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DNS Root Servers Attacked
liquidat and others wrote in with the news that the DNS Root Servers were attacked overnight. It looks like the F, I, and M servers felt the attack and recovered, whereas G (US Department of Defense) and L (ICANN) did less well. Some new botnet flexing its muscle perhaps? AP coverage is here.
Um, so how many times a day do the root servers get attacked? No, wait, an hour, a minute... Like a ba-gillion? These things happen everyday, so what's new? It's not like they haven't figured out the whole failover/fault tolerance thing. You'd have to nuke 'em to get them to stop running.
Is it just me or is going after servers that people expect up to 3 business days to update not the best way to go? You would have to sustain the attack for a long time for the average joe to notice.
Not that I am complaining, one less bot net to worry about.
Good thing that they apparently never heard of routers though.
They don't go into a lot of detail, but it's entirely possible that the bots in South Korea were, in fact, being controlled from somewhere else. I'd say that it's even *likely*.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
All that means is the Botnet was mostly infected computers from South Korea, given the penetration of broadband in that nation its not that surprising. And if it leads to the rest of the intrnet cutting off South Korea, that benefits the North.
Stupid little freaks.
You would think Slashdotters would at least understand this basic fact. *sigh*
Spam would only cause it if the addresses didn't end with commonly cached TLDs. On the other hand, I keep logging in to phishing sites with the email address yeah@nice.try, so maybe a lot of other people had similar ideas and someone tried to spam the list of harvested address without any sanity checking...
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Don't make the assumption that all DNS servers were attacked equally though.
And we all know how secure that is.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them."
Marvin the Martian
With the country's software locked to Windows and Internet explorer, is this honestly a big surprise?
You suggest that the Department of Defense's nameserver is badly managed, making an argument by analogy concerning "large governmental organizations". Since you haven't provided a technical argument, your accusation has no merit. Your "distinct impression" is pure speculation.
But congratulations on getting everyone riled up.
Silly question. Why aren't there more root servers put into operation? (Honest question! I seriously don't know. Is it a technical limitation?)
...Botnet disabled, job done!
My little Linux and tech blog
- Almost a 100% windows monoculture (really), because they standardised on an ActiveX control for secure banking etc before SSL was standardised, and everything still needs it
- Dirt cheap, fast broadband
- Fairly rampant piracy, hence many unpatched machines
Put it together and you get botnet paradise.Wow, you have that entirely backwards. The last few thousand years have tought us that institutions generally suck at fulfilling the needs of the people. Monarchies, Feudalism, the Inquisition-era Catholic church, and Soviet Russia were all the biggest, most far-reaching institutions of their day.
Thomas Jefferson and his cronies decided there was a better way. I agree with him, so I'll take a handful of determined, skilled, like-minded individuals over an "institution" a any day. I can guarantee you if all the root servers were in the control of an "institution", that institution would still be doing feasibility studies on anycast routing and crying for more money from the UN as they only way to prevent DDoS attacks.
Sorry to burst your conspiracy theory, but data mining the root name servers would be next to useless. These are the Root name servers and as such all they know about are TLD (top level domains). You ask one of the roots "who is in charge of .com" or .edu or .uk, and they respond. The only data you could ever get from them is distribution among TLDs. Now add caching name servers into the equation (99.999999% of boxes on the internet are behind one) and the statistics becomes even more useless. The records returned by the roots have a lifetime of 2 days. This means it doesn't matter if there's 1 client or 1 million clients behind a particular caching name server, it's only going to ask about .com every 2 days.
>We really need to move to a more formalized structure that reinforces the long-term continuation of the good system we have today.
And who's going to run that formalized structure? Hrm, maybe some "good individuals and organizations" would be willing to do it?
Sounds like an interesting bit of code to write if you ask me...
Several of the root servers do not have any redundancy.
Having multiple root servers IS the redundancy - originally, and to some extent even now. Big-time redundancy within each one is just (really strong) suspenders to supplement the belt.
A non-redundant root server is still useful - even if perhaps not always up and/or not capable of drinking as large a firehose of requests as some giant, geographically-diverse, multiple-cluster. All it takes is one response from one server to get your nameserver's search started.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way