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.
Anyone that has had to deal with DDoS attacks against their networks lately should know that it isn't terribly uncommon to see DDoS attacks that saturate over 1Gbps of bandwidth. With a sizeable botnet, even if the registrar has two gigabit uplinks, it wouldn't be too difficult for an attacker to knock them compleetly offline. Take whatever DDoS prevention methods you want, if your upstream links are saturated... you're boned.
Their website is still functional enough to allow
one to change the DNS servers away from [abc].ns.joker.com
I did this last for my domain.
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)?
just what joker.com needs during a DDos attack, massive publicity from major news sites which will drive more people to the servers.
Can't really say anything about that, but a quick investigation of their DNS shows that it is not geographically distributed (RFC3258). OK, I do not have the tools to do it properly, but it does not look like.
On top of that they do not look like they have their own connectivity to peering points in EU.
So frankly, they look like they are ripe for the picking. It is utterly trivial to run a domain registrar out of several diverse locations using RFC 3258. A registrar that is not doing it is in clear need of a cluebat on the head several times. I hope that this DDOS finally delivers it.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I hope people realise that moving away from joker will result in exactly what the attacker intended: hurt joker.com. My own business is hosted @ joker and I'm feeling the hurt. But Im staying.
Next up: can everbody who gets hurt by this attack band together and start a class action suit against this ddos'er? Yeah, IF he gets caught...
We're the internet here, and if this hacker gets found, make an example of him.. he should be in deep debt for the rest of his life. THAT'll scare these script idiots...
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.
well this was a great idea...they've been hit by a massive DDoS attack and then we decide to slashdot their main website...not a good day for them.....
shanegrant.com
The DDOS attack was actually middle of last week. Joker.com is now operating fine. Timeliness is important when one posts stuff like this, or at least enough editorial sense to edit for the past tense and to check out what is being said.
I've used joker.com for years. It's significantly cheaper than Network Solutions and other US registrars and I've never had a problem.
Three Squirrels
BIND comes out of the box ready to answer requests from anyone, digging the roots itself and caching. Most people don't set it otherwise, and most 'leading' control panels don't advise you to do much of anything about it. However in cases like this, all of the hardening in the world isn't going to help you if the botnet is as big as the one that got Joker.
.. well you're just screwed. Your firewall will either shut out all traffic, or open wide, depending on how its set until the attack subsides.
.. there's very very little that can be done about it given hardware most medium to medium-large companies use. They come on fast and just do not stop.
:) Takes you right to them.
Fortinets, ciscos, Junipers all handle a set number of sessions. Some as low as 1500 - 2000, throw those away when you're talking about a large botnet. Depending on how big the botnet is, and how diverse the attacking blocks are sometimes there is very little to do other than wait it out. Even with higher end Fortinets that support up to 35k sessions, if you have 100k uniques over 30k blocks
DNS records must remain public in order to resolve anything. Sorry folks, but if the network you pissed off is large enough
Some pretty scary chit, especially if you are the one who gets called to deal with it. If you want to yell at someone about it, take your pick from one of the thousands of shared web hosting providers who provide a nice comfy woumb for these networks to grow.
So the next time your host tells you that they've disabled exec(), passthru() and shell_exec() in php for security and restricted access to wget and lynx, go a little easier on them. This is why. They have no control over what their users upload and make available to the world.
Even well hardened servers are easy targets if some jackass uploads phpbb version 1. If any script interpreter can make shell calls, you ought to be checking sockets and connections often.
lsof is your friend, learn how to use it
...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.