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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.
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!?
"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.
"Probing" you say?
I'd say it's them dern aliens! Back in '67 I was driving in my good old '57 Chevy when I saw a bright light above me...
Never could sit on the Jon the same way after that.
As long as my Badger Badger Badger Mushroom song keeps playing... I be happy.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just save it to the cloud! That way, when the internet goes down, you can still run your sites through your smartphone!
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?
no, I am pretty sure he means they are literally pouring molten iron into the internet.