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."
Well done anonymous, you've just handed Amazon their marketing for their hosting services for the considerable future.
And even if you haven't, there's still a ton of suited fatcats chortling merrily about the concomitant stock price rise as they stuff their faces with expensive food and drink this holiday season.
Y'all better step it up, or this might be your Waterloo.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
They used the wrong tactic. The only thing that will bring down a beast like Amazon is a hardware malfunction
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/13/1333223/Amazon-Says-Hardware-Not-Hackers-Caused-Outage
They should be tossing hamsters or other small rodents into their server rooms. That'll show em.
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
In the black hat jargon impossible means that nobody has done it yet.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Death by snu-snu
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
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.
...for sufficiently small values of 'legion'.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Probably Slashdot stories about Amazon denying hosting to Wikileaks harmed more the company than the combined Anonymous attack. There is no firewall against social attacks.
I worked there from 2000 - 2002 and, yes, my Amazon.com knowledge might be a little dated, I can tell you one thing about Amazon.com that was just as true today as it was 10 years ago; they don't mess around when it comes to server capacity and bandwidth.
Their whole online infrastructure is built to handle the busiest hours of the busiest days of online Christmas shopping. Anonymous could never ever get enough people to make a noticeable dent in Amazon.com's ability to take orders.
Linux O Muerte!
There is no such thing as an impregnable commercial website.
Never has been.
Never will be.
It doesn't actually have to be "impregnable", it just has to be able to scale larger than the resources their opposition is able to muster. They got that.
http://xkcd.com/325/
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
We are using online payment services from SagePay in UK and almost all Mastercard transactions during the DDOS failed. Mastercard SecureCode was affected. No doubt they deny it to the press since it's quite a shame compared to Visa which had no problems with payments during DDOS.
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.