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Why the Silencing of KrebsOnSecurity Opens a Troubling Chapter For the Internet (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the better part of a day, KrebsOnSecurity, arguably the world's most intrepid source of security news, has been silenced, presumably by a handful of individuals who didn't like a recent series of exposes reporter Brian Krebs wrote. The incident, and the record-breaking data assault that brought it on, open a troubling new chapter in the short history of the Internet. The crippling distributed denial-of-service attacks started shortly after Krebs published stories stemming from the hack of a DDoS-for-hire service known as vDOS. The first article analyzed leaked data that identified some of the previously anonymous people closely tied to vDOS. It documented how they took in more than $600,000 in two years by knocking other sites offline. A few days later, Krebs ran a follow-up piece detailing the arrests of two men who allegedly ran the service. A third post in the series is here. On Thursday morning, exactly two weeks after Krebs published his first post, he reported that a sustained attack was bombarding his site with as much as 620 gigabits per second of junk data. That staggering amount of data is among the biggest ever recorded. Krebs was able to stay online thanks to the generosity of Akamai, a network provider that supplied DDoS mitigation services to him for free. The attack showed no signs of waning as the day wore on. Some indications suggest it may have grown stronger. At 4 pm, Akamai gave Krebs two hours' notice that it would no longer assume the considerable cost of defending KrebsOnSecurity. Krebs opted to shut down the site to prevent collateral damage hitting his service provider and its customers. The assault against KrebsOnSecurity represents a much greater threat for at least two reasons. First, it's twice the size. Second and more significant, unlike the Spamhaus attacks, the staggering volume of bandwidth doesn't rely on misconfigured domain name system servers which, in the big picture, can be remedied with relative ease. The attackers used Internet-of-things devices since they're always-connected and easy to "remotely commandeer by people who turn them into digital cannons that spray the internet with shrapnel." "The biggest threats as far as I'm concerned in terms of censorship come from these ginormous weapons these guys are building," Krebs said. "The idea that tools that used to be exclusively in the hands of nation states are now in the hands of individual actors, it's kind of like the specter of a James Bond movie." While Krebs could retain a DDoS mitigation service, it would cost him between $100,000 and $200,000 per year for the type of protection he needs, which is more than he can afford. What's especially troubling is that this attack can happen to many other websites, not just KrebsOnSecurity.
There is no fucking reason for the internet to be this much of a clusterfuck. Spoofed routing updates, IP spoofing, none of this should be possible by design.
With a non retarded internet DDOS attacks could simply be blocked at the source by certified ISPs. Any ISP who abused that ability, or ISPs which repeatedly allowed spoofed traffic to originate from their network could simply be banned from the internet. Problem fucking solved.
Stop patching up this shit and give us a next generation internet, I'm sick of this shit.
Give it a day or two and a solution will exist. It's only when problems become real that people start taking notice. If heroes can go down, then all of us must rise up.
It's not just refrigerators and light switches.
It's also light bulbs (Philips stupid mood thingie), thermostats (Nest, etc), nannycams (every manufacturer and his brother), (in)security systems, even fricking doorbells, et bloody cetera.
And I'm sure I've left out some major categories.
-- Alastair
And I'm sure I've left out some major categories.
Oh yeah, sex toys.
-- Alastair
No, it needs a technical solution. Making ISP's liable for outbound traffic that doesn't originate from within their address range would deal with this.
The rest can then be tackled by holding the source to blame - if you have an device that's spamming, well it's up to you to shut it down or pay up.
The issue at present is that source IP spoofing is far too easy because the ISP's are routing traffic that can't legitimately be coming from inside their network.
If they are so easy to commandeer, I think a group should go around bricking these damn things. Brick enough of them and either users will toss them or return them. Either way, the vendor will actually consider lockdown and security a value add or go out of business. The world is better off.
Krebs' site had the full backing of Akamai until it became too expensive for them to continue fending off the attacks. If it's too expensive for Akamai to do this, it means that the attackers can take any site offline, no matter how big or how powerful. So, no, it's not just about one site. How long until Akamai itself can't keep up with attacks and has to shut down?
(Score: -1, Stupid)
It''s not our computers doing this, it's the damn refrigerator. Don't blame me when your black box goes on the fritz. And don't go after the users until they can sue Microsoft and Apple, and Frigidaire for their feeble security.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
> articles go out from a seed source and are quickly seeded throughout the world.
That's a wonderful idea. We'd need a new protocol for distributing these "articles". We could call it Network News Transfer Protocol or something. You could tag your article according to categories andsubcategories, and people could subscribe to these different news groups. We could use ssl/tls for authentication of peers.
It probably wouldn't take too long to develop such a protocol; I bet we could have it done by 1986.
If I understand this correctly, Akamai threw Krebs out because Akamai could not handle the DDS. This means I'm never sending any business to Akamai because they can't handle it properly. But it doesn't mean Krebs is off the air for long.
For example, I bet Cloudflare would take him on. They've differentiated themselves on the ability to handle DDS.
Bruce Perens.
Day or two? Here's how you do it:
Publish and have people mirror it.
The most extreme way being to publish a magnet link to whatever you published and to let the world seed it.
Content distribution at "web scale" was solved ages ago.
The web, like e-mail, is going through death throes.
Gimmie a break. You know how often I've heard "email is dying"? Generally it's from some stupid millennial, or the mouthpiece of a social networking company that offers a messaging feature that, for all intents and purposes, is email (except with formatting and picture/video inserting bells and whistles). What they really mean is "we wish email were dead, so everyone would be forced to become one of our users and we could become the new defacto email".
When those kids go out and get a job and have to communicate in a serious fashion, it's not Facebook they're going to be launching -- it's Outlook.
Why would any of that work?
First, if IP address spoofing is a real thing, and it is, then it'd be trivial to turn holding the 'source' accountable into an easy money-making scam. You can't expect people to keep their devices secure as long as companies keep producing buggy devices. That would be like pressing terrorism charges against anyone who's had their phone explode in public. Completely not the user's fault. There aren't even any user-focused tools to let you know if your TV is currently attacking someone or not. Powering it off isn't good enough.
Second, the attack used millions of devices. The IPs don't need to be spoofed. A firewall can block them, but the attackers can push so many connections at the firewall that it can't handle them even if everyone gets blocked.
The only way I know to overcome a DDoS attack is to have more resources than the attacker so that they can't bottleneck anything you have. If I'm wrong, please correct me.
Are you talking about a distributed denial of cervix?
The thing is you werent telling the right thing. IoT is not a bad idea at all (much less a horrible idea). You come off as a luddite when you say that. What you should have said is security is important IoT or no IoT. It seems obvious but apparently not to some people. May be if you had been pro-security rather than anti-IoT, you would have taken more seriously. Just my 2 cents.