Slashdot Mirror
Online Attack Hits US Government Web Sites
angry tapir writes "A botnet composed of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against US government Web sites and causing headaches for businesses in the US and South Korea. The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) web site offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government Web sites have also been targeted, including the Department of Transportation."
ok let's blame China now for this.
Let's not. See what offends me about this whole thing is that it's so obivious. If they'd just targeted America, it could have been anyone. But 'whoever' it was had to go and hit South Korea too, at the same time. Who hates both the US and South Korea?
By the way, don't say "Chinese Plot", they have nothing to gain from upping tensions at this point. They've been trying to bring the North Koreans into negotiations and they too have issued denounciations against NK by this point. Iran's official line is that the UK is mostly responsible for their problems, they have little to gain from doing something to the Americans and the Russians were just recently in negotiations with Obama that appear to have gone well.
How do you kill that which has no life?
No. They are suspecting North Korea
hilarious
The reason the U.S. wouldn't attack North Korea in a cyber war is the same reason we wouldn't attack Iran. The internet is a far more powerful tool when it is use to sway opinion than it is to cripple systems.
I'm just curious when or if rules are going to be put up about Internet sovereignty, so that an attack on a website is seen as an act of war.
I can totally see a situation where a US gov't website or economic hub (e.g. stock exchange servers) would get hit by a series of computers based out of N. Korea, the US declares war on N. Korea for violating US internet sovereignty, and the whole thing was a setup by a third party looking to create and exploit a power vacuum.
Maybe I've been reading too many NetForce novels, but the whole idea scares me, and I have the feeling that most people in America wouldn't understand why... particularly the people who make the laws about this kind of thing.
Do you seriously think that North Korea has any significant systems exposed on public networks?
You could probably deface their Wikipedia entry, though. Go hog wild.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
What always bugs me with these "cyberwar" news is that people try to put one country as responsible for them, and its always China or Russia or one of the other "bad guys". Like parent post said, their goverments have no reason to do something like DDOS attacks against US. Who's to say its not just some individual who either is pissed at US/South Korea or has such political views, or does so for whatever reason? Stop blaming countries as a whole if you dont know it.
I'm sorry, but if this has nothing to do with Michael Jackson, apparently no one cares.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
US Government websites attacked... but slashdot is OK so what the heck.
What always bugs me with these "cyberwar" news is that people try to put one country as responsible for them, and its always China or Russia or one of the other "bad guys". Like parent post said, their goverments have no reason to do something like DDOS attacks against US. Who's to say its not just some individual who either is pissed at US/South Korea or has such political views, or does so for whatever reason? Stop blaming countries as a whole if you dont know it.
But there's two things that are important here..
1. An individual would have to be VERY motivated to attack two countries at once. Especially if those countries are the US and South Korea. The only thing that makes them unique is that they're at war with North Korea. We also know for a fact that the North Korean citizen does not have internet access from reporters inside the country, in fact posessing a device that can access the outside is punishable by death there so it can't have been a NK citizen acting alone. Assuming it was just one citizen from another country they would have to be very dedicated to perform what is basically a military strike against a foreign power. Prepared to risk death to frame North Korea; that would be a very unique combination and it makes little sense.
2. North Korea has recently been upping it's cyberwar capability enough for it to show up in overseas media. They only recently sent teams to participate in international hacking challanges and appear to have done well in them. One of the main reasons I instantly suspected NK is because of this.
So my personal suspicion is based on the fact that they've recently been working hard to build up their capability in this field despite having no internet connectivity for the average citizen and then all of a sudden a cyber strike hits North Korea's enemies at the same time they're conducting missile tests in contravention of UN sanctions.
How do you kill that which has no life?
Honestly, when was the last time you went to ftc.gov? Nobody goes to those sites...
Now if google, wiki, or itunes goes down, then PANIC!
All that is required is to pull the damn plug on these bots. Each of these machines has and IP address which it advertises every time it makes an attack. That's right folks: The return IP address is part of the header. You can't route packets without this information.
These feral packets _ALSO_ come into the ISP's routers. It is easy to identify them. Uninfected machines don't normally sit there and hammer away at port Blah. Some of the worst ports are 80 (html), 25 (mail) and 22 (SSH).
One really needs to only look at the ports that the botnet tries to exploit.
A simple solution is to pull the plug. A solution which is slightly more difficult is to block the ports the botnet is trying to attack on and then redirect any web access to a banner page advising the owner their machine is cracked and what to do about it... or a tech could phone the client.
_any_ ISP can do this. If they don't do it then they don't want to. As for consumer rights - crap! Its the ISP's which write the Terms of Service. They can put pretty much any terms they want providing said terms are considered reasonable. The public will probably not object. Spammers might however but then who cares if they can't find an uplink.
So the first place to start is at the ISP level.
Next: I've blocked botnets of more than 50,000 machines. I use OpenBSD on the webservers and on the firewalls. Its not that hard to do. Pf can easily handle this. If the server admins over at the "US Government Web Sites" can't handle this then IMHO they are incompetent. If reference, here is an example of how to block these bots in PF:
pfctl -t spammers -T add 190.174.220.241
pfctl -t spammers -T add 67.10.200.220
pfctl -t spammers -T add 125.161.37.199
pfctl -t spammers -T add 71.218.209.198
pfctl -t spammers -T add 202.28.120.19
This is a shell script BTW. extracting the list of bots can be done by scanning the appropriate logs.
Other than Lil Kim's xbox, how much is there to attack?
Seriously, NK is dirt poor and supremely paranoid. It's not like their economy depends on the internet in any way.
And if you attack their military computers then you quickly escalate things to a very dangerous level.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
You think for one second that a bored hacker even thinks that far ahead?
And lets get some perceptive here. A few website went down for less than a day. Hardly an attack that anyone should care about. And not national security or military level either.
Really a DDOS attack like this, *is* a small thing.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
purple monkey dishwasher
I've heard this theory before and my first thought was: "Do they even have internet in North Korea?"
Well, do they?
You're right. The real enemy here is Microsoft! If we stopped Windows, we would stop the attacks. I think we should send the military to liberate Redmond.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Who hates both the US and South Korea?
Democrats
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.