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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.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Oh!!! So that's what that button does.
Stupid little freaks.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
It's fine they are just slashdotted, give it an hour or two and they will be running just fine again.
i can still visit slashdot. i think my dell pc has a back up of the internet.
Some new botnet flexing its muscle perhaps.
That was a test system for installing Windows Vista that someone forgot to unplug from the wall.
While it's not exactly an entirely effective attack - resolving caches will, for the most part, insulate end-users from the effects for anywhere from a few hours to a few days - it could be simply an experiment. If you suppose that this was perpetrated by someone who is intent on causing mayhem, they could have been testing how well their attack would work, in order to plan a much larger one which would bring down *all* of the root name servers, and for long enough to really make people feel the squeeze.
It's a dumb, brute-force type of approach. A much, MUCH more effective way would be to simply find an appropriate flaw in IOS to exploit...
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
... for resolving caches.
In that case, it's GMILF. That's right, DNS is operated by a ring of hot grandmothers.
Besides, DNS is for wussies anyways. Real men don't need user-friendly names for their ip addresses :) But seriously, I can imagine the Web still being useful without DNS if search engines linked to IP addresses instead of hostnames. And now that email is largely a WWW service (hotmail, gmail...) a big chunk of it could survive too.
Don't make the assumption that all DNS servers were attacked equally though.
the root servers are setup in such a way that *2/3* of them can fail, and noone would notice.
[RFC2870]
2.3 At any time, each server MUST be able to handle a load of
requests for root data which is three times the measured peak of
such requests on the most loaded server in then current normal
conditions. This is usually expressed in requests per second.
This is intended to ensure continued operation of root services
should two thirds of the servers be taken out of operation,
whether by intent, accident, or malice.
actually, there was one.
:)
i dont remember the actual day/month/year, but maybe 3 years ago: MCI updated a bunch of routers, all at the same time, and screwed it up. a lot of people in north america were without internet for up to a day. i think this qualifies as major
... for resolving caches that never fnord give any sort of bogus or out of date new coke results!
This flies in the face of science.
Try this MILF,G.
Mom's I'd like to fuck, Giggidy giggidy giggidy.
This attack was clearly perpetrated by none other than Glen Quagmire.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them."
Marvin the Martian
Other experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, but vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were traced to South Korea.
Somehow that doesn't surprise me. This is the same country that uses insane amounts of ActiveX, and has the effect of conditioning people to click "Yes" whenever any site tries to install something, right? Wouldn't be any surprise if South Korea was one big botnet.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
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.
A few years ago the root server operators (on their own initiative and without asking for, or obtaining, permission from ICANN) took the wise step of deploying replica servers using a routing technique called "anycast". Thus under the name of, for example, f.root-servers.net there are many distinct servers geographically dispersed.
Consequently today we have more than 130 root servers scattered around the world.
That's good. It tends to localize the damage caused by attacks.
What is not good is that these root server operators, although they today operate to the highest of standards and with the highest degree of integrity, are not required to do so in the future.
For example, several root servers are operated by the US military establishment or by other branches of the US government and are thus subject to being "adjusted" according to military, political, or Atty General Alberto Gonzolez's latest desire to do data mining.
Nor are the root servers required to play fair and respond to all queries with equal dispatch or equal accuracy no matter the source or the name being queried for.
Nor are the root servers off limits for sale to companies like Microsoft or Google who could use them for commercial data mining.
Many people believe that ICANN serves as a kind of fire marshall, overseeing that the root servers are operated responsibly and that the root server operators have access to the resources they might need to recover from a natural or human disaster.
But that is not the case. ICANN has abrogated that role and has engaged itself as a protector of trademarks and US cultural values.
Over the last few thousand years we've learned that it's best for long term stability to build institutions and not depend on individual people. Today the root servers are the work of good individuals and organizations that encompass them. We really need to move to a more formalized structure that reinforces the long-term continuation of the good system we have today.
It's the only way to be sure.
Silly question. Why aren't there more root servers put into operation? (Honest question! I seriously don't know. Is it a technical limitation?)
It's nice to think that, but I don't *entirely* agree with it.
Microsoft is an easy target, given the insanely large user-base. However, if those users suddenly switched to Linux, it's doubtful that their practices would stop - they'd still install whichever distribution looked the best, installed 134 unneeded services and enabled them all by default, open unsafe attachments, and never update their computer.
In every operating system I've seen yet, security is an inconvenience. While you and I think that the tradeoff is worth it, we will always be outnumbered by people who think that it isn't. People who log in as "Administrator" would just as quickly read their email and browse porn sites as "root". Sad, but true.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
One of Vista's features is the way that even if you log in with admin privileges, you don't actually have them until you jump through an extra hoop, and even then I think you only have them only as long as necessary. I'm sure that if it has been implemented correctly, it will certainly shorten the amount of self-hanging rope available to the average user.
I'm also sure that there are lots of people working on a hack to disable this right now. (I've not used Vista so I may be misinformed - there may be a way to disable it easily anyway?)
And even without that, enough people are gullible enough that if a web site says that to use the available features correctly you need to "follow these simple instructions", it will be done.
It's not like they haven't figured out the whole failover/fault tolerance thing.
That's kind of the point here, actually. Several of the root servers do not have any redundancy. You can see the list at http://www.root-servers.org/. In particular, the A, B, D, E, G, H, and L servers have only a single location a piece.
F, I, J, K, and M, on the other hand, are heavily redundant and have multiple geographic locations, routed via Anycast, so a single client only "sees" the server nearest to them. This makes them difficult to DDoS, because a zombie in S. Korea pinging the J server would be sending packets to the server in Seoul, while one in California would get the one in Mountain View.
What's odd, looking at the list, is that anyone operating something as critical to the internet infrastructure, wouldn't develop some geographic and systems redundancy; unfortunately, I suspect that the government agencies in particular tasked with these responsibilities probably don't keep it at the very top of their priority lists when allocating resources and funding.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You can see the list of sites for F here:
http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/f-root/sites.php
That's about 40 locations. Now, each of which has a couple of servers, a management box, and a couple of routers, so yeah something like 200 machines total.
I'm also sure that there are lots of people working on a hack to disable this right now. (I've not used Vista so I may be misinformed - there may be a way to disable it easily anyway?)
Yes, it can be disabled by the user. The user must have Administrative access to disable it, so that might help limit it.
(Control Panel-->User Accounts-->Turn user account control on or off)
Are you kidding? I've been using Vista since RTM on my main work system and the UAC prompts are enough to either:
1: Drive one completely insane.
2: Insensitize one to the point where one clicks 'Yes' on any dialog that pops up.
3: Cause one to disable UAC prompting.
Examples:
You want to look at the event log... well you're gonna need some extra admin priviledges. Are you sure you want to look at the event log?
You want to run visual studio 2005... that complains too. Would someone please explain to me WTF running an IDE requires admin fucking rights!
Microsoft's approach of security by nagging the user to death is fundamentally flawed.
I swear, if I hadn't turned of UAC prompting, there would be a craig's list posting right now for a slighty shot-gunned compy.
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
Exactly, and I also get sick of "experts" ridiculing and blaming the victims of vandalisim and crime for messing up "their" playground. Nobody blames a homeowner when a thief kicks down their flimsy door and robs them, or a vandal rips up their mail and knocks down the letterbox.
As I have been doing for nearly two decades, I set up a friends PC just before christmas, and told him "just say no" to unknown applications. He had no troubles until about a week ago, he got a message from the virus scanner about a trojan and didn't understand the options so he just pulled the plug from the wall, called his bank and waited until next time he saw me.
The first thing I said to him was..."you said 'yes', didn't you?"...he complained bitterly..."No porn videos, No screensavers" I asked in a mocking accusation...."is a screen saver an application" he replied with a puzzled look. I booted it up and showed him how the scanner gets rid of the trojan and admired his new screen saver. The VS options were something like "vault" and "delete", there wasn't a "no" or "cancel" button so he panicked and enacted the "emergency procedure" I had advised previously.
The guy is not an idiot, he is middle aged but has had virtually nill exposure to PC's, until he went out and bought one. He restores antique furniture for a living, he is over the moon about ebay and other stuff to do with furniture but has ignored FPS games. Not that he doesn't like them he has a PS3 and loves it because "it doesn't do things that are not in the manual". For him the curve is still too steep (and life is too short) to learn how to install and register games with confidence.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Even nukes can't stop it! Or at least they shouldn't, since the internet was originally designed to run as a communications network in the event of a nuclear attack.
And the primary design feature that enabled that was removed during the rise of the ISPs.
The early internet was a NET. Redundant links everywhere. Routers all potentially knew the whole topology and could find a connection if it existed.
As the net went commercial that caused a table explosion in the routers. So BGP replaced RIP and things became less robust. Usable routes became a subset of all possible routes. Within the backbone there was still a lot of redundancy - but it wasn't quite up to the former "find a path if it exists" level.
Meanwhile, the typical host went from being something ad-hock connected to sever neighbors to being something connected solely to a single ISP - typically by a single link. The big guys might have redundant paths into their ISP's Network Operations Center. But if something took out the NOC (and often there was only one - or only one of some critical component) you were hosed. Ditto if something corrupted their databases. Even with redundant links there would only be a few, perhaps going through several single-points-of-failure - and if fully redundant still allowing a double-failure to take you down. The little guys would typically have one line (say DSL) to one box. Cut the line or crash the box - or the typically two links from it to the NOC - and you're hosed.
(Perhaps you have a dialup-backup for your DSL. Did YOU configure it to come up automagically if your main link goes down? Is it on the same phone line with the DSL? If not, does it take a different path to the central office? Or is it right up the same cable bundle on the same poles next to the same road full of the same drunk drivers or in the same underground cable running past the same backhoe...)
So the internet evolved from a nuclear-strike-survivable net to a less-robust net rooting a bunch of trees. Oops!
(And that's just for routing the packets once you've GOT the IP number. Translating names to IP numbers is a whole separate can of worms: It's what the root servers are about - which is why there are so many of them, most of them are clusters, and some are clusters that are geographically diverse. You only need to hit ONE operational root server to get started on your translation - if your answer isn't cached somewhere between you and the root, and the list is small enough to keep handy on every machine that wants to do its own nameservice.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
MacroHard
If that makes me think of a penis, do I necessarily have a dirty mind?
Visual Studio 2005 needs to register some COM components at runtime iirc, thus admin rights are involved.
Windows does indeed support groups, at least Windows XP Pro does, and by extension I assume Vista does as well. However, they are a great pain to use. Not only do you have to set file permissions (similar to unix) but you also have to set registry permissions. This is not always done properly by the program installer, even if it is supposedly written for a multi-user system (If it's not written for a multi-user system then it isn't donw at all). Furthermore, the registry entries which need to be fixed are never documented. I was, for example, eventually able to get my Saitek flight controls to work properly with a limited account after much tinkering, but some applications, supposedly able to function (mostly) in a multi-user environment are stuck running in administrator. And not just with admin rights but only as the original administrator account. I tried creating a new user with admin access and these apps will not run on it--heck, I even copied all the administrator profile over to the new account and it will still not run. One tech support team recommended reinstalling Windows as a wild shot, the other threw up their hands and said it is a bug in the OS.
When Microsoft knew they were going to release XP Pro they should have started pushing multi-user features in their developer kits. All authoring systems should have had an option to build for multi-user and all installation kits should have been set up to do the same with a radio button. I suspect that Microsoft did not bother to do this, or they charged extra for it. As it stands out of maybe twenty large and small apps on my system that I paid for recently, only the big ticket items like Mathcad and Photoshop installed and ran properly. Some open-source stuff ran pretty well, too, but they tend to avoid the registry.
In the end I gave up trying to get everything to work. I tried running a few misbehaving apps with "Run as..." but you can not drag and drop between different user areas in Windows due to their separate memory areas (the pointer is inaccessible). So Windows XP Pro turned out to be a waste of money. I feel like I paid extra to beta test Microsoft's software.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe