Slashdot Mirror
DoubleClick Hit by DDoS Attack
YetAnotherName writes "The Washington Times is reporting that everyone's most beloved online advertising distributor, DoubleClick, was subject to a DoS attack crippling the company's DNS servers, and preventing up to 75% of advertising from making it to web pages and surfers' eyes."
Oh, wait. It was DoubleClick?
Can I donate some computer time?
It's been so long since I've seen an ad I forgot about them.
I'm not sure whether the encouragement of DDOS-ing even 'evil' companies should be encouraged.
Trying to get rid of traffic they don't want to see... sounds like trying to get rid of adds we don't want to see.
ogg
Black cat, searing pain, flames...? I must be in Heaven! - Homer Simpson
On behalf of the Slashdot community, I would just like to say that this was indeed a terrible thing. I, and I believe I speak for everyone here when I say this, greatly missed the DoubleClick ads. Their intrusive nature, attempted trickery, and bright flashy lights are what make my internet experience what it is.
I hope that whoever did this terrible act is brought to justice, as such a horrible thing cannot go unpunished!
All those people clikcing links for money must have really gone overboard this time, they will probably make more money than me.
Although it may seem like some sort of poetic justice that Doubleclick was attacked...
The attacks had more far-reaching effects. Pages would take forever to load for me (certain pages, not all), if they used doubleclick ads, simply because the browser was waiting for the final item (the ad) to load.
Whether or not you like doubleclick, their widespread adoption made this a productivity hit for those of us who frequent pages w/ doubleclick content (even if we never notice it).
Help a college student
Seriously, Slashdot needs to shape up, or stop trying to be a news site. This happened yesterday. If you can't get your editors to greenlight stories faster than 24hours in advance, let subscribers do it like Fark does.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I've had the following in my HOSTS file for a while now
0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.com
0.0.0.0 ads.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad2.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad3.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad4.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad5.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad6.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad7.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad8.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad9.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad10.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad11.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad12.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad13.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad14.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad15.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad16.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad17.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad18.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad19.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad20.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.ch.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.ca.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.de.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.fr.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.jp.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.nl.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.no.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ln.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 m.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 m2.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 iv.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ebay.doubleclick.net
Lameness filter randomness: eed d ed wdwe de ff g v fdovk fok fb f osvi jfvioj asv d vp vv jspavj spav dsv aspdvj ede oijf o greg ewrg
The issue wasn't that Double Click had problems, but that every site that uses them become very slow.
Until the basic routing infrastructure of the net changes, this is going to be a common issue anytime a number of big sites all require another organization to serve up their pages (e.g. Akamai).
Thanks, Mike!
I rarely see ads in either IE or Mozilla.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Off the record, WOO HOO!!!
On the record, Punch the Monkey and Win $20!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
There is a downside to such attacks as they harm business trust on the internet and large capital investments to the infrastructure and R&D and all. But it also has an upside, and a important one it is. Little bouts of anarchy like this show The Powers that Be that there is such a thing as an internet community who does not take slimey practices (such as the Verisign search, remember?) lightly.
It keeps commercialism in check. And that is a Good Thing (TM).
No matter how much I hate /ads/, a DDoS should not be tolerated no matter to whom it's directed. Weather it's kernel.org or microsoft.com, let's try to use our knowledge constructivly instead of destructivly. How does that sound? And where does any one person think a DDoS will get for anyone as a whole? If anything, it'll bring a stronger resolve to preventative measures and keep them going strong. They have the $!! so where will it really get those who started this "attack"?
I'm a little disappointed that a group of fairly die-hard anti-doubleclick geeks could only hobble it a few hours at 75%...it may simply have been more effective to introduce a nasty virus into their network, so we'll just call this attack a symbolic way to raise awareness of this historically nasty company. I much rather have heard that a more intrusive and smaller company like CoolWeb was attacked.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Thanks Mydoom! =)
I didnt notice though.. those are blocked anyway
Id recommend everyone add this to their hosts file:
127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.de.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.es.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.fr.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.free6.com
127.0.0.1 ad.it.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.iwin.com
127.0.0.1 ad.jp.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.kr.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.linkexchange.com
127.0.0.1 ad.linksynergy.com
127.0.0.1 ad.nl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.no.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.preferences.com
127.0.0.1 ad.se.doubleclick.net
And here I thought that my ad-blocker was actually working. Silly me.
IF this isn't a second DDoS, then this happened a couple days ago already.
Help fight continental drift.
First they are DDOS'ed and now they are going to be /.'ed.. what a day..
"It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad."
Item 1. shows how far political correctness can go?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
... to enter to recieve my free iPod Mini
-K
4. Dumb pro-american sites that tell of the existence of 'terrorist training servers'
Don't one of the most aggresive advertisers in time, X10.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
I wrote my own spam filter. One of things it does is decode the message body, isolate those web addresses, then perform a simple blacklist/whitelist check on both the web server name and IP address. It turned out that, on average, every IP address was the home of three or four names.
That may not be a representative sample, though. Most of my spam is rejected by one of the DNSBLs; only mail that makes it over that hurdle actually gets the message body checked. That comes out to (usually) less than 10 web-server-based rejections per day.
But hey, I'm not going to complain. I average about one piece of spam every five days or so.
*bangs head to keyboard*
Must use preview button
Must use preview button
Must use preview button
What I tried to say, was "Don't forget one of the most agressive advertisers in time, X10", but the spontanity is somewhat gone now.
Oh well.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
Am I the only one, who after reading the doubleclick DoS article here found that their usage of the term 'hackers' was really rather....stupid? Something to that point? After reading the Great Hackers article, anyways... Surely I can't be the only one who was bugged by this.
doubleclick obviously isn't using the DDOSBlock extension for Firefox.
Now if only there were some way to legally drive spyware / malware companies out of business. That would be an effort that I could endorse 100%. The problem with this is, well, it's still a DDoS, even if it is against a company that's pretty thoroughly reviled. I doubt that the owners of the participating computers agreed to help with the project. /., but it's likely that the number of late-bloomer techies far outnumbers the ranks of the lifelong geeks. Not everybody discovers their inner geek at the same point in life - but that's another rant.) Aunt Claire, who just wants to upload new photos to the family webpage, doesn't deserve to be pop-upped and spywared to tears, but neither does she - or anyone else - deserve to get caught in the middle of an online piss war. Poetic justice or not, this event is a Bad Thing.
Plus, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who still haven't figured out that the big blue "e" isn't the Internet. Their day got totally hosed by web pages that refused to load, "server not found" issues, and assorted other garbage. They got hit by the "shrapnel", but were innocent bystanders. And no, using IE doesn't mean that "they got what they deserved." (We tend to be rather elitest here on
Still, it does warm the cockles of my black little heart, thinking of DoubleClick getting served a heaping helping of the kind of crap that they've dished out over the years.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
All those sites that you go to that have these ads are staying in business because of them.
:)
False.
If DoubleClick went away so would a lot of that content.
True.
Gotta watch out for "all" and "never"...
The devil doesn't really need an advocate, eh?
<grrr>
*closes command prompt*
Not to get all MPAA on you, but when you block the ads, you're hurting the site. Not only that, but you're encouraging "innovation" on the advertisers side to keep you from blocking the ads. This leads to a mixing of advertising and content, so that the web pages start becoming all flash or all pictures so you can't filter out certain images without breaking the whole site for yourself.
Want to keep the subscription sites down and keep the free web up? Leave the banner ads be. Hell, click on them once in a while. If the advertisers and website are satisfied with how their ads are doing, they'll be less aggressive and less likely to piss you off.
http://adzapper.sourceforge.net/
a nifty plugin for squid. does more than just remove ads, it replaces them with a 'this ad zapped' image / swf, so pages don't render weird.
it's written in perl so it's easy to hack and is easily configurable.
No matter how many times I click refresh, the DoubleClick corporate site will not not display any banner ads, nor pop up nor pop under any X10 windows...
Oh, what did you say? "The leader in network advertising" only has tasteful advertisements on their own site?
Isn't that a tad hypocritical?
Shouldn't the people advocating annoying, bouncing, animated, rollover tripe beleive in their own products and techniques enough to use it on their own pages?
Clearly they don't, and they don't.
One could only dream of the day when all the advertisers who patronize DoubleClick ask them selves why DoubleClick doesn't use their own service to advertise their own service...
Perhaps because their customers would realize how much such techniques annoy and drive off potential clients....?
Nah, marketeers (as in mouse, not misspelling 8-) will never get wise to their own lack of wisdom.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I found the PreferenceBar extension really useful. I just unclick the "JavaScript" checkbox, and the pages speed up again. Now, if only I could create a plugin that does site-specific JavaScript blocking...
Opinions my own, statements of fact may contain errors
That may explain why so many web pages with doubleclick ads have been loading so slowly lately. It has been really annoying; in many cases the rest of the page won't display until the add is finished loading.
25% of DoubleClick's advertising is still getting through.
Do you consider it unethical to read a newspaper without reading their ads? Record a TV show and then fast forward through the commercials later? Get up and get food/go to the bathroom during commercials? Throw away mail flyers for products? Use a text based browser? Have a visual imparement?
In all these cases, you are ignoring/blocking ads. Sites have a right to try and advertise, but it's your computer, and you have a right to change the presentation to meet your needs.
Also if the advertisers learned a little something form successful advertising, such as Google and newspapers, they would have a much better chance of not getting blocked:
1) Be less obtrusive. The web is a random access media. Interrupting people with full screen or popup ads is annoying and counter the operation of the web. Thus people hate them and want them gone.
2) Be relivant. Do nto slather your ad over ever site on the internet. Target your ad at sites that attract people that care.
3) Be honest. A large number of ads are highly deceptive in their nature.
Double click violates all of these their ads are a pain, they advertise whatever, wherever and most of them are "Punch the monkey and win" or "You have a message" or "Your computer is broadcasting an Internet IP address".
I LIKE Google ads, since they relate to what I search for. Thus, if I want to buy something, I search and then look in the right hand column since the ads are unobtrusive, relivant to what I want, and honestly trying to sell me it.
You liken blocking ads to rude behavior, but the reverse is also true. The majority of ads are extremely rude in the way they are delivered, with bright flashing graphics or other gimmicks that detract from the content we are trying to view.
If a site is rude to me, I'll gladly be rude in return. Going back to your example, would you feel as bad about not ordering two drinks from that bar with the two drink miniumum, if the staff treated you rudely from the moment you walked in?
OSDN uses doubleclick.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Doing that will make them unblockable since the ads and the content are being served from the same IP address. However, there is nothing to stop someone with coming up with a clever HTML rewriter plugin/browser to strip out the content (readable text and meaningful binary content files) and make a simplified version of the (likely ad-ridden) original page.
My firewall program cannot detect deliberately broken up 'SCRIPT' tags via the document.write Javascript function--otherwise Google's AdSense advertising would be blocked too. If I didn't need Javascript, I could turn it off at the browser level and kill these ads as well.
Simple, HTML-only, text-based ads for me, thank you very much (works for Google)--I am on 'sessioned', time-limited dailup and cannot waste time downloading an (animated) ad banner image, or an (obnoxious, animated) shockwave ad.
Zestyfind Default Homepage Network GAIN Weatherbug Search 180 And all of the other purveyors of spyware/adware
Ads can be sold by the clickthrough rate or the number of impressions. The thing is, when you watch an ad on TV, no one expects you to run out and buy something. Sometimes you don't need to click through for it to work. As an example, slashdot has ads for Server Beach. I was looking for a host for a client and thought, oh, lemme try server beach, their ad said they had good prices. I'm going to recommend server beach to this client.
In this case ads don't need to be clicked.
Photos.
I wasn't blocking ads on Slashdot until they started going "dynamic". If something is moving on the page besides the mouse cursor, it better be a hell of a lot more interesting than Microsoft trying to tell me that using a quad Xeon under Windows 2003 to approximate the work done by a uniprocessor AMD XP2000+ under Linux is an effective way to "lower my TCO"!
The only reason anyone is likely to care is because it has made surfing very pleasent lately. I'm sorry, its illegal, its wrong, and it hurts networks to deliver the package of shit they are sending dclick's way. Still, advertising is fucking out of control, and it needs to lighten up. Since they don't listen to us, some of us have taken to punishing them for it. I applaud their efforts.
I wanna buy the parties responsable a beer.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.