Slashdot Mirror
Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com
suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."
Considering the volume of traffic that Amazon is designed to handle normally, it's no real surprise that an 'attack' that amounts to a slight bump in traffic for them would barely be noticed.
Further, unlike Gawker-clan, Amazon is likely to have actual IT people working on securing their servers from just such events.
They are a -much- harder target than most places.
That being said, they are far from invincible. There's always a way in, and if Anonymous and allied entities really worked on it for a long time, they would likely find a way to at least deface the site.
That would be rather beyond the usual level of patience that Anonymous exhibits, though.
A more effective (and more 'lulzy'--hence, more interesting for Anonymous) way of 'poisoning' Amazon would be to leverage the review process, injecting more noise than signal, and thus crippling one of the key selling points that Amazon has as a purchasing platform.
Other effective methods might be to 'punish' Amazon-affiliated sellers' websites, interfering with their ability to do business based on their association with Amazon. This might be insufficiently visible, though, unless they did so in a manner which caused many of them to complain to news organizations.
DDoSing Amazon itself is, and has been for years, a waste of time--there's nothing that an entity like Anonymous can do to it with LOIC that they don't get on Black Friday anyway.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Dear ANON;
Why not try a simple well organized boycott? I know, it sounds grossly old fashioned and just too far beneath your considerable talent, skill and angst. But, as you have found, these companies are actually trying to stay in business because they enjoy their revenue stream. If you could, say, interrupt that revenue you could get some attention. And it wouldn't be all negative attention. No one likes a screaming child, but they are soon forgot. A well mannered articulate child is remembered forever. The longer you can interrupt their revenue the more they're going to want to discuss this quibble. So... perhaps you may wish to think about a worldwide boycott? Try it for a day. If it's moderately successful, try it out for a week. Shut down Amazon, VISA and MC's money for a month and the entire globe will listen.
Akamai had a role to play in the defense as well.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html
Akamai says it can defend against Anon attacks
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QnPlDV
Akamai managers say they could have bolstered the Web sites that buckled under attacks launched recently by Internet vigilantes.
The world's largest content delivery network says it has enough servers and the right kind of network to "mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Neil Cohen, Akamai's senior director of product marketing told CNET. DDoS describes the practice of overwhelming a Web site with traffic so that it can't be accessed.
Some well-known sites were the targets of DDoS attacks launched by a loosely connected group of WikiLeaks supporters who call themselves Anonymous or Anon for short. The group lashed out at companies they consider to be hostile to WikiLeaks, the service responsible for publicizing an enormous amount of classified U.S. government documents. Some of those attacked were MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Amazon.
MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal stopped processing donations made to WikiLeaks while Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks servers. At this point it appears that Amazon was able to withstand the attack while MasterCard and Visa's sites were inaccessible for extended periods.
Cohen said few other companies have as much experience as his with defending Web sites from this kind of threat. He said that late last month, a number of U.S. retail sites came under DDoS attack from multiple different countries. Cohen said he was unaware of who was behind it or why, but he said that Akamai helped some of the retailers withstand the onslaught of hits to their sites, which in some cases reached to 10,000 times the normal daily traffic to some of these sites. None of the sites went down, he said.
"What we did over the last decade was built out our network and we now have 80,000 servers in 70 countries," Cohen said. "We can mitigate DDoS attacks by having a server extremely close to the court rather than try to absorb the attack in one centralized location. As an attack grows in size and distributes out to more bots, we have a server near the compromised machines. As the attack gets bigger, our network scales on demand."
While there are reports that Anonymous is giving up on DDoS attacks related to the WikiLeaks case, it is unlikely that we've seen the end of them. In retaliation against the entertainment industry's antipiracy attempts, Anonymous knocked out the Web sites belonging to the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Hustler magazine, and the U.S. Copyright Office.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QiBtJU
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
... cuts in SOCIAL BENEFITS! Reduced wealth redistribution. This is actually happening in Europe as we speak. It would be UNIMAGINABLE in the USA still, there is no way in hell there will be ever be any reduction in welfare or unemployment or healthcare benefits.... at least not while Obama and Pelosi and Reid are still alive.
You seem to be missing how much more in social benefits Europeans get compared to Americans. Single payer healthcare. Subsidized child care. Actual pensions rather than 401(k)/IRA plans that leave the majority of your benefits to the whims of the stock market. Even with the cuts, Europeans nations redistribute significantly more wealth using these programs than America does.
Then there's the fact that a lot of social programs that would be administered federally in Europe are administered on a state-by-state basis here in the 'States. Things like welfare and Medicaid have been hit substantially. Essentially the reason we're not seeing the federal government cut is because the responsibility for cutting has been pushed onto individual states by virtue of the balanced budget provisions in state constitutions.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
They're just not smart enough to use them.
Should have used Amazon's EC cloud to attack Amazon itself, morons.
Classical Trojan Horse. Why bother storming the walls when once you've snuck inside you can wreak far more havoc?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's not quite true... Visa was affected, but in a different way. Verified By Visa (an SSL password you issue to visa, used for online payments to stores) was intermittent and started processing payments without going through the verification step. Had this issue when topping up my cell account while the DDoS was still underway.
But their backend systems were unaffected, so payments were still being made, they were just less secure.
Mastercard's problem was that their corporate site was on the same network as their SecureCode directory server, so naturally DDoS'ing one got the other as well. Source - 5th paragraph.
To nitpick a bit, your idea might be true, but your arguments don't necessarily hold up. Firstly, the discrimination against immigrants is mostly a social problem, not a political one. The policies in most of Europe are quite liberal, but people seem to be racists. In the US it's the other way around (at least to a certain degree). Reasons for that might be higher experience with immigration, the diversity of immigrants to the US which makes it harder for them form communities closed to the outside, and a positive feedback loop that starts with integration (giving them jobs etc.) leading to wealth and education which then leads to even more willingness to integrate immigrants. The success in the US also seems to be highly divergent for different groups, i. e. asians are much better integrated (at least economically) than blacks, even though the former immigrated more recently and therefore had less time to adjust.
Regarding social security, every EU country spends more (as % of GDP) than the US on welfare, thus making cuts more likely. If unemployment benefits are cut, the unemployed have to switch to cheaper cigarettes. In the US, they die. In numbers: the unemployed in Germany get 60% of their last income (67% with children) for up 36 months. After that, they get about 400$+rent+heating+ electricity. In the US it's 3x% for a few months, and apparently not even food stamps after that.
Fleur de Sel
Thats a great example
It also seems like a complete fabrication.
"Uzvekia" returns 4 google hits, "Uzvekia Waterloo" only returning this post.