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The Real Impact of the Estonian Cyberattack
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue May 29, 2007 10:41 AM
from the mad-world-it's-a-mad-world dept.
from the mad-world-it's-a-mad-world dept.
An anonymous reader writes "News.com offers up an interview with Arbor Networks' senior security researcher Jose Nazario. He takes stock of the denial-of-service attack against the Baltic nation of Estonia, and considers the somewhat disturbing wider implications from the event. 'You look around the globe, and there's basically no limit to the amount of skirmishes between well-connected countries that could get incredibly emotional for the population at large. In this case, it has disrupted the Estonian government's ability to work online, it has disrupted a lot of its resources and attention. In that respect, it's been effective. It hasn't brought the government to a crippling halt, but has essentially been effective as a protest tool. People will probably look at this and say, That works. I think we're going to continue to do this kind of thing. Depending on the target within the government, it could be very visible, or it could not be very visible.'"
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Russia Accused of Cyber-War Against Estonia 373 comments
earthlingpink writes about the ongoing DDoSing of Estonia. The Guardian is reporting that Russia stands accused of engaging in a three-week-long series of cyber-attacks. Government, banking, and media websites have been targeted. It is unclear whether the attacks are sanctioned or initiated by the Russian Government, but Estonian authorities believe that to be the case. NATO has sent security experts to Tallinn to help beef up defenses. The Estonian defense minister said, "At present, NATO does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action. This means that the provisions of... collective self-defense, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country... this matter needs to be resolved in the near future."
[+]
News: US Prepares for Eventual Cyberwar 223 comments
The New York Times is reporting on preparations in the works by the US government to prep for a 'cyberwar'. Precautionary measures are being taken to guard against concerted attacks by politically-minded (or well-paid) hackers looking to cause havoc. Though they outline scenarios where mass damage is the desired outcome (such as remotely opening a dam's gates to flood cities), most expect such conflicts to be more subtle. Parts of the internet, for example, may be unreachable or unreliable for certain countries. Regardless, the article suggests we've already seen our first low-level cyberwar in Estonia: "The cyberattacks in Estonia were apparently sparked by tensions over the country's plan to remove Soviet-era war memorials. Estonian officials initially blamed Russia for the attacks, suggesting that its state-run computer networks blocked online access to banks and government offices. The Kremlin denied the accusations. And Estonian officials ultimately accepted the idea that perhaps this attack was the work of tech-savvy activists, or 'hactivists,' who have been mounting similar attacks against just about everyone for several years."
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How insightful! (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, that pretty much sums up the possible outcomes.
Re:How insightful! (Score:4, Funny)
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Possible Outcomes (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Possible Outcomes (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Possible Outcomes (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:How insightful! (Score:5, Interesting)
Would this distributed DOS attack be possible without a vast army of compromised desktops being used as part of a botnet. Is it tecnnically possible to design against such attacks, or at least make it more difficult to compromise the desktops and route the rogue traffic. After all the Internet is supposed to be designed to be resistant to a nuclear attack. (I know Vint Cerf remembers it different)
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Multicast theories (Score:5, Interesting)
no reason to get overly complicated (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Multicast theories (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a thought from the 'stay in your happy place group' (TM)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean think about it, one of the things a party at war always tries to do is get the civilians of the opposite side reading "subversive" material. One of the first things we did with airplanes in war was pamphleting. We still attach pamphlets with aid drops. Would it be so strange to see the US send email to every Chinese address that looked like this [wikipedia.org]? How about a flood of anti-communist text messages? Doesn't seem very far fet
mod parent down (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure dude... So on, say, Linux, you'd have to exploit supposedly a buffer overflow to gain local access *then* you'd need to exploit a local root exploit to gain root privileges. Multiply this by the number of Linux distros out there and the number of different IM clients and suddenly your pet theory falls flat. Or maybe you were talking about rooting Vista boxes? Cancel or Allow?
You've posted links to this lame "infiltra
Backbone QOS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Backbone QOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Implementation Failure (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of companies have a root-and-branches approach to Internet connectivity, too, thinking that each site (or the whole corporate intranet) needs only one gateway to the outside. Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch the basket. For the family baked bean recipe confidentiality that's good, but for availability that's bad.
The "right" way to do it is to have multiple redundant shared trunks with neighbors. That word "shared" is scary to network administrators (or rather, to their pencil-pushing mentors). It means they'll have to carry outside traffic on their pipes (that's a metaphor, Senator), and that has risks: it costs money, and it has the potential to allow someone to see inside the network.
However, the rewards for sharing bandwidth are enormous: multiple ISPs mean allowing TCP/IP to do its job, routing traffic to avoid disasters like DOS attacks, hurricanes, and nuclear bombs. The ISPs and other bandwidth partners know they have an interest in helping to protect your network. The technical risks can be mitigated simply by routing and tunneling.
Is the above realistic? Nope. Not in a corporate environment, anyway. I'd be really surprised if anyone outside academia or pure ISP does shared trunking anymore.
But it can also happen at the leaf nodes: you and your neighbors share cable broadband and DSL connections, routing through wifi. That violates most subscriber agreements, but it's the way the protocols were designed to work. Your network should never be down.
Never.
Re:Implementation Failure (Score:4, Informative)
This is a DDoS attack. The first "D" stands for "Distributed." When you have thousands of remote machines located in different places sending traffic to your network, preventing an outage relies upon being able to figure out which traffic is legitimate and which is illegitimate, and then filter the illegitimate. Having more diverse pipes does not really make a huge difference. Either legitimate and illegitimate traffic can come in over a pipe or they can't. If it can, the attack is blocking things. If it can't you just DoS'd yourself.
The real trick here is the availability of clean or protected access from ISPs with the capability of detecting illegitimate traffic and filtering it, without stopping legitimate traffic. Many ISPs have this capability to one degree or another and a few have formally brought it to market as a differentiator for their service. I'm guessing the big ISPs in Estonia might be a bit behind in that regard, and are thus working with more capable peers to try and filter the attack further away in the cloud.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Estonia: population 1,324,333 (less than 1,5 mio.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia [wikipedia.org]
I would like to see some municipalities in USA of the size of Estonia to withstanding such cyber-attack.
Do you realize that the number of adult inhabitants in Estonia is less than a number of employees at the biggest employer of USA? (http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2 003-11-10-walmart_x.htm)
Estonia is like New Hampshire or Maine or Idaho population wise. And than cyber-attacks are
Government-orchestrated and encouraged (Score:5, Interesting)
Decent well-connected countries would not engage in this sort of things. Russia — busily turning itself back into an Evil Empire — denies "officially" organizing the attacks...
Whether it did officialy organize them, or not is irrelevant — so many things in the country happen unofficially (including the unofficial salaries — in dollars — paid to top government bureaucrats to keep them from leaving for the private sector), that the government's claims may even be nominally truthful this time.
What is important is the government's official reaction. For example, a Russian health official is on record concerning the health hazards of the Estonian sprats. Those who follow the region would recognize the tactics already applied against Georgia's major exports. Georgia's most excellent wines are now called "alcohol-containing liquids" in Russia and their import is banned "on health grounds".
Sprats are safe for now — unlike Georgia, Estonia is an EU (and NATO) member. But Russia — in sore need of something glorious in its sorry past (we liberated Estonia, not reconquered it, you see) — is still enraged. In a decent country such rage wouldn't be enough to break law and order, but Russia is another story. There is no doubt, the cyber-attacks against Estonia used Russian governmental resources, including hardware and human ones — these will most certainly not be prosecuted.
Government-orchestrated? Please (Score:3, Insightful)
Estonia (and some mass media) simply find it useful to blame everything on Russian government now. Russian companies refuse to buy their products because customers stopp
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember an incident with US spy plane and Chinese fighter jet [wikipedia.org] ?
It resulted into a hacking contest [bbc.co.uk] between US and China without any "official" guidance.
In case of Estonia an asshole named Anders (Estonian leader - my sincerest apologies to all other assholes for the comparison) referred to buried WWII veterans as "marauders" on public TV, before trying to move the statue. Quite obviously, people got pissed off. Some teenage
that's the biggest problem with this warfare (Score:4, Insightful)
however, things are too nebulous on the web. no accountability. the russians that attacked estonia can not be found by russia and suppressed easily, because no one knows who they are. well, obviously there can be some intelligent detective work done (who purchased the botnets for rent, for example), but my point is, any group of teenage assholes can do this sort of thing, from any botnet in the world, and so it renders obvious lines of accountability all nebulous and unresolved
and so it is sort of like terrorism, in that there is no one easy and big to blame. no state or governmental entity. it's vague and undefined. and in the end, therefore, these sorts of wars/ crimes are really the defining characteristic of conflicts in the 21st century. for the most part, wars of nation against nation and obvious straightforward battlefields seem to be a dead era. today's conflicts are all about shadowy organizations ready to do nefarious things in the name of nebulous agendas, and finding and stopping who or what or how is simply a task without any clear goals or clear yardsticks of progress
some people would use this fact to say that therefore there is no war or conflict at all, that say, the "war on terrorism" isn't real. no, wrong. the threat is still very real. something like 9/11 is not a phantasm of a neocon's imagination
it's just that the enemy is opaque and made of fog. but because the enemy is hard to pin down, does not mean there isn't nefarious intent out there you need to protect yourself from. yes, that vagueness can be used to amp up fear and provoke overreaction. but, in a way, doing nothing is still worse than overreaction (unless overreaction consists of taking the war to targets that should not be targets)
we live in a difficult era folks. do nothing, you're damned. do something, you can be damned worse. you need to be clever and constant and precise in your efforts, and you'll still screw up and get blowback anyways, and you must still soldier on nonplussed nonetheless, against cyberenemies, against terrorism, with no real yardstick of progress, with no real verification of success or failure, with nothing but the fog for miles and for years, and then a plane in a skyscraper, or a bomb in a disco, or a flood of emails, or a DoS for seemingly no rhyme or reason... and then gone again like a fart in the wind, until the next mass murder. it's psychologically debilitating, and yet constitution and fortitude are your best character qualities needed in order to beat back these shadowy enemies
Re:that's the biggest problem with this warfare (Score:4, Interesting)
a) Focus inwardly, trying to be on the smallest possible number of 4GW organization target lists. The less people hate you, the better you are;
b) Focus locally, building your defensive strategy on fast deployed forces stationed where they act and, if possible, made up of residents of the area, as well as lowering the dependency each area has on resources deployed from too much away. The more centralized and distant and your military force is, the weaker you are. The more dependent you are on goods and services coming from other cities, states and countries, the weaker you are. (Note that this isn't the same as neglecting a strong and big army. It's more of the way said army is built.)
USA fails on both aspects. It fails "a" miserably by making its presence felt all over the world, thus entering the list of almost everyone. And it fails "b" by encouraging a false sense of security on its population, when it should be making local militias and weapon usage proficiency as much widespread as possible, as well as by having an absolute, complete, all-embracing dependency on foreign natural resources, goods, services and work.
On a 4GW world, this is a recipe for disaster.
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well yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
Botnet? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Russia - cybercrime capital of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the site [arbor.net] mentioned in the article, Russia comes in at #17 in the attacks by country breakdown at the bottom of the page. It covers scanning, fingerprinted attacks, and DDoS attacks (no spam). The number 1 country is the good 'ole USA. We're #1! We're #1!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, because of stuff like this, we need to be prepared to use a variation of the old Internet Death Sentence. Hostile nations could be removed from the routing tables (i.e. we don't route traffic to or from them). With international cooperation attacks like this *could* be stopped dead in their tracks, with the side benefit that the offending nation would have a high priority desire to clean up the attacks.
I don't think that stopping routing from a country would make much practical difference. There are millions of vulnerable and already compromised Windows boxes scattered across the world. You can rent time on them from a Web interface. A big part of the usefulness of DDoS attacks is it is easy to make it impossible to attach them to an individual or country since the actual traffic comes from all countries. Most of the compromised machines known to be attacking as part of a botnet are within the US.