in half. Any traffic coming off the proxy as well as mail and news comes in at 5meg. Same thing with game patches/legit ISO's. Since all of this traffic is coming off a "local" server it has no cost. He also has a colocated box along with 1500 of his friends and neighbors. He has local root.administrator and can host games/web pages off it.
Lower bandwith costs, better response as far a the user is concerned. everyone wins. Of course you do have to have trained Sr. Techs/Jr. Sysadmins but not too many.
What Mr. Lamo thought he was doing was demonstrating to the NYT that they had a security problem.
Maybe it's still too early in the morning for me, but I didn't understand much of what that article said. OK, Kiddies organize in gangs and they hang out on IRC. What else is going on?? What does the 'war' consist of, who controls more machines on the internet? And it's being fought by copy & pasting the lastet Viri, Trojan Horses etc. and spreadng them around? Why can't IRC be secured, after all those years?
Some understandable explanations would be much appreciated...
Hey, essdodson! Heeeeeeeey, essdodson! Want to see a monkey? Do you want to see a funny funny monkey? Want to see the funnnnnnny funny monkey monkey?
*holds up a mirror*
essdodson: *delighted squeal*
For attacks where the 'bots do a DNS lookup, then a redirect from a webserver may be sufficient. You just nee the customer to connect once and then the genuine connection is redirected to another server. The 'bot keeps hamering away at the dummy server.
The point of DDoS is that it hits everyone. Sure we get huge numbers of DDoS attacks at work, sure none has ever taken us down. But the check that we have to write to ensure that is huge, millions a month.
Here is a take on this issue from Phill Hallam-Baker:
OK so a second bite at the same article, lets take a look at those DDoS schemes.
According to the article the ISPs are unresponsive to take down requests, the FBI do not take notice. I know that people keep making this complaint but there are high tech crimes units in the major cities and they are looking to takedown these guys. And at the moment the demand is such that DDoS is being treated as if it was a littering offense.
I think we need a better primer on how to prepare a case for law enforcement. I guess it is possible if you read the article carefully that the desk guy thought this particular person had been getting evidence by hacking.
We can't expect to do this with law enforcement in the loop every time. Lets change the model, law enforcement only get involved if the ISPs fail to act, and instead of just going after the hacker there is a liability for the ISP.
This is consistent with fire department model of government security regulations. You can do pretty much anything to your house decoration wise. Government only gets involved when safety is the issue. In particular the fire dept won't let you build a house that is a fire-trap, in part because it might set fire to buildings arround it.
Here we have ISPs that are forwarding bogons. It seems to me that this should not be that difficulty to prevent. A $500 box performing passive listening at the cable head end could sound an alert when there is a bogon attack. You don't have to look at every packet, all you need to do is to look at a sample. If you see an ethernet MAC spewing bogons you shut it down.
Another approach would be to push the bogon prevention right to the cable modem. Why on earth would these let bogon injection take place in the first place? Sure there will be some hacked modems, but DDoS is comming from hijacked machines.
Cable modems, NAT boxes and the like should have limiters built in to prevent the creation of ridiculous numbers of SYN packets or outgoing UDP packets to reserved system ports like DNS. It is pretty easy to think of numbers that should be no inconvenience to any legitimate use, and there could be an option to turn them off in any case. But why give every home user the equivalent of a loaded machine gun when they don't need or want one?
Reduce the value of your machine to a hacker, reduce the probability of attack?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Young whippersnappers! In my day we didn't even have existence! We had to sit around in a void and WAIT for existence so we could ponder walking uphill in the snow! BOTH WAYS! (beat that?)
America - Home of the scapegoat, land of the Corporation
The sad part is people SHOULD care. Everyone from Joe Average to Bob Businessman should take notice of this.
Joe and Bob should get advice from a competent computer tech. Script kiddies do what they do because there are so many unsecured boxes out there. You don't need a real pro to at least get some basic security. The one problem that's hardest to deal with is a ping flood. It's a problem because it's super easy to nail users on the Internet with ports wide open, users that click on malware e-mail attachments without even considering the source or the content.
If I chose to be a kiddie, I could go out and spread malware through via e-mail tomorrow, and rack up thousands of ping zombies over a couple of weeks. Jeez, I wouldn't have to lift a finger, I could just google some code and tweak a few things. I couldn't care less about script kiddie culture; It's the same as latchkey kid "culture" has been for the last 20 years (the slang may change, but behavior is the same). The real issue is the fact that technology allows an unattended latchkey kid drenched by material wealth (equipment and network service) act out his unchecked, hormone-influeced frustration and seriously disrupt any endpoint on the Internet.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS