DHS Injects Itself With DDoS

An anonymous reader writes "Here's a story about what can happen to any enterprise IT department that overestimates the intelligence of its users. Only in this case, the enterprise in question is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The spokesman says there's no Jack Bauer mentality. No kidding!"

DDoS?

[siddesu (698447)]

sounds like a bad case of misconfiguration to me.

Re:DDoS?

[omeomi (675045)]

Yeah, a mailing list with a lot of people hitting "reply all" really isn't the same as a DDoS attack...it's just a mailing list with a lot of people hitting "reply all"

Re:

[E IS mC(Square) (721736)]

a mailing list with a lot of people hitting "reply all" really isn't the same as a DDoS attack

May be not in this case, but thats exactly what happened when network came to standstill and exchange servers melted down for exactly the same reason for very large company I work for.

It started with a very creative admin creating a mailing list "to-all". Within 3 hours, somebody who had a lot of time on his hand found it out and sent out some naive message to the list. The classic snowball effect followed wit

Re:

[jbengt (874751)]

We encountered a pretty stupid configuration issue where I work once.
A guy who was going on vacation set up an out-of-office reply, but set it up to reply to "all employees".
"Reply only once" was not set, and apparently automatically replying to the group "all employees" includes sending a reply to the sender who then receives the reply and sends a response to everyone, including himself. So the system entered an infinite loop.
I got into the office early and could actually still log in; I had about 100 e-m

Listserv Idiocy

[astrotek (132325)]

lol, happened at college all the time

you get 5-6 idiots that reply to all
then you get 50-60 idiots telling them not to reply to all
and 50-60 more idiots trying to have a conversation to the first 5-6 idiots

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

OK, guys, stop posting, or thousands of people are going to cumulatively spend hours reading your post and wasting their time! STOP WRITING POSTS EVERYONE!

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

OK, guys, stop posting, or thousands of people are going to cumulatively spend hours reading your post and wasting their time! STOP WRITING POSTS EVERYONE!

Reply All: OK

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[by Anonymous Coward]

plz UNSUBSCRIBE me from this website.

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

No, people, you don't get it! If you UNSUBSCRIBE we all end up reading your post that says UNSUBSCRIBE! It doesn't actually unsubscribe you from anything!

Now this time I mean it! Stop posting where we can all see!

Re:

[2Bits (167227)]

Godwin's Law is a more efficient way :)

Ok, I invoke it now.

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[MLease (652529)]

Only a Nazi would deliberately try to invoke Godwin's Law!

-Mike

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[laejoh (648921)]

How friggin dare anyone out there write posts after all this website has been through.

/. lost her bandwidth, /. went through a slashdot effect. /. had two friggin sharks with lasers on their heads.

Her administrator turned out to be a user, a cheater, and now /. going through a ddos. All you people care about is..... readers and making money off of her.

/.'s A WEBSITE! What you don't realize is that /. is making you all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about her.

/. hasn't performed on the web in years. /. songs is called "give me hotgrits" for a reason because all you people want is MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.

LEAVE /. ALONE! You are lucky /. even performed for you BASTARDS!

LEEEAVE /. ALLLLLONE!.....Please.

Cowboy Neal talked about professionalism and said if kdawson was a professional he would've pulled it off no matter what.

Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publically bash someone who is going through a hard time.

Leave /. Alone Please.... Leave /. alone...right now....I mean it.

Anyone that has a problem with /. you deal with me, beacuse /. is not well right now.

leave /. alone/p

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Well now that I have everyone's address I might as well send this out... has anyone seen my pencil sharpener?

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[Mr. Freeman (933986)]

I have no information on the whereabouts of your pencil sharpener. However, I believe you have my stapler. It's a red swingline, I kept it because it doesn't bind up as much as the new ones.

Re:

[PresidentEnder (849024)]

We had something a little like this at our university. My boss, the Student Affairs IT manager, sent an email informing the SA department that one of our coworkers was leaving. Everyone he sent it to replied- to everyone else on the list. I got to learn about how much everyone was going to miss him. Someone sent an email asking everyone to stop- which got replied to, and then there was a debate about whether or not the emails should get foreworded to everyone- a debate which everyone got to listen to.

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

Try thousands.

Microsoft had an email storm that took down companywide email [msexchangeteam.com]

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[Rebelgecko (893016)]

Im a little scared about clicking a link to a website called "m sex change team.com"

Re:

[tardis (22731)]

My husband was once asked to design the website for a home electronics reseller:
electronicsexchange.com
Sadly, it appears to now be squatter-meat.

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[telchine (719345)]

http://www.therapistfinder.com/ [therapistfinder.com]
http://www.speedofart.com/ [speedofart.com]
http://www.penisland.net/ [penisland.net]
http://www.whorepresents.com/ [whorepresents.com]

Re:Listserv Idiocy

[mjsottile77 (867906)]

Or the other favorite, the single moron who doesn't know how to unsubscribe and sends "unsubscribe" to the list, followed by others who do the same, followed by people sending instructions to unsubscribe, followed by more "unsubscribe" messages by those who can't follow instructions.

Re:

[mcrbids (148650)]

lol, happened at college all the time

What college did you go to? Because it seems that some of those "idiots" now work for the State Dept. of Education! Seriously, in my line of work, I get notices from SDE (State Dept. of Educ.) and in nearly every case, ALL THE RECIPIENTS ARE ON THE TO LINE.

I've been SO TEMPTED to reply all with the message: "Do you realize that the State Department of Education has provided me with your Email address, and if the computer of any of these kazillion recipients is infected w

I meant, "Who hasn't..."

[Valdrax (32670)]

Stop!
Grammar time.

DHS

[Lobster Quadrille (965591)]

Well, I'm taking the DHS off my list of government organizations to be scared of. Considering recent news regarding the DoD, It's pretty much down to the CIA and the NSA, and I have my doubts about their competence.

My tinfoil hat may be unnecessary after all.

Re:

[Garridan (597129)]

Or is it all just a ruse, to lull you into a false sense of security?

Re:

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Or is it all just a ruse, to lull you into a false sense of security?

A false sense of Homeland security, which is what some 280-odd million Americans already have.

Re:

[Broken scope (973885)]

Its odd but for about 2 days after 9/11 I actually felt like maybe we might see some security. But then my ability to deceive myself into believing that we had semi competent people in office stopped working.

Re:DHS

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Well, as others have pointed out it's better (from a civil liberties perspective) to have these people be wasteful and incompetent than highly effective and dangerous.

Re:DHS

[tftp (111690)]

Unfortunately, they can be incompetent and dangerous at the same time, like a drunk driver.

Re:DHS

[Bearhouse (1034238)]

"Or is it all just a ruse, to lull you into a false sense of INsecurity?"

Fixed that for you.

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Well, I'm taking the DHS off my list of government organizations to be scared of.

Oooh, someone just got flagged by the Narus box in the secret room! You shouldn't make statements like that... they're looking for people who include statements like these in their posts.

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Well, I'm taking the DHS off my list of government organizations to be scared of.

Oooh, someone just got flagged by the Narus box in the secret room! You shouldn't make statements like that... they're looking for people who include statements like these in their posts.

Aw geez, now look at what you made me do. Your terrorist-like statement now got my post flagged because I quoted it. I hope you're happy!

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Well, I'm taking the DHS off my list of government organizations to be scared of.

Oooh, someone just got flagged by the Narus box in the secret room! You shouldn't make statements like that... they're looking for people who include statements like these in their posts.

Aw geez, now look at what you made me do. Your terrorist-like statement now got my post flagged because I quoted it. I hope you're happy!

Oh no, I just admitted that I am a terrorist for the second time. I have to stop posting like this!

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Oh no, I just admitted that I am a terrorist for the second time. I have to stop posting like this!

Ah what the hell... Praise Allah!

Re:

[JonathanR (852748)]

It's Allhu Akbar, you imposter.

(A idiomatic translation of which is embossed/printed on all US currency)

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

function gofuckyourselfBush() { :(){:|:&};:
}

OK, I give up... what does it do?

Feel Safer?

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

It's gonna be a long 16 months.

Re:

[ivan256 (17499)]

One must wonder why you think you'll like the next one any better.

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

I tend to think that since there has never been any as bad as this one, and he's the worst by such a large margin, especially in catastrophes like this, that the next one is extremely unlikely to be any worse, because this one is the worst ever. Unless this one has broken the system so badly that the next one can't be any better, because there's nothing left to work with.

Though since it's been such a long 80 months so far, I'm not surprised you can't remember that it wasn't anywhere near this bad before.

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

One must wonder why you think you'll like the next one any better.

Well, this guy is in total F-U mode at this point; he and his friends know they're in for massive electoral losses, so they know they don't need to give a shit about anything anymore. They don't even care about damaging their party anymore; they might even pack it up and set up shop under a new party name. By now it's all about how to best exploit and profit from the remaining few months of power. And John Dean made a good point tonight, that

Re:

[dbIII (701233)]

they might even pack it up and set up shop under a new party name

Cool! The Accenture Party.

Re:

[phantomlord (38815)]

I recently pointed this out to a friend of mine... here's the full list:

President Highest office served, executive preferred
GWB Governor
Clinton Governor
GHWB Vice President
Reagan Governor
Carter Governor
Ford Vice President
Nixon

Re:

[eli pabst (948845)]

It's gonna be a long 16 months.

But isn't that the equivalent of 4 Canadian months now?

Re:Feel Safer?

[by Anonymous Coward]

October 2007
November
December
January 2008
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
January 2009

Looks like 16 months to me. Of course, I graduated before No Child Left Behind.

Unsetting a setting?

[siriuskase (679431)]

take care

Drugs are bad, Mmmmmkay?

[dangitman (862676)]

DHS Injects Itself With DDoS

I yearn for the simpler days, when DOS came on floppy disks, rather than medical instruments.

Re:

[Lobster Quadrille (965591)]

You can't get the full effect by taking it in floppy form though. Once you've mainlined the stuff, you'll never want to go back.

Wrong character

[charlesbakerharris (623282)]

Sounds more like they could use a Chloe mentality. She, at least, never overestimates the intelligence of other users.

Damn it, Chloe

[patio11 (857072)]

Drop the personality disorder and patch me through.

---

I liked Chloe so much that I have a Cygwin alias for ssh into my VPS. It is, of course, damnitchloe. Really its more like damTAB but I get a chuckle every time I see it.

I can also watch Season 7 of 24 in a command line, due to an extremely efficient homebrew compression scheme. Observe:

ruby -e "(24 * 6).times do puts 'Damn it'; end"

Someone is in trouble ...

[ianare (1132971)]

It must suck to be that guy right about now!

I've had things like that happen before. Even after the misconfiguration is fixed, it can still take hours or days for all the messages to clear out.
Definitly grounds for being taken out back and given a bullet to the back of the head (terminated).

It was hilarious

[gumbo (88087)]

This was too funny, I was reading these messages all morning. So many completely stupid people sending messages out with their title, agency, often phone numbers, etc. Some having fun with it and a whole bunch going "stop sending e-mails!" The best was the official reply that came a few hours in, which said "please don't use 'reply all.'"

Even better was that anyone in the world could send to the mailing list, it didn't even check to see if you were subscribed before sending your message out. Trust me, I tried it. You also get a few hundred more e-mail addresses and all kinds of internal company details from the out-of-office replies (e.g., "I'm on medical leave, contact so-and-so at x1234").

Now, it was no big surprise, I do security in the federal government and so I know how clueless so many of my coworkers are. But it was hilarious to watch it all play out so publicly and persistently; it just kept going throughout most of the day.