Internet Backbone DDOS "Largest Ever"

wontonenigma writes "It seems that yesterday the root servers of the internet were attacked in a massive Distributed DoS manner. I mean jeeze, only 4 or 5 out of 13 survived according to the WashPost. Check out the orignal Washington Post Article here."

And...

[Cinematique]

it's supposed to withstand a nuclear war?

DDOS?

[sgtron]

Is that why my porn streaming was slow yesterday?

Watch Out!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the RIAA and they're pissed!

Everyone! Run for your lives, Jackie's comin!

And for all you tech support people out there...

[fireboy1919]

...when someone calls up and says "Is the internet down?" you can finally say, "It was." not just to simplify it to the level that your callers can understand, but because its the truth.

And...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that is so important that it can't be disturbed during transmission is already taken off the Internet and on its own network cable.

You don't think the military puts any critical systems on the Internet, do you?

13 servers

[dirvish]

From the article: "UUNET is the service provider for two of the world's 13 root servers. A unit of WorldCom Inc., it also handles approximately half of the world's Internet traffic." Only two servers for half the world's internet traffic? That is scary. What are the specs on those babies?

Ah ha.

[puppetman]

Now I know why my Tribes 2 experience lagged last night.

I'm going to beat the crap out of that 12-year-old as soon as I find him; he made me look like I had no skillzzz.

Re:al qaeda?

[Anonymous Coward]

It Couldn't have been...

I was using the computer in Afghanistan to surf pr0n.

Re:And...

[Jonny Ringo]

If there's a nuclear war the fucking internet is going to be the least of my worries. e-commerce, Web services, and xml can all kiss my ass.

Oh my my face is burning off, and I thirsty like a mother grabber.. I hope the internet is still up, oh hey look there goes a cockroach.

Re:That's why!

[Graspee_Leemoor]

" I couldn't load ESPN.com yesterday at school, now I know why!" ...Because you got high, because you got high, because you got high...

(It can't just have been me!)

graspee

OMG OMG

[Doctor Sbaitso]

I know I shouldn't have pressed this button [turnofftheinternet.com]...

Re:Reminds me...

[Istealmymusic]

Did you a verb? "you'll the nations [sic] back(bone)," what is that supposed to mean?

Re:Where's the Inter in the 'Net?

[mslinux]

Because that country invented the Internet. It's the most poweful, the most prosperous, the most democratic country in the world. Where would you rather the root servers be... Iran, Iraq, China, Russia? Use your fucking mind.

Re:Ah ha.

[ProfessorPuke]

Hehe, that's the opposite of true. If anything, your performance would've increased (assuming you could reach the server at all), because other internet users were unable to expend your shared bandwidth.

In other news....

[moosesocks]

In other news, Slashdot posted a story about the internet yesterday. as a result, the internet had been completely obliterated within 5 minutes.

Don't click the button!

[nebenfun]

:)
I can see how that site would totally confuse Grandma.

Grandma: "I clicked the red button."
Grandson: "YOU DID WHAT?"
Grandma: "I clicked the red button and the screen
went dark."
Grandson: "NO....IT CAN'T BE! YOU NEVER CLICK THE
RED BUTTON.! DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID?"
Grandma: "Huh?"
Grandson: "YOU KILLED THE INTERNET! YOU BASTARD!"

nbfn
seriously, cool site...
the only thing missing is the goat.cx guy

HA! Jumping through their own ass.

[kir]

A certain mil/gov organization I consult with was jumping through their own asses worried about this. The funny thing is, ummm... NOTHING CHANGED! We experienced NOTHING. I think they wanted us to do something... ANYTHING.

You know... next time this happens, I'm setting up my own root servers... errr... wait...

Re:And...

[digitalsushi]

We have another word for that :)

Re:Don't click the button!

[GigsVT]

Billy: Four minutes and counting.
Jim: O.K.
Billy: They pressed the button, Jim.
Jim: They pressed the button Billy, what button?
Billy: The big red one.
Jim: You mean THE button?
Billy: Goodbye, Jim.
Jim: Goodbye! Oh yes. This ain't aurevoir, it's goodbye! Ha! Ha!
Jim: This is KAOS. It's a beautiful, balmy, Southern California summer day. It's 80 degrees ... I said balmy ... I could say bomby ... Ha! Ha! ...O.K. I'm Jim and this is Radio KAOS and with only four minutes left to us, let's use this as wisely as possible.
Molly: Everybody got someone they call home.
Jim: Out at Dodger Stadium. It's the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers are leading three to nothing over the Giants, and for those of you who are looking to go surfing tomorrow, too bad.

Roger Waters - Four Minutes.

My Brain Hurts

[Shamanin]

"The Domain Name System (DNS), which converts complex Internet protocol addressing codes..."

And I suppose the person who wrote this article would consider arithmetic a complex system of digits and symbols.

Re:And...

[alphaseven]

That's why I have "64.28.67.150 slashdot.org" in my hosts file, so if anything goes wrong with the DNS system, I'll be able to read about it on slashdot.

Re:And for all you tech support people out there..

[Anonymous Coward]

well my dad can beat up your dad.

One critical

[xant]

There's only one critical file? Hey, just email it to me, I'll keep it on my hard drive. If anyone needs it, just shoot me an email.

Re:Terrorism

[agent oranje]

... Or, this just might be the work of a terrorist group launching a cyber attack, maybe even your neighbor, Billy the w0nd3rh4x0r.

... Or, maybe they just got slashdotted. Heh heh heh...

Re:And for all you tech support people out there..

[TomServo]

I hope for your sake that Slashdot doesn't change it's IP address any time soon then.

One would assume you still have to check periodically to see if the IP address from DNS is the same as your cached one. Either way, you are not the majority of Internet users, so for most everyone, DNS going dead == Internet going dead.

Determining whether or not kicking the majority of users off the Internet is a bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re:I work for JPNIC

[Kragg]

The attack came in and removed some entries from bind database (we use oracle to store our bind data)..

Unbreakable.

We already test for ...

[russh347]

... stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

Its called an election.

Re:And...

[no soup for you]

"Yes, IP is more important than DNS. But is Ethernet more important than TCP?" Yes, and electricity is more important than TCP.

ok, I concede that without DNS, the internet would be useless to most users. But I maintain this is only because of a reliance on usability (domain names vs. IP addresses), which is not in and of itself a bad thing. The internet would function perfectly fine without a higher-power translating a string into a number.

I've read too much Gibson and Stephenson...

[dpilot]

Despite logic, I have this image in my head of a locked room. Inside is a puddle of molten metal with silicon chips floating in it, their bond wires holding them on the surface like waterbugs.

The narrator voices over: This was a root server.

Re:And...

[Tablizer]

If there's a nuclear war the fucking internet is going to be the least of my worries. e-commerce, Web services, and xml can all kiss my ass.

Well, if it does happen, I hope they finish them off. Otherwise, the cockroaches may try to revive XML and web services based on an acheological dig in a few hundred-million years. Then again, lets punish the little bastards for infesting our kitchens. Let them suffer dumb tech bubbles and useless fads afterall.

here's one;

[The Monster]

Does anyone know a good Chiropractor!?!

Westwood Chiropractic
4711 Mission Rd. - Westwood, KS (sub. of Kansas City), Tel: [phone]
Good enough for a lot of professional athletes, and they straightened me up after my car wreck.

But I don't think they can fix uunet.

Re:And...

[sean23007]

A subterranean bunker is designed to withstand nuclear wars, but what do you think would happen if the nuke was inside the bunker?

Ummm... a lot more people would be safe? That is, the people who didn't fit in the bunker...

Follow-up Washington Post article...

[mooman]

Original Washington Post article was: "Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever"

Followup article, after slashdot story, was: "Attack on Washington Post Called Largest Ever".

Ah.. behold the mighty power of /.

Re:Well there we go!

[arkane1234]

We don't need to worry about that.

There aren't many non-idiots around, and the ones that aren't idiots are busy keeping up the slack for the idiots. So, we're in the clear.

Chiropractor: A slight step above witch doctor

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they claim your spine was out of alignment?

They might as well wear grass skirts and a bone through their nose. They make scientologist seem sensible.

Re:And...

[Waffle Iron]

Its like saying "Our roadways would function just fine, even if all the cars were gone."

Having listened to the CB radio on a few road trips, I get the impression that most big rig drivers enthusiastically agree with that statement.

Re:al qaeda?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was using the computer in Afghanistan to surf pr0n.

Junis [slashdot.org], is that you?!

Whats the difference between a dos attack & /.

[Joey7F]

A warrant

--Joey

DNS

[commodoresloat]

We can have the internet without dns, but we cannot have dns without the internet

Why would we want DNS without the Internet?

Re:WD40

[zztzed]

I hate to think of what could happen if the 31334 hackers really start mixing attacks.

Yeah, damn eleea hackers.

Re:And for all you tech support people out there..

[dimator]

You'd be surprised just how large my /etc/hosts file is.

Re:One critical

[alfaiomega]

There's only one critical file? Hey, just email it to me, I'll keep it on my hard drive. If anyone needs it, just shoot me an email.

OK, I'll send you my HOSTS.TXT file. But remember to update it every few weeks because the ARPAnet is growing faster then ever after the adoption of this new, fancy, so called "TCP/IP" technology.

Re:Where's the Inter in the 'Net?

[Anonymous Coward]

your military wanted a communications network that could survive a nuclear holocaust so that it would be the first to rebuild and conquer the world when the evil reds launched the first nuke.

Hey! They told us not to say anything about the big, hairy, World Domination Plan on my first day of basic training. Whoever told you is going to be in big trouble!

Re:I work for JPNIC

[Anonymous Coward]

That chat log lowered my IQ by 7 points. Thanks.

"Most sophisticated attack ever"

[commodoresloat]

Yeah, just look at the level of discourse in the chat [216.239.53.100]; if these guys are the hackers in question, they really are sophisticated! Just look at this conversation about DNS vulnerabilities:

[09:30] <thol> poooH
[09:31] <poooH> thol
[09:31] <BaKaRi> poooH
[09:31] <poooH> tee he
[09:31] <BaKaRi> poooH
[09:31] <poooH> awww
[09:31] <BaKaRi> poooH
[09:31] <thol> ahahaah
[09:31] <s0lar1s> balaaeh nu
[09:31] <poooH> thol
[09:31] <BaKaRi> shit
[09:31] <s0lar1s> wtf

And that's just a little fragment of it. I'm really worried about these guys taking over the internet!!

Re:Ah ha.

[Scrameustache]

I'm going to beat the crap out of that 12-year-old as soon as I find him;

I formally declare that from this moment forth, this will be know as "pulling a Jay and Silent bob", watch the movie of the same name if you want to get it ;- )

Re:And...

[cscx]

Resident asshat.

Patent Infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone could kindly point me to the person or persons who launched this latest DDOS attack, I would certainly appreciate it. I hold the patent on Distributed Denial-Of-Service Attacks By Electronic Means, and I will get my day in court, and royalties due to me.

Re:"Most sophisticated attack ever"

[Elwood P Dowd]

The chat is actually encrypted. If you gzip each comment, decrypt the result (56 bit encryption. Thank God for crypto export laws.), you'll see that they're actually exchanging compressed tcp/ip packets. They're using this IRC channel as a transport for their encrypted IRC session on another server, where they are coordinating their efforts to destroy Al Qaeda.

Re:And...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"A subterranean bunker is designed to withstand nuclear wars, but what do you think would happen if the nuke was inside the bunker?"

I think everybody outside the bunker would be like "What the hell was that?!"

Re:And...

[EverDense]

you wouldn't be affected if several large mail servers where DDoSed would you?

I might be positively affected, if the "several large mail servers" included Hotmail.
Less spam, for one.

Re:One critical

[mysticalreaper]

Well, you guys can rest easy, i sent xant an email. I said:

"Hey xant,

I've attached the critical file you alluded to in your comment at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=43025&cid=4509 265.

Keep it on your hard drive in case we all need it. :)"

Heh. In case his hard drive goes, maybe a couple other people should get it from here [internic.net].

Firewalling pings

[hansroy]

ICMP is a four letter word, after all.

"Ordinary User"? :-)

[CrystalFalcon]

("Ordinary Internet users experienced no slowdowns or outages because of safeguards built into the Internet's architecture.")

Bullshit.

I had obvious impacts trying to resolve DNS names during the time period of the attack (Delaware AT&T), despite having a caching name server on my local net, which queries AT&T's caching (primary?) servers.

Ehm, I think your interpretation of "Ordinary Internet User" is somewhat out of sync with that of the general media. :-)

Re:In other news....

[evilviper]

Alright... Let's clear this up. There was no DDoS. I was just playing with 'ping', and decided to see what would happen if I set it for the max size, and the destination as '255.255.255.255'. That's it... Just an accident. Sorry everybody.

Re:And...

[phagstrom]

designed to withstand nuclear wars

It's nice to know that you do not have to quit your [favorite online game] 'just because' a nuclear war breaks out.

Re:And...

[MikeDX]

Besides that, you would have to be a little slow of mind to be inside a fallout shelter WITH a nuclear weapon

That's all part of the Windows (tm) eXPerience.

A large nuclear device is about to explode, would you like some help?

Re:And...

[SEWilco]

Besides that, you would have to be a little slow of mind to be inside a fallout shelter WITH a nuclear weapon

They'll have to pry my nuclear weapon out of my cold dead fingers. A man has a right to protect himself. Would you want to participate in a nuclear war without a nuclear weapon? Bringing a knife to a nuclear war ain't smart.

Re:And...

[SEWilco]

I guess they would have to repair the bunker?

Ask Slashdot: My bunker had a nuclear weapon which disassembled itself as designed. Should I repair the bunker the way it was? Or should I remodel to make use of the larger space which is now available? Is water cooling better than air chillers? What bunker mods are your favorites?