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DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
George Orwell Becomes a Blogger: Diaries Published "Real Time," 70 Years Late
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drewdrawshashtags
08/07/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
You know that you're big on Twitter when the KGB hacks it to shut you up.
They should have just unfollowed.
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drewdrawshashtags was starred

DwayneGebsite
08/07/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
is Giz still having poblems? The entire Gawker network is not working normally. i havent seen a picture on the site for days, and thats after it takes 10 minutes to load the site. its like being on dial-up. but worse.
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reddingofish promoted this comment DwayneGebsite was starred DwayneGebsite was unstarred

reddingofish
08/07/09

@DwayneGebsite: Have you run a spyware checker lately? And don't say I don't need to because I am on a Mac, if you are on Solaris or HPUX I would understand but otherwise run a spyware scan or go to your internet properties and check the box that says show pictures.
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Metkis
08/07/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
I'm curious what most star posters think of 4Chan.
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Barry99705 promoted this comment Metkis was starred Metkis was unstarred

Barry99705
08/07/09

@Metkis: Waste of time, just like facebook.
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UnderLoK
08/07/09

@Metkis: That community would be better served on IRC.

4Chan just speaking of the site itself has always been way too annoying for me to ever use. It's like they started to develop it in 97 and never finished. I still don't understand how people can stand it.As far as the users (hackers) go, I don't care.

Before that they were all on IRC and didn't take stupid risks like going to a site like 4Chan.
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Edited by UnderLoK at 08/07/09 8:22 AM UnderLoK was starred UnderLoK was unstarred

Draco_2k
08/07/09

@Metkis: I'm not a star commenter... But what the hell.
If you ever look at 4Chan, do remember to appreciate the moment - because you're looking in the mirror image of our entire society stripped of social norms, laws, false responsibility, peer pressure, cultural influence, forced behaviour and abridged freedom of expression.
This is how sad we really are.
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UnderLoK promoted this comment Draco_2k was starred Draco_2k was unstarred

orthorim
08/07/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
The only thing I wonder is how much worse this needs to get until the internet gets an upgrade to prevent DDOS attacks.
I don't know why there isn't hardware to protect against it, actually. I mean I know there is but it doesn't seem to work particularly well.
How can 10,000 or even 100,000 PCs bring down a website? That's what is baffling to me. Something somewhere is seriously screwy.
One thing is obvious - it is extremely cheap and easy to rent a botnet with a few 10,000 nodes. A few thousands dollars and you are in. There is no relation to the cost of defending against such an attack.
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UnderLoK promoted this comment orthorim was starred orthorim was unstarred

Accelerata
08/07/09

@orthorim: with IP source address spoofing, its becomes virtually impossible to determine which requests are legitimate automatically. if every single router on the internet guarded against IP spoofing, you might be able to limit it greatly, but there's nothing an individual server can do. as long as you have access to more bandwidth than your target (usually via a large bot net), there's really no way to stop it automatically. you have to trace the packets backwards, hop at a time, to determine the sources and then block all traffic from them.
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discounteggroll promoted this comment Accelerata was starred Accelerata was unstarred

UnderLoK
08/07/09

@orthorim: For the average attack there are plenty of ways to block the traffic, however if it saturates your connection you’re screwed. This is why the bigger sites have massive amounts of hardware and the data center they sit in has unreal amounts of bandwidth to protect them from such attacks.

The data center I used to be in had 24 gig-e connections on all major carriers (att, quest, L3, tw, etc) which put them at an advantage (and their customers). On a few occasions we had some pretty big DDOS attacks which the data center just blocked at the border for us. Our connection was only 100mb, but the DDOS was 2gb. Since the data center had over 24gb we never skipped a beat. Most of the traffic was coming in via ATT so they called up ATT and they dropped the route to our site on their end which put a stop to 80% of the attack. The other attacks were similar in nature and luckily they weren’t well distributed so they were easily blocked.

Articles like this make the art of mitigating a DDOS sound simplistic or even hopeless, but if you are in a good data center, with quality gear, that is usually not the case (not always). The problem with Twitter is if someone farts on it, it goes down.
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Edited by UnderLoK at 08/07/09 9:09 AM UnderLoK was starred UnderLoK was unstarred

badasscat
08/07/09

@orthorim: It's not "the internet" that needs an upgrade, and it's not even particularly difficult to defend against a DoS attack. It's just a bandwidth issue. Every company contracts for the amount of bandwidth they think they need - there's no point paying for more. The problem is when a DoS attack happens, the required bandwidth suddenly increases exponentially. It's not that the internet as a whole or even the web host can't handle it, it's that the site in question hasn't bought that bandwidth. And it takes time to ramp up, because it's not a question of just the pipes... it can also be your load balancer or even your servers, which have hardware in them commensurate with the bandwidth you've purchased, and they need to be quickly upgraded and/or replicated too (all while your site continues to run).

Blocking traffic is problematic for a whole bunch of reasons, but it's not really necessary. All that's necessary is bandwidth.

I worked for a company that was DDoS'd several times, and the first time was really bad because we just hadn't prepared. We knew what needed to be done (basically calling up our host and telling them to temporarily increase our bandwidth) but it just took around 8 hours to do it. The 2nd and 3rd times were barely a blip, though, because by then we'd gotten new network hardware, had a few "standby" servers ready and also had a new contract that basically added DDoS detection and automatically increased our bandwidth temporarily.

I think most companies just don't do these things until they're hit the first time.
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Edited by badasscat at 08/07/09 2:42 PM badasscat was starred badasscat was unstarred

bluetom00
08/07/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
History lesson kids: If you transliterate from the Cyrillic, it's actually pronounced "Sukhumi" in the Latin alphabet, which also happens to be the name of the capital city of a region that both Russia and Georgia claim as their own. Wow, seven years later and those Russian classes finally pay off.
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negated: has star powah
08/06/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
We really should convince the rabidly patriotic Russian hackers that the rabidly patriotic North Korean hackers and rabidly patriotic Chinese hackers are out to hack their shit. And sit back with popcorn.
But seriously, isn't it kind of pathetic that all the countries with closed presses have their own personal volunteer hacker armies taking down some of the largest sites on the net, and the closest we've got is 4chan?
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DeusExMach will still be strong after the boys of Summermodo have gone. promoted this comment

deanbmmv
08/06/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
DDOS attacks are getting frighteningly frequent and easy to do.
Just past month there's been several high profile DDOS's, the independence day one, the AT&T/4chan one, Gawker at the weekend, then all this stuff yesterday
And I'm sure there's many that don't make it to the news.
Also why is this guy special enough to get someone/somegroup to attack him and the sites he visits?
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Edited by deanbmmv at 08/06/09 11:42 PM deanbmmv was starred deanbmmv was unstarred

cipotefello
08/06/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
$5 on 4chan
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Whydoesthisalwayshappentome
08/06/09

@cipotefello: $10
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deanbmmv: ([k]) promoted this comment

deanbmmv
08/06/09

@Whydoesthisalwayshappentome: ¥1,000,000,0000
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Jimmy From The Block
08/06/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
I thought the Gawker attack was directed at the Consumerist website. Not Giz
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TonyRockyHorror
08/07/09

@Jimmy From The Block: Gawker doesn't own or operate Consumerist anymore. hasn;t for a while.
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92BuickLeSabre promoted this comment TonyRockyHorror was starred TonyRockyHorror was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
08/07/09

@TonyRockyHorror: Due to the terms of the deal with Consumer Union, Gawker agreed to host Consumerist for a year until CU could figure something out.
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geiko
08/07/09

@TonyRockyHorror: Yeah but they are still linked in some way. The same way that fleshbot and consumerist have both updated the comment system on their sites along with all gawker sites. They might not be owned by gawker anymore, but they still operate along side one another.
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drjayphd
08/07/09

@geiko: Nope, Consumerist is still using the older comment system.
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geiko
08/07/09

@drjayphd: well fleshbot has the new system in place. I think. I mean, that's what they tell me, I wouldn't know myself.
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92BuickLeSabre
08/07/09

@geiko: Fleshbot may have been "spun-off" for advertising purposes, but it's still owned by Gawker Media.
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92BuickLeSabre promoted this comment 92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
08/06/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
All of a sudden the banhammer seems pretty tame.
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GitEmSteveDave_HurtHisKnee
08/06/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
Does "Cyxym" translate to GitEmSteveDave in Georgian?
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Jitty
08/06/09

In reply to DDOS Attack Against Facebook, Twitter, Et Al. Was Because of One Guy's LiveJournal
Seriously, internet security needs to be updated so ddos attacks become outdated. Really, it's ridiculous that one or only a few people with some decent computer science knowledge can take down entire networks.
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DeusExMach will still be strong after the boys of Summermodo have gone. promoted this comment Jitty was starred Jitty was unstarred

DeusExMach wonders what the hell happened to his star.
08/07/09

@Jitty: What, you don't have TehInterwebz v3.5? It prevents any and all malware attacks. You can get it at Costco, iirc.
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