WikiLeaks Back Online After Massive DDoS Attack 56
Trailrunner7 writes "Controversial document-sharing site WikiLeaks was back online Monday evening after sustaining a week-long distributed denial-of-service attack. The organization apparently received some extra capacity and assistance from Web performance and security firm Cloudfare to counter the 10 gigabits per second of bogus traffic that overwhelmed servers for numerous WikiLeaks domains and several supporters' sites. Targets included WikiLeaks' news aggregation site and its donations infrastructure, which it calls the Fund for Network Neutrality. A few days ago the organization posted a statement describing what it surmised was a DNS amplification attack. 'Broadly speaking, this attack makes use of open DNS servers where attackers send a small request to, the fast DNS servers then amplify the request, the request has now increased somewhat in size and is sent to the server of wikileaks-press.org. If an attacker then exploits hundreds of thousands of open DNS resolvers and sends millions of requests to each of them, the attack becomes quite powerful. We only have a small uplink to our server, the size of all these requests was 100,000 times the size of our uplink.'"
Speak truth to power, get shitstorm in return (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how everyone says they like the truth, openness, honesty, free speech--all that shit. Well, until someone dares actually exercise any of that stuff when it exposes THEM, of course. Then it's GODDAMN WAR!!
It kind of reminds me of the old crack my union friend used to make back in the day: "Ronald Reagan loves labor unions, as long as they're in Poland."
Re:Speak truth to power, get shitstorm in return (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, troop movement and positions
... were never exposed by Wikileaks, contrary to the squawking of Faux News' talking heads. Also notable, 'exposing troop movements and positions' wouldn't be an issue if our government didn't insist on sending them all over the world for some imperialistic bullshit.Ultimately, the responsibility for putting troops in harms way lies with the armchair generals in D.C., not Wikileaks.
Although I do agree that evil should be exposed, good should not always be exposed.
"Good" has nothing to hide, or at least, so says every cop who has ever wanted to search my property.
Re:Speak truth to power, get shitstorm in return (Score:4, Insightful)
So since you seem to be implying that the US and/or the West was behind a DDoS — because that's how the US rolls in the cyber realm: DDoSing targets [insert rolling eyes emoticon here] — I think you should turn your attention to this:
http://wikileaks.org/syria-files/ [wikileaks.org]
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Social Media Becoming Online Battlefield in Syria - Mashable
Social media is often credited with helping spread the Arab Spring, as activists shared messages of discontent and organized protests using Facebook and Twitter. More than a year after the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, it has become a megaphone for propaganda from both sides of the struggle in conflict-ridden Syria.
http://mashable.com/2012/08/09/social-media-syria/ [mashable.com]
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Disinformation flies in Syria's growing cyber war - Reuters
On Sunday, it was a hijacked Reuters Twitter feed trying to create the impression of a rebel collapse in Aleppo. On Monday, it was another account purporting to be a Russian diplomat announcing the death in Damascus of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/07/us-syria-crisis-hacking-idUSBRE8760GI20120807 [reuters.com]
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Reuters Twitter account hijacked, fake tweets sent - CNET
The hack of news agency's tech feed comes two days after its Web site was breached and defaced with a phony pro-Syrian government story.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57486971-93/reuters-twitter-account-hijacked-fake-tweets-sent/ [cnet.com]
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Reuters hacked, phony Syria stories posted - CNET
Bogus posts reported on setbacks suffered by rebel Free Syrian Army fighting Assad regime.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57486463-83/reuters-hacked-phony-syria-stories-posted/ [cnet.com]
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Nah, it's easier to live in the topsy-turvy bizarro land where the US is what's wrong with the world.
Re:"Massive" DDoS attack (Score:4, Insightful)
How about childish, old fashioned, pointless?
I mean seriously, even if you manage to "kill" a large entity on the internet with a DDoS, all you do is give them more publicity and a few hours of people going "What? Where did it go? Oh, I'll check again to see if it works later." Shut a site down for days, keep it troubled for weeks, and you've expended great amounts of resources at.... giving them more publicity. If you've caused them any pain it's miniscule, they've regrouped, patched a few systems, installed a couple of load balancers, whatever it is they do... and then they are back. And the attack is over.
It always ends.
The only entity that a DDoS could be expected to be truly effective against would be one too small to be worth using it against.