Why the Silencing of KrebsOnSecurity Opens a Troubling Chapter For the Internet (arstechnica.com) 207
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.
Internet of Things? (Score:1)
Re:Internet of Things? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Internet of Things? (Score:5, Funny)
And I'm sure I've left out some major categories.
Oh yeah, sex toys [arstechnica.com].
Re: Internet of Things? (Score:5, Funny)
Are you talking about a distributed denial of cervix?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, some have installed one of the various "Religion" DLCs available. Some have entirely unpatched systems, which might give you malware if you connect. Exclusive provider contracts seem to be one of the most reliable ways to ensure continued and safe service. If you use more than once service provider, they both start denying service. Be sure to clear your cookies! Watch out for "free" upgrades that come with their own expensive expansion packs.
Re: (Score:1)
I have this feeling that many ISPs have persecuted server operators, and used some handwaving justification that net-addressability has anything to do with further enabling DDOS botnets. I.e. net-addressability is the defining requirement of server operation. Wheras to send spam, being behind a NAT really isn't an impediment.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes they're all vulnerable, but you have to be nearby to exploit.
No, you don't, and that's the whole point. Someone 1,000 miles away can fiddle with your IoT gear, own it, or use it maliciously.
Re: (Score:2)
We tried to tell people (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't care that IoT is a horrible idea, and they ignore countless other security practices to increase their own pocket wads. Power holders want to track your every move and dig every loose penny they can find out of _your_ pocket in the process.
Stop connecting every damn thing to the Internet, and start securing what you have to have connected. This is not a mentally challenging thought process, so if you don't "get it" that makes you...
Re:We tried to tell people (Score:4, Informative)
*Some* of us tried to tell people it was a terrible idea. A lot of /.ers thought it was just a peachy thing and volubly heckled us about it, laying out in great detail how beneficial it was to have your refrigerator keep your grocery list for you to check as you shopped, be able to automatically turn you lights on and off as you went to and from work, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Stop lumping all things that are on the internet with IoT paranoia. There are very good internet enabled things that have nothing to do with silly consumer gadgets, and they use high security as well (not the weak wifi stuff).
Re: (Score:2)
They don't care that IoT is a horrible idea, and they ignore countless other security practices to increase their own pocket wads.
If the internet is vulnerable to such attacks, then we have already lost. And of course, it is, so we have.
Stop connecting every damn thing to the Internet, and start securing what you have to have connected.
How about we add some security to the actual network? No amount of security will protect you from a DDoS.
Re:We tried to tell people (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
We need a new secure internet (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: We need a new secure internet (Score:2, Informative)
That will be abused to cut off ISPs that tolerate piracy, and we can't let that happen. According to Slashdot users, piracy is a basic human right that nobody should be allowed to infringe upon.
Re: (Score:3)
Unlikely, torrent no work so good with spoofed address. Plenty of upload but the down is painfully slow.
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Right. Companies who make billions of dollars a year as ISPs (Comcast, Charter-Time Warner, etc) are going to allow you to ban them from the internet.
Please get out of your mom's basement and learn how the world really works.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:We need a new secure internet (Score:5, Insightful)
In a normal country, you can setup things called "laws" that companies need to adhere to.... I know it's a foreign concept but it does actually happen in some places!
Just not anywhere of importance. Tell us again: how many Goldman-Sachs bankers are in jail? How about HSBC bankers? How much competition does Microsoft have in the PC OS space? How many people at Sony landed in jail after the rootkits?
Re: (Score:1)
You wouldn't be reading this webpage if traffic that didn't originate in a given ISPs network wasn't forwarded. The packets that constitute your HTTP requests travel through several different networks between your home router and a server hosting a website. If any of those networks blocked packets that did not originate in their network you wouldn't be reading these comments.
Learn how routing works....
Re: (Score:3)
Really, security researchers should have started moving to Tor and I2P services years ago. When the bandwidth is spread out among many limited intermediaries, DDOS will just threaten to take down parts of the net you yourself use... if it gets anywhere at all. [archive.is]
Re: (Score:2)
There is no fucking reason for the internet to be this much of a clusterfuck.
There isn't much daylight between Internet we have today and the ideal version of it in my view. Shit that runs over it is an entirely different story.
Spoofed routing updates, IP spoofing, none of this should be possible by design.
If everyone got off their asses and implemented BCP 38 it would be more difficult yet I'm not so sure we would see a better outcome. Preventing reflection is helpful and having more confidence in source addresses important yet I find it hard to believe this is a solution to anything.
With a non retarded internet DDOS attacks could simply be blocked at the source by certified ISPs.
Problem isn't spoofed traffic it is desire and capability to flood others.
Re: (Score:2)
There isn't much daylight between Internet we have today and the ideal version of it in my view. Shit that runs over it is an entirely different story.
Uh no. The internet is the network and the computers. It's an inter-net-work of computers. The shit that runs over it is likewise therefore also part of the internet. If the internet will happily carry shit traffic, then it's a shit internet.
I love it too, but let's not pretend that it's not grossly flawed.
Re: (Score:2)
Uh no. The internet is the network and the computers. It's an inter-net-work of computers. The shit that runs over it is likewise therefore also part of the internet. If the internet will happily carry shit traffic, then it's a shit internet.
I love it too, but let's not pretend that it's not grossly flawed.
No I'm talking about the architecture of the network itself and have made that quite clear. You can invent whatever definitions you want and ignore the clear context of parents remarks yet in doing so you are no longer communicating any useful information.
Asserting pipes are shit because you pumped them full of shit is itself worthless shit.
Re: (Score:2)
Fine. Can I send you the bill for these multi-million dollar routers you want to turn in to boat anchors? I have two or three dozen I'll need to replace.
Re: (Score:2)
Fine. Can I send you the bill for these multi-million dollar routers you want to turn in to boat anchors? I have two or three dozen I'll need to replace.
If the internet becomes just a lot of DDoS then they'll effectively be boat anchors anyway. The problem needs fixing at any cost, because the cost of not fixing it is that the internet becomes useless and that cost is too much to bear. Will you ignore the disease until it kills the host? Or will you administer a painful medicine?
Re: We need a new secure internet (Score:1)
I'm about to buffer overrun your butt if you don't stop bad mothing C, the language of our lord.
Brian said "SPECTRE", not "specter" (Score:1)
SPECTRE. The SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.
From a James Bond movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECTRE
Re: (Score:2)
"From a James Bond movie."
Kids these days.
Even if you're going to restrict yourself to movies, SPECTRE was the villain in most of the Sean Connery Bond flics. And that was in no small part because they took liberally from Ian Fleming's books.
At least you got the acronym right.
Now, for bonus points, what did THRUSH (the Man from UNCLE bad guys) stand for? (And, trivia note, Ian Fleming contributed concepts for that TV series, including the name of the main character, Napoleon Solo.)
Are we sufficiently off-
Re: (Score:2)
THRUSH isn't an acronym. It's the name of the organisation. Attempts to make it one came later, in some of the novelisations, I think.
Re: (Score:2)
Stand? No. Squirm uncomfortably? Yes.
Re: (Score:2)
Books are just first-drafts of screenplays.
Unless it's the other way 'round like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Committee for the ...And that's the nub of it.
Liberation and
Integration of
Terrifying
Organisms and their
Rehabilitation
Into
Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_espionage_organizations
Business as usual... (Score:2)
As long as it scales in parallel to money, its nothing new or revolutionary. New gun for hire, different day.
Well, we learned one thing... (Score:2)
...that there's ANOTHER reason the "internet of things" is a stupid idea.
A single domain was silenced. (Score:1, Troll)
Big deal. One domain was silenced.
He can still work and do what he needs, now he has to participate in the rest of the media network.
That's the whole point of the Internet being invented in the 60's to begin with. One site / segment get's bombed, you can still get on in other segments of the network. All he needs to do is submit Press Releases just like everyone else.
Problem that's not a problem has been solved.
Re:A single domain was silenced. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>Krebs' site had the full backing of Akamai until it became too expensive for them to continue fending off the attacks
It wasn't too expensive for Akamai to continue fending off the attacks. It was too expensive to them to fend off the attacks for free
Re: (Score:3)
Well, since the figures I've seen bandied around are that protection from this level of attack would be about USD100-200K per annum, this effectively means that unless you have a lot of money or a company willing and able to pay what amounts to protection money, you potentially won't be permitted to speak - doing so with an uncomfortable topic for someone gets you knocked offline. Pay the wrong mob and you get to pay again, and again, and again.
One potential outcome may be that truly personal sites will bec
Re: (Score:2)
Well, since the figures I've seen bandied around are that protection from this level of attack would be about USD100-200K per annum
Google offers it free [withgoogle.com] to all journalists.
Re: (Score:1)
For as much Libertarian cock sucking goes on around /. this seems to be exactly the free market at work. Only he was getting service for free. So yeah, he wasn't worth keeping around without being a real customer.
Re: A single domain was silenced. (Score:1)
This is a problem in itself. What you suggest means the end of a free internet. Only domain owned by organizations big enough to absorb that kind of ddos or too small to attract attention would be left in the end.
You don't say... (Score:3)
What's especially troubling is that this attack can happen to many other websites, not just KrebsOnSecurity.
So wait, a DDOS attack can happen to anybody? This kind of hard hitting revelation is why I keep coming back to this site.
Re: (Score:2)
You heard it here first. Now there's something they don't say about slashdot
Re: (Score:2)
I've been DDoS'd for talking shit on irc. Well, I say shit, but what I was saying was true... only inflammatory. But back then it didn't take a very large attack to knock someone off ye olde internet, an ISP would scarcely notice.
Distributed websites (Score:1)
This sounds like a good use for some torrent-type technology to supply "distributed websites"
Rather than having a server or "servers", articles go out from a seed source and are quickly seeded throughout the world. Maybe add some sort of checksumming/encryption to help validate that an article did in-fact come from the real source and not an impostor... it would stop sh*t like this from happening.
Great idea! Articles could be categorized and dist (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
Re: (Score:1)
Gee, sarcasm.
newsgroups are different than a P2P seeding system. There wasn't really a peer so much that your ISP and some other major odies would keep local cache's of the top groups. The obvious disadvantage of this being that those same bodies get to choose which newsgroups they clone/share, whereas in P2P anyone who has picked up the document/article/whatever is potentially also a peer.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which central server did these non-peers cache the newsgroups from?
Re: (Score:3)
NNTP was pretty decentralized, one of the challenges with it in the later days of NNTP was the relative ease of newgroup injection and crapflooding.
IIRC, NNTP server software on the hardware of the early 2000s scaled poorly and the traffic volumes were growing fast so you started to see ISPs get much more control oriented when it came to retention periods and which newgroup messages they would honor and from whom.
Partially sarcastic (Score:2)
> newsgroups are different than a P2P seeding system. There wasn't really a peer so much that your ISP and some other odies (bodies?)
You didn't have to use your ISP's servers, just like you don't have to use their DNS. People routinely used other news servers, and nerds often ran their own. Of course using your ISP's local servers tends to be faster and more efficient than some server on a far-away network.
Until shortly before NNTP mostly died, most ISPs didn't want liability from choosing to carry s
Re: (Score:2)
I2P does this... https://geti2p.net/en/docs/app... [geti2p.net]
In fact, addresses within both Tor and I2P are crypto public keys.
It even has a distributed filesystem.
Superdistribution of Content (Score:2)
The attackers are distributed. The victims are not. We need to superdistribute web content like we do with music. Think TOR meets torrents. It would take httpd authors, browser authors, and even search engines to get in on the act, but it would put an end to the problem. (somebody is probably already working on this)
The web, like e-mail, is going through death throes. The kids will decide what lives and what dies I guess.
Re:Superdistribution of Content (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
FTFY.
Re: (Score:2)
"TOR meets torrents" is I2P.
It has distributed content sites like Syndie, and even has bittorrent contained within the net (not a gateway to clearnet) and a distributed filesystem (Tahoe-lafs).
Re: (Score:2)
No, like:
pubs.site.tld would return the contents of site.txt which is simply
2016-09-23 15:41:23 magnet:sfgalkfgalfgalfgasf ...
2016-09-21 11:34:08 magnet:sfgalkfgalfgalfgasf
----Public Key----
dgsh;slgh;sdg
Then you grab and seed what you want. The torrent contents would be signed. Other sites / journalists / whoever could verify the public key with the actual author if needed.
Stupid IoT (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
To ISPs "servers" are considered 'harmful devices', but botnets of these sorts of clients with out of development closed source firmwares are considered "nonharmful devices". Lol.
Story's Not Over (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Do you have a source for this? All I've seen is that Akamai/Prolexic was unwilling to keep doing it for free, because it was getting really expensive. That seems like a significant difference, especially from the perspective of somebody intending to pay money for the services rendered.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
There's also Google's Project Shield, which is free for journalists.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a really good point. This service sure isn't going to throw someone off for being attacked too much. I'll ask someone at Google to expedite the process.
Re:Story's Not Over (Score:4, Informative)
The answer is already here... (Score:1)
The answer is already here.
Use ipfs
https://ipfs.io/ [ipfs.io]
This problem goes away on it's own. Sure they DDoS but they only be hitting 127.0.0.1
Ironic (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This is a stupid attack (Score:1)
It's a sign of continuing centralization (Score:2)
In the past it was trivial to just mirror websites as they typically only consisted of some HTML pages and some images. If something like that happened in the past, you'd just have mirrors popping up everywhere.
Today websites are much more complicated. Even something as simple as a blog is now dynamically generated every time its loaded. You cannot simply mirror that.
Re: (Score:2)
"You cannot simply mirror that."
You can actually mirror a dynamic site trivially, it's just that the snapshot goes immediately out of date.
The first way to improve dynamic website performance is to put a proxy in front of the web server to cache content and minimise the number of hits that reach dynamic code.
I'll add a caveat to my comment about mirroring dynamic sites: I'm not talking about the latest wave of non-HTML sites that use JS to render directly in the browser. In theory they can be mirrored as we
Problem of todays web: "One fat sitting target" (Score:3)
Ok, people my point is we have too long relied on companies protecting those that can pay (Brian cannot) the hefty fee from DDOS.
And when I introduced this thought with "one fat .. target" I meant even Akamai with its big - but limited - bandwidth is condensed to just one target when that bandwidth is exhausted.
My point: Mittigation for this scale of attack is to counter it with a "borg collective" of an even or bigger scale.
The vulnerability for Brian, us and everyone is, that the fight is one against an army. Now one could argue that going on the offensive(attacking the bots, identifying the bots) would be a favourable cause. However this would end up in many little scrimishes that drain energy and end in a victory for that bad guys, because they have more energy.
So I don't think that such an offensive would be a meaningful course of action. The best course of action would be to first weaken those DDOS attacks and then rendering them uneffective because there is not even a single target.
So todays sites are a single sitting fat target, Akamai is just a thick wall, but every wall can be shot to pieces with a big army.
But there are two known and working mittigations
a.) freenet / freesite - with its hash keys and asymetric encryption a site is even "signed", also everyone who connects to a freesite will store it in the cache/storage.
b.) bit-torrent
example: It is still active and thriving till today, under attack and not just holding up but thriving.
Idea: torrent(ify) the web
But the secondary - offensive - measure is to identify the unwilling bots of these bot nets and work on this front - long long way to go.
Just start syndication (Score:2)
Krebs just needs to change his distribution model. Instead of limiting this info to his own website, just start publishing the content on any interested website. Why hasn't slashdot already contacted him and offered to host his content? Even if they can DDoS a single major site into submission, they won't stand a chance of taking several offline.
For that matter, why wasn't Akamai sending out tons of abuse@ emails during this mess, telling ISPs to stop the flood coming from their side, or face financial lia
Easy solution (Score:2)
Hold manufacturers of such shitty IoT appliances liable for facilitating crimes. Not only will we be spared fridges that spy on our lives, this whole mess would end pretty fucking quickly.
Fatal Flaws (Score:2)
It's not a good thing when one or two jackasses can fuck over the entire internet.
And yes, I know this wasn't the entire internet, but imagine this attack writ large, performed by multiple actors, possibly with state backing (or maybe just a lot of personal resources).
The internet is basically at the mercy of whoever feels malicious on any given day and who has the ability to push a few buttons.
Krebs now hosted by google (Score:2)
The site is back! Now hosted by google.
Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
I think this is a problem in want of a legal solution rather than a technical one. That is, people hosting ddos botnet nodes behind their internet connection, winningly or not, be held accountable. And it needs not be anything drastic, just require heavy throttling until they fix their shit. And foreign actors can simply have their mal intended traffic dropped at the border links if their country doesn't enforce similar rules.
Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
So if there is a leak or a hole, shouldn't it be plugged then?
Being aware that the problem exists isn't enough. What's the next step, an RFC of some kind? So that our leading technologists can find a solution?
Re: (Score:2)
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 technical solution is cleaning up millions of owned systems.
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.
This isn't 1996. Nobody runs botnets where individual hosts overtly "spam" and expect to keep their network intact.
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.
This just happens to be the low hanging fruit.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it needs a technical solution [as opposed a legal one]. Making ISP's liable .........
That is a legal solution.
The rest can then be tackled by holding the source to blame
So is that.
Re: (Score:2)
It is pretty unlikely this attack needed source spoofing. Far more likely each insecure IoT device only contributed a trickle, and that with a legitimate IP address.
What is needed instead is to make manufacturers of these crappy, insecure devices liable for the full damage caused. They can then try to get that money back from the attackers (good luck with that...).
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree that this would be the best approach, it requires one thing that we are not going to get anytime soon: A significant majority of non-stupid people. IoT has zero reasonable applications at this time. But far too many people are not mentally equipped to see that.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you aren't understanding a simple fact here. This is not devices that are spamming, this is thousands and thousands of devices, none of which is generating more traffic than could be legitimate.
The design of the internet says I can send packets from any device to any device on any port I choose, and that is what these bots are doing. I am sure that no single device out there is putting out as much traffic as a single high resolution web cam watching baby eagles hatch or many other non-evil uses.
Th
Re: (Score:2)
"Making ISP's liable for outbound traffic that doesn't originate from within their address range would deal with this."
Probably not. ISPs that won't respond will not help, and taking those offline risks harming innocent users, and we have a problem that cannot well be solved. And I bet a small Americano that many of these ISPs are major players, and will not be taken to account.
"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
Re: (Score:1)
Time for a license to get on the internet, eh? You need to pass a test about keeping your system patched.
And for those companies releasing IoT products with open FTP ports, may they die in a fire [medium.com].
Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Think you patch your IoT door cam?
I doubt it. These are stupid simple, and that's the problem.
Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately it's not that easy, the target should be the ones building the botnets - make it a capital crime.
Re: (Score:2)
Block all by default? Only open SSH, and outbound connections ONLY to the cloud server?
Re: (Score:2)
And we will see new problems instead.
But ISPs seems to delay the introduction of IPv6 a lot, which sucks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Excuse me? This will not even help one bit. The biggest danger to the Internet are morons that have no clue how it works.
Re: (Score:2)
ummm, how does moving to IPv6 make my internet connection bigger or my web server capable of handling more connections? The problem here is simply the number of connections, not the protocols they used to connect. For that matter, this was on Akamai infrastructure, do we have any idea what percentage of this attack was IPv6?
IPv6 is not a universal panacea, it simply fixes a few structural issues with IPv4 and makes the address space a lot bigger. (Actually IP space is bigger than MAC address space, we are
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why should I give a fuck about what side of The Party he prefers?
Re: (Score:2)
Make egress filters mandatory. No ifs or buts. Make it law.
Make it law that I can disconnect any user who isn't egress filtering and is sending me shit.
Make it a law where? If it's just in the US, or just the US and the EU, then the law does no good. It would need to be a worldwide law, good luck getting such a law in every country.