DDoS Extortion Attempts On the Rise 277
John Flabasha writes "There's an excellent article that originated on the LA Times and was syndicated to Yahoo News about DDoS attacks on online gaming and one of the solutions out there. Since when did ISP null routes go out of style?" We've run a number of previous stories about DoS blackmail attempts, like this one or this one.
Re:Null routes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Null routes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Worldpay and Paypal, that hurt bad (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the reason why we cant get world peace. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like he learned a lot while in IRC... (Score:2, Insightful)
How is it a protection racket?
Comparing a security company which helps defend against DDOS attacks to the DDOS attackers themselves is like comparing a security guard whom you hire to guard your business to the local gang who shake you down for "fire insurance".
Yes, both are getting paid to prevent harm to your livelihood. But the DDOS attackers and the gang are the ones threatning that livelihood in the first place. There is absolutely no moral equivalence here.
Re:IP Spoof Filtering... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Null routes? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Worldpay and Paypal, that hurt bad (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Null routes? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the perspective of the host going down... no.
Re:Why not just block the method of communication? (Score:5, Insightful)
To attack IRC servers just because thats the place where the bots go, is assanine and illegal. Some servers have 5000+ users on them, and the people who own/run those servers have enough problems as it is dealing with attacks from packet monkeys.
How would you like it if I DDoS'd your server because one of your users sent out spam? You'd probably be screaming bloody murder to the FBI about it.
Unless you are willing to allow other people to do the same things you want do to them at the exact same levels, don't even suggest that attacks are a way of dealing with a problem.
Re:Easy Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
It's kind of ironic... (Score:3, Insightful)
The debate touches on more subjects than we could possibly cover here, but experts are claiming that SCO could have taken countless preventative measures to stop the attack affecting their services.
(see here [itvibe.com])
Groklaw had a bunch of "experts" claiming it was easily stopped, as well, and suggested it was faked by SCO.
The truth is, as people here have pointed out, that it really doesn't matter what preventative action you take; if your pipe is full, your pipe is full, even if you drop all the packets when they hit your routers.
You can't easily beat a bandwidth saturating attack.
-Dan
Re:Null routes? (Score:3, Insightful)
So yes, the 40 byte SYN packet consumes bandwidth coming in. But you don't expend bandwidth or cpu time otherwise [e.g. no ACK/SYN going the otherway]
Although that raises an interesting question. Who should pay for the bandwidth coming in? Just like who should pay for SMS? I didn't choose to have a SMS plan [well ok by signing up I did, but they don't have non-SMS plans]. So if some ass decides to SMS-bomb my cell why should I pay for it when my cell company didn't protect me?
So if you firewall some jackass with a fat-pipe who decides to connect flood you and you do your part by not opening the connections who should pay for it?
I think this is a good way to transfer some responsibilities back to the ISPs [in particular the originating ISP, something fishy about the same or similar HTTP request occuring 1000s of times a minute from a DSL...] and ultimately the user. Just like how spam should [ideally] be handled....
Oh yeah...
Tom