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BlueSecurity Fall-Out Reveals Larger Problem
mdrebelx writes "For anyone following the BlueSecurity story, sadly the anti-spam crusader has raised the white flag. Brian Krebs with the Washington Post is reporting that after BlueSecurity's announcement, Prolexic and UltraDNS, which were both linked with BlueSecurity through business relations came under a DNS amplification attack that brought down thousands of sites.
While much of the focus about the BlueSecurity story has been centered on the question of what can be done about spam, I think a bigger question has been raised - is the Internet really that fragile? What has been going on is essentially cyber-terrorism and from what has been reported so far the terrorist clearly have the upper hand."
There have been other outages, major, which have had significant impact. It's a good question: is the internet that fragile?
In many ways it probably is. At the same time, the infrastructure seems resilient enough. The world so far hasn't laced up life-and-death critical systems to the internet such that a failure could cause loss of life. Well, that is, if you don't include:
Oh, wait, I guess people have started doing that.
What mechanisms exist for more than resiliency, i.e., instant self-healing? Could terrorists with a little knowledge and a few well-placed EMP generators disable major segments of the internet?
Unlike phones and the phone networks which were built with lots of oversight and regulation (Universal Service was a big driver for this (aside: now that everything is profit driven, don't expect phone service at that farm house at the end of that long country road anymore... noone HAS to provide it)), I'm not aware of what safeguards back up the internet. In my entire lifetime, I've not one time experienced a phone outage, not once! Power outages, etc., the phone companies have backups to backups to ensure service (though there is the occasional and hard to manage for ditch digging incident).
While large pieces of the internet are built upon the phone companies' infrastructure, other pieces aren't, and there are significant additional layers of complexity not in the phone companies' purview (switches, routers, coax cable from cable companies).
That question, "is the internet that fragile?", is probably the biggest reason I've never opted to switch my phone service to VOIP yet. I'd hate to be the one (tiny chance, I know) who needs to make that one 911 call and not be able to do so because the internet is unavailable (which happens occasionally here, which is also too often).
It seems like every week there's a new issue with DNS. Why can't DNS be secured? Is it just inertia? Is BIND really that pathetic, or are they just not using it correctly?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> What has been going on is essentially cyber-terrorism and from what has been reported so far the terrorist
> clearly have the upper hand.
Yup, and I'd have loved to have seen the US gov use this as a perfect 'live fire' exercise. After all, if they can't stop a few punk spammers how can we have any confidence they could stop a determined attack by the usual terrorist suspects?
Perfect opportunity to test all the phases of response, from tracking the responsible parties all the way to eliminating them. Ok, in this case a SEAL team would probably have to be tasked to capture em instead of just dropping a few bombs on their sorry asses. Or if, as I suspect, the ringleaders are in the US or other western representive nations, just have em all arrested.
Democrat delenda est
well the internet is as strong as the weakest link, and guess what OS that link is..
None of those attacks (DOS) could have been done without the use of thousands of zombie machines.
I guess the only way of stoping the attakers is by taking their weapons (zombies) from them and thats left as an excersise for the survivors.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Seems to me maybe the solution is a tiered internet where spammers pay more to use the bandwidth... oh wait, sorry wrong discussion.
Clever or not, I got nothing...
I think a bigger question has been raised - is the Internet really that fragile?
No, the Internet is robust and redundant. What is fragile are the tens of thousands of pwn3d Windows PC's that are being used without their owners' knowledge to perpetrate these massive DDOS attacks. If I were a lawyer for Blue Security, Yahoo, or anyone else who has been hit recently, I would be seriously looking in to the merits of a lawsuit against MS for gross negligence or something similar.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
It's the direct link to more governmental control over something under the premise that it "has to be" so the "terrorists" can be stopped.
While I do agree that this definitly shows the threat spammers really pose to the internet, I fear at least as much handing government the card blanche to monitoring all and any internet traffic for the sake of "saving us from spam".
No, I'm aware that this won't help a single bit in an attempt to quench spam. But did any anti-terror activity actually work against the alleged threat?
So bring this problem to the attention of your senators, your governors, your congressmen or whoever has some power in your country. This is a very, very serious problem, the criminals are getting the upper hand in this turf, and the internet is a resource I don't want to see depending on the goodwill of the spam mafia.
But for all that we hold dear, avoid the word terrorism. Legislators have been using that word before as the excuse for every kind of restrictive laws that did JACK to solve the problem and only created more. Try to find a word that makes them actually realize the problem and realize that this problem is serious. Not only to the worthless humans using it, but also to precious commerce.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, the Internet isn't that fragile. It's suprisingly robust, in fact. About the only thing that can really do any significant damage is sheer volume, enough traffic from enough distinct sources to overwhelm the target server or swamp it's network connections. No matter what, anything is always going to be vulnerable to that. You can only have finite bandwidth and server horsepower, and if an opponent's willing and able to throw enough resources at you he can simply overwhelm you. It's often referred to as "the Slashdot effect".
The only thing that's happened is that, because of the inherent insecurity of Windows machines and the increasing number of them with broadband connections, the bad guys now have access to orders of magnitude more bandwidth and horsepower than any single server can have. In military terms it's like facing an enemy who outnumbers you by ten thousand to one. Distributing your DNS won't help, redundant pipes won't help, distributing your servers won't help, if you can deal with 99% of his assault he's still got a hundred times what you can absorb left.
The only thing that can help is cutting off the supply of ownable machines the bad guys can take over and use in their attacks. If they're limited to their own machines they can't do much harm.
Dear Homeland Security: please look closer at Redmond.
This is terrorism. Everyone with a trojaned Microsoft box is aiding and abetting.
Thank you, Linus and Steve.
More like "hundreds of thousands".
My spam traps have been hit by over 1.5 million unique IPs this year alone,
with an additional 30,000 never before seen IPs every day.
I estimate there are currently 3-4 million compromised machines world wide.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
You know, BlueSecurity was working. Had they survived, it might have shutdown the spammers. This is going to become a massive bubble issue. Someone just needs to pick up the torch BlueSecurity dropped, and be willing to fight the fight.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
Your choice of OS is no protection. If you run malicious software, your computer is a zombie. Period.
Really? I looked around and can find no links through google for malicious zombie downloads on linux that will run on all flavors. Please post the link to one or a link to an article that disects one.
I'm not making the argument that linux can't be hacked - it can and I've seen the results of root kits. How many linux zombies are there? Is it proporational to the number of linux vs. windows machines? (Assuming Linux desktops and servers total 2% of desktops, 2% of spam zombies should be Linux, right? Where are the 4% of OSX zombies?)
It's about time to come up with a new type of server based messaging.
For every lock, there is a new way to pick it. For every type of security, there is a new way to hack it. This is a band-aid. The real problem is the fact that there is money to be made from this.
As much as we hate the NSA and other invasive orginizations they impose structure and laws. Chaos is the alternative.
Emperor Palpatine, is that you?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I backup the internet every night at 10 pm (PST).
From TFA "These massive assaults harness the power of thousands of hacked PCs to swamp sites with so much bogus traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors."
The problem is the thousands of hacked PCs that are used in these attacks. The internet is working exactly the way it was designed and the bot nets take advantage of bottlenecks in the system.
What is being done to take out these bot nets? I've perused a few of these bot squads on IRC and while there are many zombied Windows machines there are also many *nix boxes which succumbed to the brute force ssh password attacks because they had user accounts with stupid passwords.
Aside from locating and neutralizing the individual boxes in the squads shouldn't we be creating and deploying self immunizing tools in our infrastructure that detects these boxes and quarantines them?
Shouldn't we also be holding people accountable for having vulnerable boxes connected to the net? Perhaps a bandwidth restriction will help for repeat offenders.
To do #2, you lose one or more of the things that makes email valuable
1)Its free- you only pay for bandwidth
2)Its universal, anyone can get an account
3)Its open, no company can block a user from email
4)Its possible to send email to anyone, even someone you don't know, if you have their email address.
All of these are extremely important and make email the useful tool it is today. Take any away, and the usefulness plummets. Spam is annoying, but the benefits of the four above points far outweigh it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Fanatics flying airplanes into buildings killing thousands : Terrorists.
Haxors commanding botnets to DDOS servers : Cyber-terrorists.
Big corporations doing aggressive take-overs : Corporate terrorists.
Mass producers dumping products below cost overseas : Market terrorists.
Politicians sketching doom scenarios during campaigns to woo scared voters over to their party : Political (party) terrorists.
C'mon cut it out will ya, soon they will brand humans multiplying without limits sucking up resources and scaring other animals away and out of existence : Biosphere terrorists?
You know, according to some theory, black holes will eventually suck up most of the available matter in the universe, leaving it a dark cold desolate place with only some Hawking radiation to warm your soul. Should we call those : Universal Terrorists then?
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
I work for an unnamed backbone provider, and have currently been involved in blocking said DNS Amplification attack.. to give you a general idea of the size of the attack and the number of zombies involved.. When I left work... The attack was 14,768% of 9.8MBps... or.. over 13GBit/sec... Our infrastructure is holding up just fine, however.. Personally, I'd like to find the 'owner' of these zombies, and castrate him. I guess the guy doesn't have anything better to do with his life than trash the net...
Accorging to this the blue frog model will be open sourced as a peer-to-peer model available through sourceforge.net.
A few years back we would have laughed that someone is calling this terrorism, and just saying it's just a few scriptkiddies having fun with DDOS and whatnot. Computers are just a fun box, nothing serious about it. Relax. Nothing of value is lost, and if you don't have a backup, you deserve it. Darwinism at work.
It's also interesting how questions change. We question: Is the internet really that fragile?
What happened to the baser question: Do we really depend so much on the internet?
Of course, now that we do, maybe we should look into making the internet even more resilient than the original creators envisioned. After all, it was made to endure nuclear war, but a few scriptkiddies can still take down any site with a little DDOSing and DNS-tweaks..
Just always remember where we came from.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Sadly the internet is already compromised since the bot networks are already too large for most organisations to take on.
I hope someone does something to deal with the botnet threats. Being able to suck multiple gigabits of bandwidth means 'they' can kill any small to medium sized internet operation if they want to via a range of attacks from the simple to the rather sophisticated.
Tier1 ISPs usually don't care other than possibly to try and filter all your traffic to prevent their other customers from suffering.
Some medium/larger sized companies use services like Akamai siteshield that are capable of sustaining a reasonable DDOS-ing but the botnet operators will eventually realise that the attacks are not just about knocking a site offline. Akamai will charge you for that traffic which will send the companies bankrupt anyway (and possibly quicker than going offline). In fact i was wondering how on earth bluesecurity were going to pay their bandwidth bill.
The defences we have against such attacks are pathetic. I was amused in an episode of 24 when they came under an online attack from terrorists and their new "CISCO FIREWALL" protects them, i mean seriously the firewalls are the least of your problems these days. If you come under attack from one of these serious russian dudes - you'd be looking at trying to filter the traffic well before it reaches the firewalls since your line and network would be saturated.
The internet is so not fragile it isn't even funny. Can people make it hickup and sneeze along minor portions of it? Yes. Is it fragile? Hell no! It's been running for 20 years across the globe. It has been hammered by viruses, trojans, organized DDOS attacks and world-wide calamities and their corresponding data-storms and still the internet as a whole has functioned. It may simply be that the internet is not enough of a singular entity to be susceptible to a singular vulnerability. Computers are fragile, software can be fragile, but the aggregation of those two into an organism made up of millions perhaps even billions of machines is not fragile. The DDOS attack on Blue Security, when compared to the totality of the internet is practically meaningless. The only thing that might make the entirety of the internet fragile would be a universal vulnerability which has no workaround and cripples the main traffic routes of the internet itself. Maybe this will happen, but I think even then, the internet will continue to function but perhaps just along it's backroads and private secure networks.
As much as we hate the NSA and other invasive orginizations they impose structure and laws. Chaos is the alternative.
I don't know where you got the idea that NSA's activities have done anything to "impose structure and law" on the Internet.
If anything, the NSA has been actively participating in the chaos by going ahead and doing their own thing with no regard to the law.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The basic requirement here is that DNS servers shouldn't be accepting queries from clients outside their local organizations. This is like the old "open relay" problem with SMTP. Obviously, such DNS servers have to be fixed. To force the issue, DNS servers queried by other DNS servers should find out if the querying server incorrectly accepts queries from the outside. If it does, that server is marked as a loser, and its queries get processed only after any other queries, and maybe with a deliberate delay. That should deal with the problem in the near term.
The stronger form of this protection is that many queries from loser servers are answered with an address that returns a page saying something like "Your DNS server at [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] has a problem and must be upgraded." The screaming users will get the problem fixed.
You're wrong. Lawmakers impose laws, not government agencies, and when they're doing their job properly they pass laws that keep dangerous organizations like the NSA in check. They've been rather lax in their duties lately ... certainly Congress has largely fallen down on the job. The problem is that too much of our current government has been infected by the disease of unaccountability. They do whatever the Hell they please in the name of "homeland security" or "antiterrorism", and there's nobody left to tell them to stop.
... I think I just described AOL.
I would further submit that America was far less chaotic in the good old days when big government wasn't so big, wasn't so invasive and tended to leave its citizens alone. It isn't necessary to have a government that restricts and monitors its citizens to the degree that ours is doing for the purpose of achieving a stable society. In fact, the imposition of excessive control, coupled with erratic enforcement, creates instability! This is variously called "political unrest" or "social protest" or, when carried to the logical extreme, "rebellion". Furthermore, it is the kind of thing Americans do when they're pushed too far. At least, I hope it's still the kind of thing we do. It's about the only hope we have left. The way things are in D.C. nowadays, it's pretty obvious that while the lights are still on there's nobody home.
The Wild West aspect of the Internet, which seems to disturb you to some degree, is precisely what makes the Internet the greatest advance since the invention of fire, the wheel and air conditioning! The economic, scientific and cultural benefits of the Internet, as it is today, far far outweigh the dark side. Reducing the Internet experienced by ordinary people to a bland, "civilized" mix of email and heavily-filtered browsing would take away the power, freedom and utility so many people have come to expect and enjoy. It would also largely eliminate innovation and the development of new technologies, as no-one would be allowed to do anything not approved by the powers-that-be. Huh
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, the problem is that the Internet was created as a trusted network between universities. IPv6 has been created as an untrusted network and many of these problems would disappear if everyone switched.