cyberattack - Gizmodo

posts about #cyberattack more →
The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
North Korea Now Attacking US Government Sites, Sources Say
Russia Launches New Full-Scale Cyber Offensive Against Foreign Country

Your version of Internet Explorer is not supported. Please upgrade to the most recent version in order to view comments.

Dsmvwl Admin Promote to frontpage Approve user Ban user ×

Auzburner
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
Problem: I hate to say it, but I don't feel Obama's willing to retaliate. I don't see him as a President that is willing to pull the trigger when he really needs to. Between the Nuclear threats, NC's inability to follow treaties and now a legitimate attack. Something forceful MUST be done. They're testing the willingness of the Obama administration to retaliate, but so far America has wimped out. I just really hope the US Gov gets its act together in this matter and shows them we're not fooling around, show them what we're made of. PLEASE
Reply

Auzburner was starred Auzburner was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@Auzburner: And do what exactly? What is your magic plan no one has thought of yet?

Fire a missile and watch them blow the crap out of Seoul in 15 seconds? Drop our nuclear arsenal and let it impact our allies on every side?

You've got one crazy guy sitting in a bunker surrounded by 23 Million poverty-striken workers, with his finger on the button to start an all out strike with one of the world's largest militaries against the capital city of one of our closest allies less than 30 minutes away by car.

And that's before we address the fact that Russia and China are its northern neighbors and absolutely insist that no one destabilizes it any more than it already is for fear of 23 Million refugees.

North Korea has been a problem for half-a-century. If it were an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved by now.
Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

Sunburn_summer
07/14/09

@92BuickLeSabre: I could be wrong, but isn't Seoul in South Korea... a slightly different country to the South of the cyber bad guys. My geography isn't all aces so... bygones if I'm wrong.
Reply

Sunburn_summer was starred Sunburn_summer was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@Sunburn_summer: It is all of those things. If you look at a map, Seoul is just south of the border with North Korea; there is a river that runs from N. Korea straight through the middle of Seoul; and it's well understood that N. Korea has long had it's "defenses" targeted directly at it.
Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

Auzburner
07/15/09

@92BuickLeSabre: I'm not saying bomb them, I'm saying: Quit the "strongly" worded speeches toward the NC Gov and take a stand. Quit backing down and ignoring the problem. No diplomatic moves have been made of any substance. I feel like I'm talking about Hitler's regime and the worlds inability to react. We sent some strongly worded letters as if that would make a difference. Now, I'm not saying this will ever be as big, but certainly it's the same idea: Don't let NC walk all over us.
Reply

Auzburner was starred Auzburner was unstarred

Uncletwitch
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
I wonder if there is a way to cut that country off electronicly from the WWW.. They want to be isolated; fine.. Be then... Maybe some covert missions to take out any satalites they might have floating up there...Triple the import taxes..Drive them into the stoneage
Reply

Edited by Uncletwitch at 07/14/09 12:21 PM Uncletwitch was starred Uncletwitch was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@Uncletwitch: Drive them into the stone age? It's more like a walk across the street.
Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

SigmundTheSeaMonster
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
If I wanted more money for my department's budget, but had no reason, hmmmm, would I knowingly allow such an attack, as to easily get appropriations? Ofcourse!
Reply

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@SigmundTheSeaMonster: You mean like your brand new office of cyber security that was announced less than two months ago and which still has some convincing of Congress to do before it gets sufficient appropriations in the next budget? You mean like that? Yeah, maybe just a little.
Reply

Edited by 92BuickLeSabre at 07/14/09 12:04 PM 92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
Kim is on death's door. Stroke, pancreatic cancer, the works. He's acting up to maintain his control as he weakens so things will pass smoothly to his son.

There are rumors about his son, of course, but only that...rumors. Let's hold our breath another few months and see what happens when the old man dies. We could (emphasis on could) be dealing with a very different North Korea (for good or bad) very soon.
Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

Hvedhrungr
07/14/09

@92BuickLeSabre: It's the new wife, not the son, who's the real powerhouse. I'm not even sure power will pass down the family line now. She's been pulling the strings even before she married him, and since has consolidated her influence to the point where the military leaders check their agenda with her before talking to him.

Sounds a lot like a power behind the throne.
Reply

Hvedhrungr was starred Hvedhrungr was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@Hvedhrungr: That's a totally fascinating tidbit that I had not heard before. Where did you get that info?
Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

Autism
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
They need to stop making DDoS nonsense and get back to what they're really good at: making more VERY GOOD Korean Drama Series.
Reply

Autism was starred Autism was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@Autism: I don't know. There's been a bit of a drop off recently. I actually stopped watching completely about 3 months ago. Am I really missing anything?
Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

egoods
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
This is a touchy subject for me. Half of me hates the idea of going to war with another country. But the other half of me would love to see Kim Jong Il's personal water slide bombed. Plus how hard can it be? They're an impoverished country with a dictat... oh wait it can be really hard, totally spaced on that whole Iraq thing.
Reply

egoods was starred egoods was unstarred

KraZy007
07/14/09

@egoods:

Yeah, but in N. Korea's case, there's S. Korea right next door, with the same culture, same language, etc. We wouldn't have to play government if we did successfully remove the dictator. We could just let S.Korea take over, effectively uniting the two Koreas.
Reply

KraZy007 was starred KraZy007 was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@KraZy007: Actually everybody is nervous about this. What do you do with 23 Million underskilled, undereducated, more or less brainwashed, undernourished people?

China is completely freaked out that many of them, afraid of the South, will rush North. Russia, which shares a teeny-tiny border is even more insistent that no one crosses over. And the South, through allowing Samsung and others to develop some cooperative industrial programs in the North, is hoping for a slow, slow transition.

Plus, the North has a number of un-utilized natural resources. Who will own them? Who gets to use them?

If you can remember how dramatic it was trying to unify East and West Germany after the fall of the wall, multiply it by 10, 100, 1000?
Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

junyo
07/14/09

@92BuickLeSabre: Because the situation will magically get better if we wait even longer to address it. If there are 23 million people that'll have to be absorbed by someone, in a few years there will be 25, then 30. And at a certain point the dam bursts. The only question is if the Western world decides when and how, or kicks the can down the road and lets someone else have the decision imposed upon them. Or N. Korea discovers a cheap, abundant food source that they've somehow overlooked for the past 50 years. Even if you wait out the current dictator, and pin your hopes on the next, for anything possitive to happen he'd have to be suicidal enough to attempt to moderate the country, which basically entails admitting to 23 million+ people that your family has been mindfucking them for the last three generations into shitlaced dirt poor squalor, starvation, and the ever present scepter of annihilation thinks to our reindeer games. But here's some canned tuna from Belize, so we're cool, right?

Yes, it sucks. No, there aren't easy, neat solutions. So sometimes you just need to rip the bandage off. A quick, definitive messy, best of a list of bad alternatives solution now may well be better than waiting for a perfect solution.
Reply

junyo was starred junyo was unstarred

92BuickLeSabre
07/14/09

@junyo: Your logic is fine assuming that the world is static. But it isn't.

Reply

92BuickLeSabre was starred 92BuickLeSabre was unstarred

OtisCabeal
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
I say we set off an emp on the border but announce what we are doing an hour before hand. that way they dont have time to say they will retaliate if we do it also so that they know that they are not under a nuke attack. The power will shut of throughout huge sections of NC but no one will be harmed. That should destabilize them about as much as this attack did to us. and is a mesured response that will mess with them just as much as they have messed with us
Reply

OtisCabeal was starred OtisCabeal was unstarred

Geisrud
07/14/09

@OtisCabeal: Why do you gotta bring North Carolina into this? I mean, just because you're not a Tar Heels fan...
Reply

Geisrud was starred Geisrud was unstarred

SkiBumCU
07/14/09

@OtisCabeal: Setting off an EMP powerful enough to hit Pyongyang would utterly destroy Seoul... -1
Reply

SkiBumCU was starred SkiBumCU was unstarred

Voyou_Charmant
07/14/09

@Geisrud: I agree. Attacking North Carolina will have little to no effect on North Korea, unless there is something I'm missing. Maybe Alex Jones knows something; brb -- investigating!
Reply

Voyou_Charmant was starred Voyou_Charmant was unstarred

Killjoy
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
So he knows that he'll get nuked for nuking, but that a cyber-counterattack won't do much to his country. Clever girl...

The good thing is, now that we've killed Bin Laden and gathered up Saddam's nukes we can focus on Kim Jong Il. He's never going to know what hit him.
Reply

Killjoy was starred Killjoy was unstarred

Geisrud
07/14/09

@Killjoy: We killed Bin Laden? I must have missed that one.
Reply

Geisrud was starred Geisrud was unstarred

Killjoy
07/14/09

@Geisrud: But you didn't miss the fact that we found Saddam's WMDs, so that's alright.
Reply

Killjoy was starred Killjoy was unstarred

Lite: hates Illinois Nazis
07/14/09

In reply to North Korea Now Attacking US Government Sites, Sources Say
Eastern Europeans were hacking the US for years just after the "iron curtain" fell. It wasn't as if they had hugely powerful machines back then either.

It has more to do with how much time, curiosity, and tech ability you have. In this case creating a bot net from which to ddos people isn't that difficult these days.
Reply

PurpleMonkeyDishwasher:
07/14/09

In reply to The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We Are F*cked
Although I understand DDOS attacks can temporarily disable important website by flooding them with requests, I would hope that this is something that can be solved. It's not like people are actually hacking into computer systems and stealing confidential information. Can't they just make it so websites only allow a certain number of requests and never be allowed to overload? When the threshold of requests is met, additional requests can just get the message saying to come back at a later time.
Reply

Jesus Diaz
07/14/09

@Purple Monkey Dishwasher: You can quantify the damage that a DDoS attack will do. Denying a service is real, and affects real world people and assets. It may not be as bad as actually killing people with a missile, but it's an attack nonetheless.

And what you described is what happens now: Overloaded with requests, the server starts returning "come back later" messages to everyone, making impossible for actual users to use the service.
Reply

Jesus Diaz was starred Jesus Diaz was unstarred

Hardcore1
07/14/09

@Purple Monkey Dishwasher:

Or maybe they are? http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jO5PtkM_1FjwMZjh3LS74g26...
Reply

Hardcore1 was starred Hardcore1 was unstarred

PurpleMonkeyDishwasher:
07/14/09

@Jesus Diaz: Yeah good point, I hadn't thought about it that way. I guess the addresses they are targeting are very crucial to keep important services running.
Reply

Intelext
07/14/09

@Purple Monkey Dishwasher: DDOS attacks can simply be stopped by using an external firewall.
Reply

Intelext was starred Intelext was unstarred

PurpleMonkeyDishwasher:
07/14/09

@Hardcore1: Yeah, my comment was based on a lack of understanding of a DDoS attack. I was thinking they were targeting websites for brief periods of time so that people like you or I could not access them. Where it gets bad is when they target sites that are crucial to running a country's government and economy, I now see that could cause major damage (even to be down for a couple of hours).
Reply

Xeno
07/14/09

@Purple Monkey Dishwasher: To some extent this already happens in that a web server often has limits in place as to how much bandwidth to use for it's domains. The DDoS attacks actually go after the server and it basically must use all of it's resources to refuse all the connections.

The counter to DDos is to refuse connections to the IP's doing the attacking. Once you get enough of the attackers blocked then services can go online again.
Reply

Edited by Xeno at 07/14/09 10:31 AM Xeno was starred Xeno was unstarred

PurpleMonkeyDishwasher:
07/14/09

@Xeno: But isn't the problem that they are all bot computers with unique IP's and therefore you don't know which ones are legitimate and which ones should be blocked. If it was the same computer sending multiple requests it would probably be pretty easy to just block all IP's making more than a certain number of requests.
Reply

egoods
07/14/09

@Purple Monkey Dishwasher: There's typically a pattern involved. The best (only?) way to stop a DDoS attack is to figure out what makes the traffic from this botnet different from the normal traffic. As the botnets get more sophisticated it gets more and more difficult to differentiate.
Reply

egoods was starred egoods was unstarred

Gann
07/14/09

@Purple Monkey Dishwasher: You just described the 'Distributed' in 'Distributed Denial of Service'.
Reply

Gann was starred Gann was unstarred

Margatron
07/14/09

@Purple Monkey Dishwasher: I think some of your confusion of a DDoS attack has to do with the lack of information the government is providing as to what exactly was affected in the attack. Sure, they have secrets to keep and all, and we can post our textbook definitions, but the whole vague nature of the announcement is the source of confusion.

All they're saying is that we're vulnerable, not what was attacked.
Reply

Margatron was starred Margatron was unstarred

Jrsy Devil's Advocate®
07/08/09

In reply to North Korea Now Attacking US Government Sites, Sources Say
Was that one of the images for the Kim Jong 'shop contest?

If not, it should have been..
Reply

GitEmSteveDave_HatesFriday
07/08/09

In reply to North Korea Now Attacking US Government Sites, Sources Say
I feel so roan-rey. Hey guys, hack the South's Brue House, would you?
Reply

OMG Pizza Party!!1!
07/08/09

@SetDipSwitchesTo_GitEmSteveDav...: Hmm, spot me five dollars?
Reply

GitEmSteveDave_HatesFriday
07/08/09

@OMG Pizza Party!!1!: @ninjagin: You're bustin' my bawrs here!
Reply

d_r_e
07/08/09

In reply to North Korea Now Attacking US Government Sites, Sources Say
"South Korean hackers launched an offensive using denial of service attacks against the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, and Transportation Department's web sites, which were down at some points during July 4 and this week."

Shouldn't that be North Korean? Jesus, have you been hanging out with Adam and his vaporizer? I kid, I kid.
Reply

d_r_e was starred d_r_e was unstarred

Curves
07/08/09

In reply to North Korea Now Attacking US Government Sites, Sources Say
OMG, I cant UNSEE that you know. I am scarred for life.
Reply

Curves was starred Curves was unstarred

Kaiser-Machead
07/08/09

In reply to North Korea Now Attacking US Government Sites, Sources Say
I find his confidence in himself rather refreshing, if not grotesque and hilarious.
Reply

Kaiser-Machead was starred Kaiser-Machead was unstarred

Earlier discussions Other discussions Show all discussions Show featured discussions only Start a new discussion