Slashdot Mirror
DDoS on Domain Registrar
miller60 writes "Netcraft is reporting that 'domain registrar Joker.com says its nameservers have been hit with a massive DDoS attack, causing outages for customers. More than 550,000 domains are registered with Joker, meaning the outages could be widely felt. It's not clear why the DDoS is succeeding, as most registrars have implemented sturdy DDoS protection since the attack on the root nameserver system back in 2002.' Some security experts have warned in recent weeks about DNS recursion attacks as previously discussed here on Slashdot, which can amplify the power of attacks launched from botnets."
If anything, I'm surprised that more regitstrars aren't being hit by this. Maybe they agreed to pay up instead.
I think it's time for the sensible businesses to form an alliance to defend themselves from these DDOS attacks. We've got to be able to switch along storage, location, share the load among us. If there was a few dozen or hundred larger sites with huge pipes, then actions like this could be avoided. Virtualization looks like a very good help for this. Send along a vmware image to the emergency network, fire up the systems, vpn to the backend, and you're set. I know I oversimplify this, but I guess something along these lines could work (technically). Of course politics and such come into play, but if major players started to float this idea - again, I think it could work. Any thoughts (or flames)?
Most of the phishing scams and obscene spam (farm girl on farm animal type of stuff) I get in my inbox and most of the popups I see on the internet are joker registrations. Half the time, these are completely out of the blue - I don't get surprised when I get this stuff jumping random links from altavista, but when I'm cruising gamebanshee, even very mild porn is out of place. And the spam is just inexcuseable. Before anyone suggests the obvious - like a virus or malware for the popups, I get this on FreeBSD and MacOS X, not Windows.
Now, I know very well that not everyone registering at joker is carrying on such questionable or downright unscrupulous behavior (certainly less than 1% I hope), but I don't look up the registrar of every domain I visit, just those ones I have a complaint against - which is probably true for most anyone on the net.
The problem is that Joker usually doesn't appear concerned about the activities it's customers engage in (AUP notwithstanding), so it might be that someone out there saw one too many popup or phishing scam coming out of a Joker domain and got no satisfaction at the abuse desk.
Of course this wouldn't be justification for screwing up everyone else's domain, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
...in his recent interview, but I don't think he went far enough. He said that DNS is the Achilles' heel of the Web. I believe it's the primary vulnerability of the Internet in general. Virtually all the "who governs the net" garbage would be a non-issue if it wasn't for the name heirarchy.
What we need is an entirely peer to peer adaptation of the Web using DHT as an addressing system, where the hash of the file itself serves as its' address. That would solve (at least) two major problems:-
a) It'd get rid of the abovementioned "Internet governance" BS as mentioned above. I believe we could still have an entirely hyperlinked/relational/semantic Web using a DHT system...it just initially might require some more work. The reason why this would eliminate the TLD issue though is because the naming system itself would become irrelevant. It's worth remembering that DNS was originally developed by scientists/academics. If they'd remained the only people using it, it would have worked acceptably. Unfortunately however, the commercialists came along later and fucked it up, which they tend to do to everything they get their hands on. If the commercialists still want the old DNS/TLD system, let them keep it. The DHT system could be implemented for those of us interested in more productive uses of the network.
b) It would at least go a long way towards putting a final nail in the coffin of the {RI,MP}AA's ability to track/identify (and therefore sue) anybody using p2p filesharing. No DNS means no named websites, and no named websites means no centre of gravity/vulnerability to make the {RI,MP}AA's lives easier.
For those of you who think I'm insane, realise that to a degree it's already been done with the Kad p2p network. Anyone connecting to Kad is only able to view (to the untrained or non-mechanical eye, at least) a totally incomprehensible array of numerical strings and file hashes. It might be traceable to individual users, but not easily. What we need to do is figure out how to create an adapted version of HTTP that is able to rely on a machanism similar to Kad as its' trasit/addressing system.
In terms of coding this, I'd have no idea even where to begin myself...so I guess all I can hopefor is that someone else out there who could is sufficiently interested in the idea to try it.