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Chris Jacob
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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
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.
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?
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?
@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.
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.
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.
08/07/09
They should have just unfollowed.
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
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.
08/07/09
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.
08/07/09
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.
08/07/09
08/07/09
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.
08/07/09
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.
08/07/09
08/06/09
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?
08/06/09
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?
08/06/09
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08/07/09
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08/07/09
07/14/09
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.
07/08/09
If not, it should have been..
07/08/09
07/08/09
07/08/09