Online Dispute Becomes Internet-Snarling Attack
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The problem is getting worse every day. You can rent botnets that exploit this for as low as $5 on places like hackforums.
Authorities won't deal with your problem unless you are as big as Mastercard.
Your host will likely ask you for protection money (ddos protection is incredibly expensive) or just kick you out to protect their other customers.
The sad thing is that when people talk about it on a hosting forum, the number one response is "who did you piss off"?
I don't know how well they've tightened specimens for scientific study, but there was a scandal not too long ago where anyone who bothers to fill out paperwork could order anthrax and smallpox for research purposes from a lab.
There's lots of problems in this post. But the idea that anyone could "order smallpox" is totally false. A journalist synthesized 1 gene from smallpox which is the scandal you were referring to. 1 gene != smallpox.
At some point in the mid-21st century, I could see "downloading of consciousness" as a likely option.
The question would be whether moving to Mars in 2030-2060 would reduce one's access to downloading (seems unlikely) or if it is higher risk and/or lower access to life extension to make it less likely you would live to either downloading point or substantial life extension through biological means.
With downloading, I think either earth orbit or deep space would be more interesting than Mars, though. Mars level latency, assuming Earth retained most intelligences, would be a horrible compromise.
Edit: clarity on actual vs declared origin
http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-knocked-spamhaus-of...
Layer 7 is the application layer which means they are overloading the application. A web server connected to a 10gbit link won't be able to handle 10gbit of traffic if each request it has to do a complicated SQL query for each load. Layer 7 requires much less bandwidth though it depends on sending correctly formatted data.
A layer 3 attack doesn't even get to the application so it doesn't matter what the data is which means they can use techniques like the Open DNS resolver reflector and hence can get much more traffic with a little amount of seed traffic. As well this hides the "original" source of the attack.
It's a paranoid one man show that seems to be compulsively anti-everything, and especially anti-authority. However, on a technical level he seems to know what he's doing.
“These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.”
"He likened the technique, which uses a long-known flaw in the Internet’s basic plumbing, to using a machine gun to spray an entire crowd when the intent is to kill one person."
The hyperbole here is astounding. DNS amplification attacks and generic DDOS attacks are nothing at all like that. Why do these silly articles continually relate them to war and weapons that kill humans?
Edit: I read once in the monthly cryptogram that a DDOS is more like the Russians sending a million man army to go stand in line at the local DMV. They deny normal customers the service, they do not kill them. Denying access and killing are two very different things.
If you had the Russian army attempt to blockade shops you would expect a response from the US Army and the shop to be unblockaded in fairly short order.
The dangerous thing about DDOS is not that it's a particularly deadly weapon but that it's powerful enough to do a non-zero amount of economic damage with little/no risk for the perpetrator and that there is no effective counter-measure that doesn't involve throwing money away.
1. http://www.amazon.com/Last-Train-Hiroshima-Survivors-Look/dp...
Recently, there have been questions about the accuracy of some parts of this book. At this time, Tantor Media will continue to make it available to our customers, but we wanted to make you aware of the issues. Here is a statement from the hardcover publisher of the book, Henry Holt and Company:"It is with deep regret that Henry Holt and Company announces that we will no longer print, correct or ship copies of Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima due to the discovery of dishonest sources of information for the book. It is easy to understand how even the most diligent author could be duped by a source, but we also understand that this opens that book to very detailed scrutiny. The author of any work of non-fiction must stand behind its content. We must rely on our authors to answer questions that may arise as to the accuracy of their work and reliability of their sources. Unfortunately, Mr. Pellegrino was not able to answer the additional questions that have arisen about his book to our satisfaction."The Last Train from Hiroshima offers listeners a stunning "you are there" time capsule, gracefully wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino's scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb's survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.At the narrative's core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand-the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American fliers in the air. Thirty people are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki-where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of the cataclysm at ground zero both times. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell in which Yamaguchi had been standing, placing him and a few others in a shock cocoon that offered protection, while the entire building disappeared around them.Pellegrino weaves spellbinding stories together within a narrative that challenges the "official report," showing exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki-and why.
Arrest the criminals doing the vandalizing. It's very simple. Someone or some group causes millions in property damages or service disruptions, it's a serious crime and should be treated as such. They should be hunted down and arrested, whatever the rock they're hiding under.
And I hate to say it but you're doing the same thing. Where did "millions in property damages or service disruptions" come from?
A DDoS is an irritating annoyance. It rises to the level of a bunch of jerks who decide to climb up and rewire the traffic lights to be continuously red and cause a traffic jam. You can certainly arrest them when they do something illegal, but why does that require us to make them out to be a bunch of evil masterminds hellbent on causing a nuclear holocaust or financial Armageddon?
Edit: On second reading, it looks like the "nuclear bombs" quote by the CEO of Cloudflare was taken out of context.
Actually, given that my new phone connection is VOIP-only, an attack that saturates or damages[1] the respective part of the network could block an emergency call and quite possibly lead to problems down the line. It's hard to estimate how much we actually depend on the internet nowadays.
[1] "damages" as in "put critical infrastructure pieces temporarily out of function"
The main Wikipedia page on Cyberbunker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker reminds us both that Spamhaus has gone after them before, including interceding with their ISP, and that Pirate Bay was at one point hosted there.
The associated Wikipedia talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACyberBunker suggests, among other things, that Cyberbunker has claimed to be an independent country (apparently on the theory that a former NATO base isn't actually Dutch territory).
Nobody is forced to use the Spamhaus service. The people choosing to use the Spamhaus service seem to be happy with it.
The authors of this article have absolutely no idea what they're talking about - and what's worse is they sprinkle this kind of crap throughout the article.
>Mr. Kamphuis said Cyberbunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for “abusing their influence.”
>“Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet,” Mr. Kamphuis said. “They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam.”
And this goes unchallenged? Honestly I can't believe they printed such bullshit! Everyone configures their MTA to use Spamhaus because it WORKS - nobody is forcing MTA admins to use it.
"If you dont stop behavior _I_ dont like, I'll submit you to a list so nobody can send or receive email from you."
And the hope is that they act honorably.
Why the ISP networks are not doing their job? Isn't is very simple to filter?
Would be interesting to see an update from CloudFlare - AFAIK, the largest DDoS they've dealt with before has been a tad over 100 Gbps.
Unless you are paying your hosts tens of thousands a month, they don't help you either and usually want to drop you unless you pay them extra.