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BlueSecurity Fall-Out Reveals Larger Problem
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu May 18, 2006 07:14 PM
from the continuing-sagas dept.
from the continuing-sagas dept.
mdrebelx writes "For anyone following the BlueSecurity story, sadly the anti-spam crusader has raised the white flag. Brian Krebs with the Washington Post is reporting that after BlueSecurity's announcement, Prolexic and UltraDNS, which were both linked with BlueSecurity through business relations came under a DNS amplification attack that brought down thousands of sites.
While much of the focus about the BlueSecurity story has been centered on the question of what can be done about spam, I think a bigger question has been raised - is the Internet really that fragile? What has been going on is essentially cyber-terrorism and from what has been reported so far the terrorist clearly have the upper hand."
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interesting question about fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been other outages, major, which have had significant impact. It's a good question: is the internet that fragile?
In many ways it probably is. At the same time, the infrastructure seems resilient enough. The world so far hasn't laced up life-and-death critical systems to the internet such that a failure could cause loss of life. Well, that is, if you don't include:
Oh, wait, I guess people have started doing that.
What mechanisms exist for more than resiliency, i.e., instant self-healing? Could terrorists with a little knowledge and a few well-placed EMP generators disable major segments of the internet?
Unlike phones and the phone networks which were built with lots of oversight and regulation (Universal Service was a big driver for this (aside: now that everything is profit driven, don't expect phone service at that farm house at the end of that long country road anymore... noone HAS to provide it)), I'm not aware of what safeguards back up the internet. In my entire lifetime, I've not one time experienced a phone outage, not once! Power outages, etc., the phone companies have backups to backups to ensure service (though there is the occasional and hard to manage for ditch digging incident).
While large pieces of the internet are built upon the phone companies' infrastructure, other pieces aren't, and there are significant additional layers of complexity not in the phone companies' purview (switches, routers, coax cable from cable companies).
That question, "is the internet that fragile?", is probably the biggest reason I've never opted to switch my phone service to VOIP yet. I'd hate to be the one (tiny chance, I know) who needs to make that one 911 call and not be able to do so because the internet is unavailable (which happens occasionally here, which is also too often).
Interesting how things change (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also interesting how questions change. We question: Is the internet really that fragile?
What happened to the baser question: Do we really depend so much on the internet?
Of course, now that we do, maybe we should look into making the internet even more resilient than the original creators envisioned. After all, it was made to endure nuclear war, but a few scriptkiddies can still take down any site with a little DDOSing and DNS-tweaks..
Just always remember where we came from.
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Re:interesting question about fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:interesting question about fragile (Score:5, Informative)
Traditionally yes, this might be "economic terrorism"(tm) according to the Dept. of Defense terroism is "the unlawful use of -- or threatened use of -- force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives." This would seem to apply here.
Parent
Re:interesting question about fragile (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes this was cyberterrorism (Score:4, Funny)
> clearly have the upper hand.
Yup, and I'd have loved to have seen the US gov use this as a perfect 'live fire' exercise. After all, if they can't stop a few punk spammers how can we have any confidence they could stop a determined attack by the usual terrorist suspects?
Perfect opportunity to test all the phases of response, from tracking the responsible parties all the way to eliminating them. Ok, in this case a SEAL team would probably have to be tasked to capture em instead of just dropping a few bombs on their sorry asses. Or if, as I suspect, the ringleaders are in the US or other western representive nations, just have em all arrested.
weakest link (Score:5, Insightful)
None of those attacks (DOS) could have been done without the use of thousands of zombie machines.
I guess the only way of stoping the attakers is by taking their weapons (zombies) from them and thats left as an excersise for the survivors.
Maybe they pay more for a tiered solution.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe they pay more for a tiered solution.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Fragile Internet? No... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the Internet is robust and redundant. What is fragile are the tens of thousands of pwn3d Windows PC's that are being used without their owners' knowledge to perpetrate these massive DDOS attacks. If I were a lawyer for Blue Security, Yahoo, or anyone else who has been hit recently, I would be seriously looking in to the merits of a lawsuit against MS for gross negligence or something similar.
Re:Fragile Internet? No... (Score:5, Interesting)
More like "hundreds of thousands".
My spam traps have been hit by over 1.5 million unique IPs this year alone,
with an additional 30,000 never before seen IPs every day.
I estimate there are currently 3-4 million compromised machines world wide.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Parent
Be wary with the label "terrorism" (Score:4, Insightful)
While I do agree that this definitly shows the threat spammers really pose to the internet, I fear at least as much handing government the card blanche to monitoring all and any internet traffic for the sake of "saving us from spam".
No, I'm aware that this won't help a single bit in an attempt to quench spam. But did any anti-terror activity actually work against the alleged threat?
So bring this problem to the attention of your senators, your governors, your congressmen or whoever has some power in your country. This is a very, very serious problem, the criminals are getting the upper hand in this turf, and the internet is a resource I don't want to see depending on the goodwill of the spam mafia.
But for all that we hold dear, avoid the word terrorism. Legislators have been using that word before as the excuse for every kind of restrictive laws that did JACK to solve the problem and only created more. Try to find a word that makes them actually realize the problem and realize that this problem is serious. Not only to the worthless humans using it, but also to precious commerce.
Not fragile, just vulnerable (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the Internet isn't that fragile. It's suprisingly robust, in fact. About the only thing that can really do any significant damage is sheer volume, enough traffic from enough distinct sources to overwhelm the target server or swamp it's network connections. No matter what, anything is always going to be vulnerable to that. You can only have finite bandwidth and server horsepower, and if an opponent's willing and able to throw enough resources at you he can simply overwhelm you. It's often referred to as "the Slashdot effect".
The only thing that's happened is that, because of the inherent insecurity of Windows machines and the increasing number of them with broadband connections, the bad guys now have access to orders of magnitude more bandwidth and horsepower than any single server can have. In military terms it's like facing an enemy who outnumbers you by ten thousand to one. Distributing your DNS won't help, redundant pipes won't help, distributing your servers won't help, if you can deal with 99% of his assault he's still got a hundred times what you can absorb left.
The only thing that can help is cutting off the supply of ownable machines the bad guys can take over and use in their attacks. If they're limited to their own machines they can't do much harm.
Dear Homeland Security (Score:4, Funny)
This is terrorism. Everyone with a trojaned Microsoft box is aiding and abetting.
Thank you, Linus and Steve.
DON'T WORRY GUYS! (Score:5, Funny)
The internet is not fragile, its abused (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is the thousands of hacked PCs that are used in these attacks. The internet is working exactly the way it was designed and the bot nets take advantage of bottlenecks in the system.
What is being done to take out these bot nets? I've perused a few of these bot squads on IRC and while there are many zombied Windows machines there are also many *nix boxes which succumbed to the brute force ssh password attacks because they had user accounts with stupid passwords.
Aside from locating and neutralizing the individual boxes in the squads shouldn't we be creating and deploying self immunizing tools in our infrastructure that detects these boxes and quarantines them?
Shouldn't we also be holding people accountable for having vulnerable boxes connected to the net? Perhaps a bandwidth restriction will help for repeat offenders.
Just to give you an idea... (Score:5, Informative)
warning: botnet operators 0wn the interweb! (Score:5, Informative)
I hope someone does something to deal with the botnet threats. Being able to suck multiple gigabits of bandwidth means 'they' can kill any small to medium sized internet operation if they want to via a range of attacks from the simple to the rather sophisticated.
Tier1 ISPs usually don't care other than possibly to try and filter all your traffic to prevent their other customers from suffering.
Some medium/larger sized companies use services like Akamai siteshield that are capable of sustaining a reasonable DDOS-ing but the botnet operators will eventually realise that the attacks are not just about knocking a site offline. Akamai will charge you for that traffic which will send the companies bankrupt anyway (and possibly quicker than going offline). In fact i was wondering how on earth bluesecurity were going to pay their bandwidth bill.
The defences we have against such attacks are pathetic. I was amused in an episode of 24 when they came under an online attack from terrorists and their new "CISCO FIREWALL" protects them, i mean seriously the firewalls are the least of your problems these days. If you come under attack from one of these serious russian dudes - you'd be looking at trying to filter the traffic well before it reaches the firewalls since your line and network would be saturated.
Re:Yes, the internet is that fragile (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yes, the internet is that fragile (Score:4, Informative)
Any tool improperly used can possibly cause problems.
This a proper way to secure a Bind nameserver.
An example would be in your bind named.conf adding an acl section and adding to section options.
acl "trusted_queries" { 127.0.0.1; 192.168.1.0/24; some.ip.network.outthere/8; };
acl "trusted_recursion" { 127.0.0.1; 192.168.1.0/24; some.ip.network.outthere/8; };
options {
allow-query ( "trusted_queries" };
allow-recursion { "trusted_recursion" };
version "no version";
};
zone "some.zone.com" IN {
type master;
file "pri/some.zone.com.zone";
allow-query { any; };
};
Parent
Re:Terrorism too strong a word (Score:5, Insightful)
The use of force (taking down servers) by a group (spammers) against people/property (blue & others) with the intention of intimidating socieities (blues users) for ideological (financial too) reasons.
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Re:motivation (Score:5, Funny)
Emperor Palpatine, is that you?
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Re:motivation (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know where you got the idea that NSA's activities have done anything to "impose structure and law" on the Internet.
If anything, the NSA has been actively participating in the chaos by going ahead and doing their own thing with no regard to the law.
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Re:motivation (Score:5, Insightful)
I would further submit that America was far less chaotic in the good old days when big government wasn't so big, wasn't so invasive and tended to leave its citizens alone. It isn't necessary to have a government that restricts and monitors its citizens to the degree that ours is doing for the purpose of achieving a stable society. In fact, the imposition of excessive control, coupled with erratic enforcement, creates instability! This is variously called "political unrest" or "social protest" or, when carried to the logical extreme, "rebellion". Furthermore, it is the kind of thing Americans do when they're pushed too far. At least, I hope it's still the kind of thing we do. It's about the only hope we have left. The way things are in D.C. nowadays, it's pretty obvious that while the lights are still on there's nobody home.
The Wild West aspect of the Internet, which seems to disturb you to some degree, is precisely what makes the Internet the greatest advance since the invention of fire, the wheel and air conditioning! The economic, scientific and cultural benefits of the Internet, as it is today, far far outweigh the dark side. Reducing the Internet experienced by ordinary people to a bland, "civilized" mix of email and heavily-filtered browsing would take away the power, freedom and utility so many people have come to expect and enjoy. It would also largely eliminate innovation and the development of new technologies, as no-one would be allowed to do anything not approved by the powers-that-be. Huh
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reincarnation? (Score:5, Informative)
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