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.'"
Bravo Cloudflare! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using Cloudflare [cloudflare.com] for my DNS hosting since the beta days and they are an outstanding group of individuals. Their free DNS hosting is top-notch, with no pressure to upgrade to the paid option. They are some of the same people behind Project Honeypot [projecthoneypot.org]. It's good to see firms like Cloudflare stand up and be counted when free and open access to information is threatened.
"Massive" DDoS attack (Score:3, Interesting)
I think we need another term to describe DDoS attack other than massive. Every DDoS attack is massive, that's kind of how they work. How about megalithic, prodigious, elephantine or gargantuan? Other suggestions?
Ice T said it best... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Freedom of Speech... Just watch what you say"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iceberg/Freedom_Of_Speech..._Just_Watch_What_You_Say [wikipedia.org]!
I think the album cover is most appropriate in this situation.