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The Real Impact of the Estonian Cyberattack
An anonymous reader writes "News.com offers up an interview with Arbor Networks' senior security researcher Jose Nazario. He takes stock of the denial-of-service attack against the Baltic nation of Estonia, and considers the somewhat disturbing wider implications from the event. 'You look around the globe, and there's basically no limit to the amount of skirmishes between well-connected countries that could get incredibly emotional for the population at large. In this case, it has disrupted the Estonian government's ability to work online, it has disrupted a lot of its resources and attention. In that respect, it's been effective. It hasn't brought the government to a crippling halt, but has essentially been effective as a protest tool. People will probably look at this and say, That works. I think we're going to continue to do this kind of thing. Depending on the target within the government, it could be very visible, or it could not be very visible.'"
Depending on the target within the government, it could be very visible, or it could not be very visible.
Yep, that pretty much sums up the possible outcomes.
You know... I thought about the possibility of a Multicast worm/attack ... Just haven't had time to document it... Would work similar to the following... For those who use IM clients that have annoying streaming advertisements... If you didn't know, those are multicasted to your machine... My theory was to re-inject packets at the router level (avoiding Reverse Path Forwarding when possible) to make your machine believe my spoofed host is a valid source to get your images from... Only thing is, the image would be corrupted forcing an infection on your machine... This would in turn replicate via broadcast from the infected hosts... It was a theory of mine while studying DoS attacks for the CCIE security exam and a lot of variables would have to be met... Anyhow, the reason for this post is, I believe those committing DoS attacks are halfclued as to what a real attack could potentially do... For instance Border Router Attack Tool is another theoretical tool to break BGP neighboring. You of course have to know enough about a topology to even get it to work but under a unified stream, you could cause massive route flaps which lead to neighbors disconnecting. Its only a matter of time before someone takes it to the extreme and breaks connectivity between huge AS'
Infiltrated dot Net
just do this
What would QoS do at this level except overwhelm your processor? Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding would be the better solution nowadays. Cat 6500 info... If networks were built correctly from the ground up, these attacks wouldn't even happen as much. If three networks were connected and all had uRPF or filtering in place, no three networks would be able to spoof addresses and cause attacks. They'd be forced to attack using a valid address on their network which would make tracking easier...
Infiltrated dot Net
Decent well-connected countries would not engage in this sort of things. Russia — busily turning itself back into an Evil Empire — denies "officially" organizing the attacks...
Whether it did officialy organize them, or not is irrelevant — so many things in the country happen unofficially (including the unofficial salaries — in dollars — paid to top government bureaucrats to keep them from leaving for the private sector), that the government's claims may even be nominally truthful this time.
What is important is the government's official reaction. For example, a Russian health official is on record concerning the health hazards of the Estonian sprats. Those who follow the region would recognize the tactics already applied against Georgia's major exports. Georgia's most excellent wines are now called "alcohol-containing liquids" in Russia and their import is banned "on health grounds".
Sprats are safe for now — unlike Georgia, Estonia is an EU (and NATO) member. But Russia — in sore need of something glorious in its sorry past (we liberated Estonia, not reconquered it, you see) — is still enraged. In a decent country such rage wouldn't be enough to break law and order, but Russia is another story. There is no doubt, the cyber-attacks against Estonia used Russian governmental resources, including hardware and human ones — these will most certainly not be prosecuted.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
According to the site mentioned in the article, Russia comes in at #17 in the attacks by country breakdown at the bottom of the page. It covers scanning, fingerprinted attacks, and DDoS attacks (no spam). The number 1 country is the good 'ole USA. We're #1! We're #1!