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Webmail Services Struggling Against DDoS Attacks (fastmail.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago, privacy-oriented webmail service ProtonMail was hit by a massive DDoS attack, which was accompanied by extortion. It turns out they're not the only ones. FastMail has warned that similar attacks could lead to service disruptions this week. They have refused extortion demands, and have been hit with a couple brief attacks already. This follows attacks over the last week on Runbox, Zoho, and Hushmail. Each service has been working with data centers and network providers to mitigate the attacks as well as possible, but they're still struggling with intermittent service disruptions.
Judging by the systems being hit, I can't help but wonder if the attacks are being done by a government agency.
More like, the companies who wrote the OS should be responsible.
No. Botnets run mostly on deprecated and unpatched systems with known security holes. That is not the fault of the OS vendors. If software vendors are held liable for the stupidity of their users, then software will become far more expensive, and FOSS will disappear completely.
I myself advocate an approach that identified zombie systems simply have their internet service shut off. We've been able to pretty cleanly identify which IP addresses are the source of these attacks, why not have legislation requiring that they simply lose their internet access until they fix it? Kind of like the ham radio days where you're held accountable for your activities when transmitting to the public.
Take it a step further and establish a treaty body that requires each signing nation set up the same laws for their ISPs, in addition to a trade organization that enforces these rules.
That would put a stop to this real fast. Either way something has to be done because this is going to get out of control real fast as even more people get high speed broadband and have no idea what the fuck they're doing with their equipment.
Actually with that statement, I think you fundamentally misunderstand how a botnet works. They have multiple compromised hosts under their control, each of which potentially has a unique IP address. So yeah, you'll likely see the IP address appear to change even though it's the same actor behind the action.
In most cases, the botnet operator doesn't have the ability to change the IP address of each individual host, because they don't have the ability to change the WAN MAC address (which is required to get your ISP to issue you a new DHCP lease.) Even in the cases where they do (such as a compromised NAT router) there's still the matter of the WAN device itself doing sticky MAC configuration and only allowing one MAC address to access the WAN (which is almost universal among DOCSIS cable providers, DSL providers, and even fiber providers in order to conserve their limited IPv4 address pool.) In the case where they can change the WAN mac address, they don't typically have the ability to clear the old MAC first (which in the more permissive WAN bridges requires a power cycle, i.e. rebooting a cable modem. Motorola cable modems can via a web query to 192.168.1.100, but other than that most modems don't support this.)
But let's say conditions are absolutely perfect, and they can change the MAC address at will and thus change their IP address, there's another problem: Virtually all ISPs keep logs of which account has a lease to which IP address at what time.
Which means that even in the worst of cases, you can still identify what account has been participating in a DDoS, and that account could be suspended as per appropriate legislation, until they remove and/or correct any compromised systems.