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UK, Not North Korea, Is Source of DDoS Attacks
angry tapir writes "The UK was the likely source of a series of attacks last week that took down popular Web sites in the US and South Korea, according to an analysis performed by a Vietnamese computer security researcher. The results contradict assertions made by some in the US and South Korean governments that North Korea was behind the attack. Security analysts had been skeptical of the claims, which were reportedly made in off-the-record briefings and for which proof was never delivered." The Vietnamese security site's blog is linked from the article, but it is very slow even before Slashdotting. The researchers observed 166,908 zombies participating in the attacks — a number far larger than most earlier estimates.
Update: 07/14 21:24 GMT by KD : Wired is reporting that the UK owner of the IP address in question is pointing a finger at a server in Florida, which it says opened a VPN to the UK machine for the attacks. Once again, the attacker could be anywhere.
Update: 07/14 21:24 GMT by KD : Wired is reporting that the UK owner of the IP address in question is pointing a finger at a server in Florida, which it says opened a VPN to the UK machine for the attacks. Once again, the attacker could be anywhere.
Cue UK government announcing multi billion plan to make the internet 'safe' with new content filtering, anti-filesharing and communication logging schemes in 5... 4... 3...
uhh, they already did that.
(well except for the '£billions' part, which they passed-on to the ISPs so it wouldn't appear in the budget defecit)
Well, it sort of is. The IP datagram specifies the source ("from") and destination ("to") IP addresses (1). (The IP address identifies a connection to the internet; on the "local" side of that connection there may be only one computer or there may be a network of computers; if there is more than one computer, the router has to be set up to know which computer to forward packets to, either by configuring it to open certain incoming ports to one computer or by establishing a connection from that computer going out, which the router can then keep open for the duration of the connection.)
However the source/destination ports are actually specified in the TCP headers (2). Ports are typically thought of as representing which service on the destination computer is being requested (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc.), but the port will also help the router in a multi-computer network route incoming packets, e.g. a rule may be set to route all packets addressed to port 80 to a particular computer which is set up to serve web pages (port 80 is the standard port on which all web servers "listen" for connections); packets addressed to port 25 on the other hand can be routed to a computer set up to run the e-mail system (port 25 is used by SMTP servers), which may not be the same computer as the one running the HTTP server. The TCP headers are followed by the data, and together the TCP headers/data form the data portion of the IP layer's datagram.
If the return IP is incorrect, you'll never get a response, of course. Since there's no legitimate reason to do this, and since the IP datagram is a standard format, modems/routers can be programmed to check the packets and ensure that the "from" IP is, in fact, correct.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Ssssshhhh, facts spoil the fun. The original blog post -however - claims that the IP address they tracked is indeed the master server, that it is located in UK and is running on Windows 2003 Server Operating System. So on the basis of that post, the UK would have to be regarded as the source. It would be interesting to see whether this claim can be verified or at least substantiated, but it seems to be more supported by facts than any other claim I heard.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team