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Someone Is Learning How To Take Down the Internet, Warns Bruce Schneier (schneier.com)
Some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them, says Bruce Schneier. He adds that these attacks are of much larger scale -- including the duration -- than the ones we have seen previously. These attacks, he adds, are also designed to test what all defense measures a company has got -- and they ensure that the company uses every they have got, leaving them with no choice but to demonstrate their defense capabilities to the attacker. He hasn't specifically shared details about the organizations that are under attack, but what little he has elaborated should give us a chill. From his blog post: [...] This all is consistent with what Verisign is reporting. Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there's a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains. Every quarter, Verisign publishes (PDF) a DDoS trends report. While its publication doesn't have the level of detail I heard from the companies I spoke with, the trends are the same: "in Q2 2016, attacks continued to become more frequent, persistent, and complex." There's more. One company told me about a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks: testing the ability to manipulate internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services. Who would do this? It doesn't seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do. Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering. It's not normal for companies to do that. Furthermore, the size and scale of these probes -- and especially their persistence -- points to state actors. It feels like a nation's military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US's Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.
Could be NSA/GCHQ false-flag operation to pin the attacks on Russia.
Don't worry I've already copied the internet onto a blank CD.
north korea's last dieing move after the nukes fail?
considering the number of new problems created and old problems made anew by the Internet (tm), taking it down isn't necessarily a bad thing.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
...it's called probing. Not to engage, but to evaluate.
Is Learning How To Take Down the Internet.
Does this mean my Internet's won't work?
How will I check my fridge when I am out of town?
I trust you are on an "unlimited" data plan?
"All your Internet Bases are belong to us!"
Awhile back I used up a couple weeks of vacation time I had accumulated. First I got the idea in my head, why don't try powering my phone off for awhile?. After a few days of withdraw I started to feel liberated. From there I abandoned email and the internet entirely. More withdraw was followed by an even greater sense of liberation. It was like breathing for the first time. After a hair over a week, I grudgingly came back to virtual reality. But damn was that disconnected time wonderful.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
1) Notice problem.
2) Look at logs/whatever and verify insane traffic levels.
3) Throttle/block source at router.
4) Repeat for every upstream switch that is impacted by the attack. For those which you don't control, call (yes call) up your peer and inform them of the issue so they may do the same.
1-3 can be automated fairly easily
4 can be automated with cooperation, agreements, established procedures, responsive personnel, etc. (4 isn't going to be automated.)
5) Inform zombie ISP customers they're part of a botnet / get authorities after the operators.
6) Cut customers off from the internet until they clean their shit up / throw people in jail or block their host country (Russia / Brazil / China) until the respective authorities put people in jail.
1-3 are all you need as a network operator concerned about other shit on your network.
1-4 are what you need to get the DDoS target accessible again.
5 and 6 are what the internet needs in general.
Ready to move on to the 40 Gbps backbone 100 Gbps fast Internet 3 and leave all you civilians behind to complain why we can't do better.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"The data I see suggests China, an assessment shared by the people I spoke with."
Of course, that will be buried in these comments that it's a US false flag, that obviously it's the US that's responsible, etc.
It couldn't possibly be someone like China.
"What's this big red cable do? Let me just adjust the cable so I can walk by the rac "
Except, from TFA, "The data I see suggests China, an assessment shared by the people I spoke with."
But that's impossible in your mind...it has to be the US. It could never be a US adversary with principles that run decided counter to internet freedom, human rights, and so on. Clearly this is a US effort to leave itself a capability to "take down the internet", when we are the ones ceding control of ICANN and IANA.
I wonder who would stand to benefit from an Internet black out during the US presidential election?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I'll be "that" guy, the vast majority of elint ferret missions did not overfly the Soviet Union... they would fly parallel to the border and record electronic emissions. One particular stunt they did pull was have a SAC bomber head straight at Soviet airspace to illicit a response which the elint plane would record, generally the bomber diverted right before it hit Soviet air space but there were rare incursions. And the Soviets did the same thing but it was generally with European countries and not the US because that's were any conventional war would have been executed. What a lot of people don't realize is that the Soviets did shoot some of these planes down and ~100 US airmen died on these missions (always listed as training mishaps). These activities inadvertently contributed to the Korean Airlines 007 shootdown. The most common elint plane at that time was one of the RC-135 variants, a four engine jet that vaguely has the same configuration as a 747. The Soviets thought it was a ferret mission and shot it down.
Nah, they only copied the good stuff. One blank CD is probably overkill, but who has floppies or zip drives any more?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You just have to love the work of Google's DeepMind projects!
Once China's great firewall is updated to RedOS 2.0. They can turn off the "Internet" and keep the good times rolling behind their borders...
But of course...
If the NSA can't OWN the Internet. It will do the next best thing, and throw a tantrum and shut it off.
"If we can't have it.. nobody can!"
640k ought to be enough for anybody to back up the Internet.
yea...that
I hope it's US DoD trying to catch up on cyber security. Or maybe not. I'm not sure who's scarier, foreign governments or our own. Not that I like terrorists, but I'm pretty sure we all need to be more worried about all the the "official" guys we willingly bought nukes and stuff for than we do about the "alquiedas" who might like to steal one.
dying.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
For far too long we've allowed people to buy computers, hook them up to the internet with crappy "AV" software, let the end-user allow the subscription to end, not install security updates, and do literally everything else they can do to compromise security. In effect, it's like letting a drunk driver to drive around in his car after allowing him to cut his break lines, and shove a heavy rock on the accelerator. There needs to be something that holds people accountable to do a bare minimum number of things.I realize that simple things like having a decently ranked AV, keeping it and the OS updated, keeping critical programs updated, and ensuring that home passwords are sufficiently complicated won't stop every single attack. But neither will simply telling people they should't drive drunk. That's why we have laws and cops and revokation of driver's licenses, fines, and jail time. At some point, end users need to be held accountable.
"Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there's a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains."
Somebody who has no idea how anything works must have written this.
Annnnnd you failed
Is the moderation system disabled? That one deserved a "good question" mod, but the closest approximation here would be "insightful". Not only that post, but no "insightful" mods yet. That led me to check for "funny" mods, too, and couldn't find any. Anyway, I can't give you a mod point since I never get any. Many years now...
I still think that most of the spam and scams are motivated by profit, and most of the time the way to fix the problem is to figure out the business model and break it. Unfortunately, only one major success story I can think of: The demise of the pump-and-dump spam scams. After several research papers proved the scammers were essentially printing their own money, they changed the rules of the game to stop it, and the stock-touting spam went away.
Focusing on your narrow question about the presidential election, the answer is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. America has real enemies and all of them benefit from the effective paralysis of the American government. That means ALL of America's enemies and wannabe enemies are looking at the problem in terms of their OWN profits. Some of them (like Russia) are playing short-term games for money to be harvested next week, but many (like China) are playing for the long-term, seeking power that will later translate into money.
Their calculus is not limited to your "Internet black out" (sic) scenario, but would include all sorts of attack scenarios. However, I think it is obvious that a large-scale Internet blackout extremely close to the election would help Trump because it would probably cripple the Democratic GOTV efforts.
I'm more concerned with why Windows 10 is so great for pwning. Hint: Microsoft has no financial liability and the ISPs don't care as long as you pay your bill.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The latest Internet version from Vivaldi, version 1.4, wrote 1 TB to my SSD yesterday (by memory allocation and Windows swap) - thanks Vivaldi!
Just save it to the cloud! That way, when the internet goes down, you can still run your sites through your smartphone!
and they ensure that the company uses every [sic] they have got, leaving them with no choice but to demonstrate their defense capabilities to the attacker.
This doesn't make sense. To require them to use every defense they have would require the attacker to be precisely calibrated with the defenses the company has.
It's much more likely that the attacker has more offenses that the company doesn't have defenses for or that the attacker has fewer attacks and that the company has defenses that are not employed.
Even more likely is a disjoint match - the attacker has attacks the company is not prepared for and the company is prepared for some attacks the attacker is not employing.
The only way the statement could make sense as written is if the attacker has a priori inside knowledge of the companies' defenses. That would be a much bigger story. More likely is that at least some of the claims in the article are not well-founded and/or outright propaganda.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Wait, the Internet is up to version 1.4 already?
When did it move out of beta?
My computer often freezes with the beachball of death or disappearing cursor. Some runaway application, interacting with OS memory managment or UI services and devices, has managed to DOS my computer. Often a reboot is the only solution.
But what was the real problem? The fact that someone designed an OS that allows runaway processes and memory managers and what not to completely dominate all other processes, or to completely hijack key devices.
Why would an OS not have a more effective segmentation; a hierarchy, which enforces rules like:
- Never dominate the pointer movement and rendering, ever, for any reason
- Give the process kill user interface (red button, X), and the process termination procedure, absolute highest priority as well.
- Have a high-priority command shell process.
- Don't let background processing and user-process memory use ever dominate and freeze user interface rendering. Probably requires a separate CPU core just for talking to the graphics subsystem.
Seems like an off-topic aside maybe?
But the same principle should be applied to Internet design.
- A backchannel allowing sys-admin commands (at low data rates only) to get through the network should have highest priority and not be affected at all by overcapacity on other "channels".
- A low data rate channel permitting only low-frequency-of-send email / messaging protocol to get through should be next in line. By design it should not permit flooding. Its functioning should be entirely independent of any DDOSable level.
- A level which supports general web-ish and messaging protocols but for trusted authenticated communicators only.
- Finally, separated from the other levels at every switch, router, and network card, something akin to the current DDOS-ABLE level where anything goes.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Seriously, We need to create more virtual networks at the backbone level, and fully separate utilities, military, stock brokers, etc from the main arena. After all, while a nuclear plant needs to communicate with others, what need does it have to actually talk to the business office? none. The same is true of other Areas.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
no, I am pretty sure he means they are literally pouring molten iron into the internet.
badselfeater.com (the federal beast...) Maybe we will find out in a few hours!? @ 7PM EST their countdown timer hits 0...
Walk with Music;
The solution to DDoS Attacke is peer-to-peer. Thank goodness DNS already works that way. If Verisign goes down, the information is still available in a DNS server near you. Mail will still work. WhatsApp may be not, but hey we can still use SMS.
nice use of "what all". feels down-home.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
n/t
Have gnu, will travel.
I do remember hearing Wikipedia maintains an offline variant people can grab, like 16GB.
First off all, ISP's ought to automatically detect abnormal traffic patterns to their clients and start blocking it in a temporary access control list that would expire after some time. There should be a protocol to share this temporary ACL upstream (how far upstream TBD depending on the size of the ACL vs how much routers can fit in RAM). If a source address is continually on the ACL then the ISP owning the address should be automatically notified so that they can take action against the client. If an ISP doesn't take action to cut off these users until they clean any infections / stop being malicious then other ISP's should cut off that ISP.
Yes it would be painful at first but the more that ISP's police each other and their clients then the more botnets would shrink.
This doesn't seem too far-fetched given China's traditional hostility to freely-available information versus the U.S.'s scary degree of dependence on the Internet.
Is it possible to roll back to an earlier version? Even though it is rather old, the pre-AOL one wouldn't be too bad. Maybe the one before Canter & Seigel? Heck, I'd take the one before Eternal September.
Some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them, says Bruce Schneier.
This all is consistent with what Verisign is reporting.
Is it? The way I understand it, verisign reports that their customers (verisign sells DDoS migitation services it turns out) have seen more and larger DDoS attacks in 2016, not attacks against verisign's infrastructure.
Nah, it's probably just C'thulhu looking around.
rm -rf http://./
I am glad to see some attention being put to our exponentially growing FRAGILITY, as we race to replace all "dumb" infrastructure with really stupid plans for "smart" IOT everywhere. So thanks for the post. But I don't have a lot of hope. All the SF books and stories in the world haven't prevented our mad race to surrender all our privacy and create all the trappings required for totalitarianism way beyond anything imaginable in Brave New World. So, why should I hope that we will pull back from this race to make computers and buggy software the ultimate arbiters of all our cars, planes, stoves, heating systems, refrigerators, washing machines, toilets, door knobs, etc. etc. etc. I used to think humans were too smart to fall for anything so transparent. But here we are -- and racing headlong toward nightmare. Yeah, IOT. Humans haven't evolved their common sense and self control in thousands of years so we might as well go for AI and IOT in everything.
I don't know why or how, but that just made my day so much brighter. /hat tip
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Aware that I am replying to an AC.
The problem with the self-healing theory is the following; the multiple of grids go down.... the few basic grids on a regional level are, your basic 15 - 20 power grids. 20 or so huge Air and rail transport grids, lucky for us, the USA has redundancy system built in, it's all radio and physical. Logistical grids fail in general so expect food stocks to dwindle to nothing.
Not sure about water grids, I think they are local-ish or state-ish
We won't die, or at least a large percentage will live, the problem is the re-boot.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
You seem to be advocating the user is responsible for their actions, a la the car model.
Oddly, you seem to an OS recommendation. Surely you recommend OpenBSD, correct?
You also realize anti-virus software is garbage, right?
The US issue of self-healing theory might not be real policy at the private sector or consumer level.
Building out to add as many consumers at a very low cost along one network is about cost savings. A one connection policy only up and down the wider network.
The gov, party political, mil elite on the upper east coast would have great redundancy thanks to contractor overspend and mil/gov policy.
The west coast would have had the rush to build networks and in theory have a few different networks still running.
The real fun part is the unpaved fly over state where east and west multinationals agree to peer. Why pay to build out redundancy for another company?
Thats shareholder cash per year been lost to a "theory". The working one link, one satellite, buying just enough shared bandwidth for expected daily data flows is the all the redundancy worth investing in.
Recall "A Dissertation So Good It Might Be Classified" (01.01.04).
https://www.wired.com/2004/01/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I beat you to it. I already have it on a floppy.
Um, moderators:
Note that the GP is *the artist formerly known as 'naval information warfare officer'*. And he just sank your battleship with the incessant whining about "anti-Americanism" on Slashdot. Are we just going to join in the call for war again based on possibly "mistaken" information, like with Afghanistan and Iraq? Let's get some confirmed evidence first this time.
For sure the military don't use DNS from a public cache, and maybe not even TCP/IP anymore. I doubt very much they will suffer any denial of service attacks from the public internet. I hope they're not that dumb.
*New name: cryptologic warfare officer.
omg, they have already broken sentences. The rest of the internet will soon fall.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Was it blank before or after you copied it?
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
The "Vivaldi Internet" is.
(My post was a reply to "got the Internet on CD-ROM" you have to read it in context.)
("Google Internet" is at version 52!! (It bombs? Maybe that explain the Vivaldi behavior since it's based on Chrome))
HELP! I accidentally the whole internet!
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
CRTL+P
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
or CTRL, whatever.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Combined SCP-355 into one handy source?
http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-335
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
new domains would be limited or stopped, existing domains would work just fine. bruce should crawl back in his hole.
nothing to see here - move along
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a September that never ended - forever.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
You are correct ( my person views only ) about the private sector and consumer level self-healing. As an observation of self-interest and I don't have the cite source facts, look at the bridges and roads of the USA. Most bridges ( greater than 50% ) are in need of major repair ( read that in 2012, can't find the source ). We don't have enough qualified Bridge inspectors in the USA to look and write reports ( we have less than 100, and I am sure the report I read said 42 in the entire USA ).
Heck we need a huge amount of money to be spent on logistics repair and or replacements.
Read about the Brooklyn bridge, it was built with triple redundancy and that's what saved it when NY ran out of money for maintenance in the 70's and could only emergency maintenance. Imagine all those bridges built in the 50's and 60's, they need fixing.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Twice the capacity?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
or even
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
SD card (200GB) is so much more than twice a CD (700MB) or even a Blu-Ray disk (50GB) as to be laughable.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That is what all this cloud stuff is, they just want to bring back the mainframe days.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
fall.
North Korea.
I doubt they would make it past the nukes falling though as the US has easily enough to hit the whole of North Korea.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?