An Anti-DoS Tool That Returns Fire 407
An anonymous reader submits "Security company Symbiot is about to launch a product that can help companies fight back during a DDoS or hacker attack by launching their own counter offensive. A ZDNet UK story quotes security "experts" questioning the legality of such a product and asking how it will will avoid being fooled by hijacked PCs and spoofed IP addresses..."
Friendly fire. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you see the tech guy trying to explain that their company was knocked off, not by the attack, but by the counter attack?
"It's okay, sir. It was friendly fire.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article, According to the company, a response could range from "profiling and blacklisting upstream providers" or it could be escalated to launch a "distributed denial of service counter-strike".
Given that blacklist maintainers have gotten such an unfriendly response from some quarter that they're starting to operate anonymously (google SPEWS for more), launching your own DDoS would put you in deep doo-doo, no matter how white you think your hat is.
-RatOmeter
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose that one could theorize a way monitor the network traffic around the attacking system and attempt to gather information about the zombie traffic, for example. That can't be easy, and perhaps their solution is to sell (or otherwise distribute) monitors for us to put on our systems to aid them in monitoring the networks from which DDOS can be attacking... As Wayne and Garth say cha, right.
Also, doesn't /. sometimes look like a DDOS? Acts like it, maybe. Seems to wipe out more than a few web servers...
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:4, Funny)
And of course there is no way they would use this information (if it were true) to shut down the attacker by legal means?
Sound *very* American to me.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:3, Funny)
What? Like four more years of Bush, or 1000 free Britney downloads?
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:3, Funny)
No, no, remember, the government's differentiator is "_we_ get to do things that are illegal for you!"
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:3, Informative)
Err... what? Canada's problem has always been the opposite -- our Prime Minister is too powerful. He appoints supreme court judges, and can invoke the "notwithstanding clause" to make legislation immune from judicial review anyway; he appoints senators; and he's the leader of the majority party in the house of commons, so they never vote against him, either.
Out of the so-called democracies of the world, Canada is about as close to an absolute monarchy as they get.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Funny)
"In the history of our country, diplomatic relationships with third world dictatorships have always been difficult. In such situations we usually have to deal with a ruling party leader who doesn't listen to the people, won't accept public criticism and only listens to those able to make large donations of money to the party. And the third world dictator isn't any better either."
Canadian Parliament (Score:3, Interesting)
This means (effectively) that all the Majority MPs are barred from ever voting their concience or on behalf of their constituents in Pariliament, which i think is wrong, considering thats why we elected them in the first place
Re:Canadian Parliament (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't understand the political system. Under British-style systems (Canada is one; others include Isreal, India, etc), YOU, as a voter, votes for the PARTY--not the politician!!! Some people are under the mistaken notion that they vote for the representative politician. Tha
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it sure looks like a really bad idea. Someone is getting overpaid out there...
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily.
What stops company X from making a "pact" with company Y? If company X is getting DoS'd, then company Y helps defend by launching their own counter-strike.
Dangerous? Yes.
Liability issues? Yes.
Effictive? Maybe. Probably more than current methods. If it doesn't stop the current DoS, maybe it will prevent them in the future.
Surely someone will implement a counter-strike system in the next 5 years. Let's see what happens!
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be even worse if it was effective. Imagine the first time some joined corps get hit by a distributed reflection DOS attack and their little vigilante group of automated systems take out CNN, AOL, Yahoo, Google, etc in the counterstrike.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Funny)
Just write it off as regrettable "collateral damage" in the "war on cyberterrorism" and reload.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Funny)
You're fine until someone kills Archduke Ferdinand.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Funny)
One good turn deserves another (Score:5, Funny)
It preemptively surrenders even before it's attacked.
Re:One good turn deserves another (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One good turn deserves another (Score:3, Funny)
Re:One good turn deserves another (Score:5, Funny)
Or the Polish Version (Score:5, Funny)
Or the Iraq version (Score:5, Funny)
Or the Soviet Version (Score:5, Funny)
Or the UN version (Score:5, Funny)
Or the Japanese Version (Score:5, Funny)
Or the American version (Score:5, Funny)
.
.
.
.
Re:One good turn deserves another (Score:5, Funny)
The Andorran version, well, the ethernet cable is really just for show, for ceremonial purposes you understand. We aren't actually hooked up to the net and the "attack' is a just a script we run once a year.
The Laotian version, "Pedal faster, I think we're winning!"
The Tahitian version, well, that's just the French version really, in a box with a palm tree on it.
That Australian version, "Phhhhhh! That's not a DDoS. THIS is a DDoS!"
The Mexican version, "Manana."
The Burmese version, which preemptively attacks itself.
The desktop version for Jewish mothers, which when attacked just issues a popup saying, "No, that's ok. Don't worry about me. I'll just sit here alone in the dark. You never give me any network traffic anyway."
Ad nearly infinitum.
KFG
And the US version... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Friendly fire. - Old Mailbombing attacks (Score:5, Funny)
So then you forged a message so that it looked like it came from a second victim - and when their mailbox filled up it would bounce them back to the first victim
A fun way to take down T-1 lines back in the day when that was considered more bandwidth than any large university could ever use... Not that I have ever done anything like this
Re:Friendly fire. - Old Mailbombing attacks (Score:3, Insightful)
BR
IIRC, you didn't need to fill up an account. Simply sending a message from invalidAddy@server1.net to invalidAddy@server2.net usually did the trick. Server2 would bounce the invalid message back to Server1 rinse and repeat. Not that I have any first hand expirience.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:3, Informative)
Wow! What a rosy world you must live in. Spoofing happens ALL the time. Those korean networks are really on top of the egress/ingress acl'ing, that's why nobody ever sees attacks/spoofed traffic coming from them. No, sorry to burst your bubble but spoofing is very frequent and happens all the time. You would think that the big shops would deploy
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:4, Interesting)
A DDoS _as_ the counter-attack is a ship with many holes in it.
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:4, Funny)
"Look out, we're being attacked by 127.0.0.1! Return fire!"
Re:Friendly fire. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.shopip.com/
Get ready for more attacks (Score:5, Insightful)
source of attacks against systems as people spoof attacks at it. (Much like smurf attacks)
Some day people will realize the answer is to remove the vulnerable hosts that are being used as attack sources.
Re:Get ready for more attacks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Get ready for more attacks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Get ready for more attacks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Get ready for more attacks (Score:3, Interesting)
Their 'white paper' reads more like a babble generator [google.com] preloaded with military phrases rather than geek [siliconhell.com] or Star Trek [pathcom.com] phrases. It's sounds impressive as hell, but it's utterly meaningless.
Re:Get ready for more attacks (Score:4, Informative)
Not just hosts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Get ready for more attacks (Score:5, Insightful)
A second problem is that for the average computer user, it can be very difficult to tell casually if your computer's been infected and is packeting someone else. The fraction of the computer population that checks their firewall to measure their traffic, or goes over the processes running in memory every once in a while, is probably fairly small. This means that infected computers tend to stay infected for a long time. There's also no real, efficient way for a DDoS target to notify thousands of machines about the problem, much less expect a significant proportion of them to respond in any short amount of time.
I think the goal of this approach was to try to make it inconvenient for the compromised machines by taking down their net connection, and thus push the owners to investigate what the problem was. A friend of mine recently discovered that her brother's laptop was riddled with trojans and spyware, after he brought it to her complaining that it was "running slow". Turned out he was oblivious to the problem for a long time until so many processes had loaded down his machine that it was running at 100% utilization even when it was "idle". In the meantime, it was potentially available to be a participant in DDoS attacks. It wasn't until it was inconvenient for him that he took any steps to figure out what was wrong with it.
Of course, many of the other posts have already explained why this particular approach is bad -- everything from spoofing causing innocent victims to be hit with counter-attacks, to the problem of having enough bandwidth to DOS a distributed attack in the first place. The challenge is going to be to develop a practical way of creating incentives for people with compromised machines to fix them quickly.
Re:Get ready for more attacks (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we need to focus on ISPs who allow large numbers of these infected machines to remain on their networks. These ISPs could easily set their gateways to log suspicious outgoing traffic (like lots of connection attempts to different hosts on port 135), compile a list of potentially infected machines, and then contact the end users to help them clean and patch. I imagine a well-designed ISP liability law (with warning provisions to help overcome corporate inertia) could help a lot.
Looks doable to me. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the obvious solution (after all, no zombies = no DDoS-nets), but the problem is there's no practical way to achieve it.
I think I see a way:
First: A counter-probe to identify whether a suspected site actually is a zombie. This would eliminate friendly-fire counterattacks and lets-you-and-him-fight scenarios.
A good signature is the presence of a controlling port for the zombie (thou
Great, just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
Can you imagine large corporations full of MCSEs engaging in "information warfware"?
Re:Great, just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget to salute.
I want an anti-spam tool to return fire (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I want an anti-spam tool to return fire (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I want an anti-spam tool to return fire (Score:3, Informative)
If you're hosting your own DNS, use a spam trap subdomain and feed its addresses to any spammer until it gets flooded with a few hundred spam emails per day. If a spammer's host annoys you and has port 25 open, redirect your spam trap's MX record to that host... the bastards will spam each other and your email server can relax.
Last year the French superspammer Artmarket has been "blown away" after some spam tr
So the question is (Score:4, Funny)
Dude! (Score:5, Funny)
(oblig. - "Of course, that would require them to be reading the articles")
ahhhh (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, it makes sense now.
Re:ahhhh (Score:5, Funny)
The #! anti-DOS tool (Score:5, Funny)
please.. (Score:2, Funny)
Next step (Score:2, Redundant)
I think the government will back me up.
Endless Loop (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Endless Loop (Score:2)
What happens when someone gets smart and creates one that looks for other Symbiot boxes and basicly has them fighting each other?
Don't worry, by that point we'll be reduced to using pen and paper anyway because of all the spam we're recieving.
Re:Endless Loop (Score:3)
Well at a guess, Symbiot will have sold at least two installations.
(whether their customers' net connections will survive is another question...)
As an ISP, what would you rather have:
(a) someone who double-clicks on the attachments
(b) something which tries to DoS whoever it thinks is attacking it
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Dumbest. Idea. Ever. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, let's fire back at the machines attacking and DOUBLE the number of packets on the network while breaking the law! That'll solve it! As if the bandwidth from DoSnets and spam wasn't choking the internet down enough already...
How in the hell do ideas like this make it long enough to be publicly announced? It makes me sad that morons have tech jobs making crap and I couldn't even get hired changing toner if I wanted too...
Re:Dumbest. Idea. Ever. (Score:3, Insightful)
How in the hell do ideas like this make it long enough to be publicly announced?
Good marketing. Marketing makes decisions independant of intelligence, feasability, or any of the other things that people with a normal IQ would consider important aspects of the plan. Managers know that if the plan somehow succeeds (they're managers, they have no way of guaging the feasability or intelligence of anything more technical than simple addition) they can take credit for lending muscle and support to it. If it
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
"More than 500.000 already infected!"
-fren
Nothing But Bad things can come from this (Score:2)
What a great idea! (Score:2, Insightful)
Simbiot or Some Idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine it'll have some sort of military function, though.
This is tricky (Score:2)
The possibilities are endless.
Still a useful idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Subject receives DOS attack from Zombie machine
2) Subject returns fire to zombie machine, perhaps with some sort of encoded you're attacking me so I'm attacking you script.
3) From here the following happens, either somebody notices the machine is being attacked, investigates and reacts, leading the original victim to shut off it's counter-attack. Or an automated script in the Zombie machine packet sniffs the retaliatory attack and shuts itself down and/or notifies admin for further action.
This seems like a good idea, while the ethics of a counter-DoS attack are not sound, this could be a way to limit attacks. However Zombie's spoofing other addresses could lead to issues as well...again tho it's well known that DoS's are a pain in the butt to stop so what could work? Dunno...
government attacking (Score:2)
March 31 + 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Cookies (Score:5, Funny)
You may be taking out grandma's computer in Birmingham that has got a 100-year-old cookie recipe that has not been backed up.
Okay, now they're crossing the line. You mess with Granny's Lucious Cookies, and you're in for it. This means war!
Their method (Score:2)
This is what happens... (Score:4, Insightful)
possibly slightly (Score:2, Interesting)
innocent, possibly and slightly are not 3 words I use to describe people who allow their computeres to become zombies for DDoS attacks. It's in appropriate to say the 3 words I would use in public.
government-approved dos attacks against offenders? (Score:2, Informative)
Governments could soon be using hacker tools for law enforcement and the pursuit of justice, according to an expert on IT and Internet law. Joel Reidenberg, professor of law at New York-based Fordham University, believes it likely that denial of service attacks (DoS) and packet-blocking technology will be employed by nation states to enforce their laws. This could even include attacks on companies based in other countries,
Bruce Schneier (Score:5, Informative)
Counterattack
This must be an idea whose time has come, because I'm seeing it talked about everywhere. The entertainment industry floated a bill that would give it the ability to break into other people's computers if they are suspected of copyright violation. Several articles have been written on the notion of automated law enforcement, where both governments and private companies use computers to automatically find and target suspected criminals. And finally, Tim Mullen and other security researchers start talking about "strike back," where the victim of a computer assault automatically attacks back at the perpetrator.
The common theme here is vigilantism: citizens and companies taking the law into their own hands and going after their assailants. Viscerally, it's an appealing idea. But it's a horrible one, and one that society after society has eschewed.
Our society does not give us the right of revenge, and wouldn't work very well if it did. Our laws give us the right to justice, in either the criminal or civil context. Justice is all we can expect if we want to enjoy our constitutional freedoms, personal safety, and an orderly society.
Anyone accused of a crime deserves a fair trial. He deserves the right to defend himself, the right to face his accused, the right to an attorney, and the right to be held innocent until proven guilty.
Vigilantism flies in the face of these rights. It punishes people before they have been found guilty. Angry mobs lynching someone suspected of murder is wrong, even if that person is actually guilty. The MPAA disabling someone's computer because he's suspected of copying a movie is wrong, even if the movie was copied. Revenge is a basic human emotion, but revenge only becomes justice if carried out by the State.
And the State has more motivation to be fair. The RIAA sent a cease-and-desist letter to an ISP asking them to remove certain files that were the copyrighted works of George Harrison. One of the files: "Portrait of mrs. harrison Williams 1943.jpg." The RIAA simply Googled for the string "harrison" and went after everyone who turned up. Vigilantism is wrong because the vigilante could be wrong. The goal of a State legal system is justice; the goal of the RIAA was expediency.
Systems of strike back are much the same. The idea is that if a computer is attacking you -- sending you viruses, acting as a DDoS zombie, etc. -- you might be able to forcibly shut that computer down or remotely install a patch. Again, a nice idea in theory but one that's legally and morally wrong.
Imagine you're a homeowner, and your neighbor has some kind of device on the outside of his house that makes noise. A lot of noise. All day and all night. Enough noise that any reasonable person would claim it to be a public nuisance. Even so, it is not legal for you to take matters into your own hand and stop the noise.
Destroying property is not a recognized remedy for stopping a nuisance, even if it is causing you real harm. Your remedies are to: 1) call the police and ask them to turn it off, break it, or insist that the neighbor turn it off; or 2) sue the neighbor and ask the court to enjoin him from using that device unless it is repaired properly, and to award you damages for your aggravation. Vigilante justice is simply not an option, no matter how right you believe your cause to be.
This is law, not technology, so there are all sorts of shades of gray to this issue. The interests at stake in the original attack, the nature of the property, liberty or personal safety taken away by the counterattack, the risk of being wrong, and the availability and effectiveness of other measures are all factors that go into the assessment of whether something is morally or legally right. The RIAA bill is at one extreme because copyright is a limited property interest, and there is a great risk of wrongful deprivation of u
Self defense != vigilantism (Score:4, Insightful)
A woman carries out a devastating martial arts move on someone about to rape her -- self defense.
Self defense is immediate, and it's aimed at stopping an attack in progress. Self defense doesn't excuse harming innocent third parties: if you use a hand grenade to stop a mugger, the law will rightly punish you.
There's plenty of room for argument about this, but remote patching of the machines that are DDoSing you might be self defense. Any counterattack that is based on military principles, like the product under discussion here, is vigilantism.
Notice that everything Schneier says is based on the assumption that regulated police and courts of law exist. Before those are set up on a lawless frontier, experience shows that citizens will set up a Committee of Vigilance.
Useless... (Score:3, Insightful)
A basic denial of service attack is simply nothing more than somebody using all of their available bandwidth to send meaningless information to the victim host. If such an attack is greater than the available incoming bandwidth the victim has, then their legitimate incoming traffic gets delayed or dropped after being timed out.
However, even if the IP addresses are being spoofed, it's pretty easy to trace back through the routers where these packets are coming from, and that'll lead you to the point where the attack is coming from. That doesn't tell you who the hacker was per se, but it at least ends the attack.
A DDoS is nothing more than the result of hundreds or thousands of machines all directing a DoS at the same place. Now it's not so easy to trace back... effectively, they're coming from everywhere! The DDoS victim has nothing they can do for themselves other than order enough bandwidth to have more incoming bandwidth than the attackers have to throw at them, and that's not a cheap or fast solution. They're more or less waiting for whatever virus or worm touched off the storm to be cleaned up by the antivirus vendors.
Hacking back your attackers is only going to cause other people to start wondering why you're scanning and hacking them... isn't not going to do much towards stopping the useless data that's streaming at you. The worst case situation is where two of these hacking systems meet it each other... and therefore an automated hacking war between identical systems go on forever while never disabling a real hacker.
Seems like all this product does is appeal to over-agressive personalites who are in IT positions and hate the concept of there being an attack that there's a possible attack that there's no possible way to defend against. It doesn't have to work, it just has to seperate dumb people from their money.
Incentive for egress filtering? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's really scary about this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The company is obviously trying to jump on the media-whore bandwagon by proposing such an idea, but look who they are and where they're from. Texans' historical idea of security hasn't been impressive.
Shame on ZDNet for creating this troll in the first place. Shame on Slashdot for referencing this troll. Shame on us for being so outraged by it and taking the bait.
We know this idea will never fly. But now we've given this loser company 15 minutes of fame. This story belongs on a Darwin Business Awards list or Fark.com, not here.
Ok this is flame bait (Score:4, Interesting)
Now since it's tcp and a 2 way connections we can be fairly confident that at the time of the connection reverse routing paths go to the attacker otherwise syn fin ack would have been problematic.
Things liek this have been discussed on NANOG etc before and a lot of people hate it obviously. I think if you could find exploits in the worms themselves and reply back with something to disable the worm inside the same request that would be acceptable as I should have the right to respond to any request from the internet with whatever I desire inside one session, though some would disagree.
This has me thinking... (Score:5, Interesting)
But, most DDoS attacks do have easily verifiable signatures. (Ping floods, excessive SYNs from spoofed source addresses, among many others.)
Why not start helping ISP's to block this crap at the source? They are, essentially, what allowed these machines to be zombified in the first place. Aggregators and headends should already have the intelligence to block IP spoofs, which eliminates SYN floods. It shouldn't be too difficult to imagine blocking an excessive amount of outbound (inbound from the ISP's customer base) ICMP packets...say...10% or more packets are ICMP=no YUO. (arbitrary figure, it could be less, it could be more).
If nothing else, build some intelligence into backbone packet inspection (yes, I am aware of the vast amount of cycles this would take...but everything can be ported to ASICs at some point), such that vast amounts of packets, with duplicate signatures could be throttled back or dropped if a DDoS is detected.
In short, we know we can't educate the lusers, but if the ISP's distributed the cost of such an implementation among all users, I'd imagine most people wouldn't even notice the cost increase.
There's some other ideas floating around in my head, but they aren't fully formulated yet.
Best way to stop DOS attacks (Score:3, Insightful)
Example RR not allowing their users to send packets with a return address that is not a RR IP for the area.
That won't stop DOS attacks from happening, but it will make it easier to track the zombies, and maybe even get the perp.
As my Earlier Post stated (Score:3, Interesting)
But is it morally defensible? (Score:3, Informative)
Um the first to note (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't quite get it.
Though you can tell this is an american idea. the concept of collateral damage [e.g. people with the same ISP or host being tossed offline] isn't relatively important to them...
Why not make a tool that can find who started the DDOS and then accidentally send them to 20 years in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison? That would be worth money.
Tom
Most interesting part: the techniques. (Score:5, Insightful)
"In these cases, the operations center may call for a variety of efforts, including (1) escalated multilateral profiling and blacklisting of upstream providers; (2) distributed denial of service counterstrikes; (3) special operations experts applying invasive techniques; and (4) combined operations which apply financial derivatives, publicity disinformation, and other techniques of psychological operations."
Now how exactly this will help when you have a few hundred to a few thousand virused zombie machines running a DDoS against you and you have no clue who's behind it... is beyond me.
My take on this (Score:5, Interesting)
Lovely. So not only do we now have to fend off attacks from script kiddies
and packet monkies, we now have to fend off attacks from idiot sysadmins who
set this tool up and allow it to go all out on supposed 'attacks' against
their systems.
I'll share my favorite goober with firewall story. When I was a
sysadmin/netadmin at a large ISP, I used to get these 'attack' reports from
clueless users all the time. I could identify which tool they used just by
how the body of the message looked and how the 'attack' was described. Got
ones saying that my performance testing server (which sometimes did ping scans
across the dialups to see what the general response time was) was 'attacking'
the user's machine with a single ICMP echo. Or how our IRC server was trying
to attack the user on the ident port every time they tried to connect.
Of course, the best one was when a supposed 'security expert' called up and
complained how my two caching DNS servers for the T1 customers was attacking
his entire network on port 53 UDP. He had naturally filtered the 'attack'
because it was obvious that our Linux DNS servers were infected with one of
the latest Windows viruses going around, and suddenly noone on his network
could browse the web anymore.
So, let me ask the question, do we really want people like that having a tool
which autoresponds to attacks with attacks? At least when he filtered out our
DNS traffic, it only affected his network... But imagine if he had launched
an attack against my DNS servers in response? Yeah, thats a great idea.
Of course, now that the AHBL does its own proxy testing, we get all sorts of
fun reports from end users about our 'attacks' against their machines. Latest
one demanded I tell her why we had scanned her, but wouldn't tell me her IP
address or when the scan happened exactly, claiming that I had done the scan,
so I should know what IP she is. Too bad I test over 100,000 IP addresses
daily for open proxies....
Lets not even get into the legal consequences for a tool like this, especially
if it backfires and launches an attack against the NIPC, for example.
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
We now have a product that produces more shit than ever, has no sound concept behind it other than "Let's nuke the shit out of these &&&%$s", probably costs a shitload of money and appeals to PHBs in the extreme.
I'd say: Let's buy some shares.
Countattack Vs Countermeasures (Score:4, Insightful)
The obvious solution would be to respond to the attacking machine by using the same exploit by which it was initially infected, and cause it to go to sleep or attempt to clean itself. Obvious problems arise if the machine is doing something important, but the question arises: when are you allowed to protect your own property in response to somebody who hasn't properly fixed their own?
Conceptually, the best way to do this would be to log attackers, note how they are infected based on heuristics of common infections, and then wait until they attack has been going on for a certain period of time. If the machine is still coming out strong after a day, one should be justified in taking measured to put it offline...
It's time to stop pandering to sysadmins that don't do their jobs. We have some machines that aren't $1000/minute mission critical, but if one were infected I wouldn't feel overtly upset if somebody put it to sleep for me (so long as the machine itself wasn't damaged). For those that do run $$$$/minute machines, they should be well secured so such things don't happen, or at least not for prolonged periods of time.
It's accountability time for sysadmins... you're not unjustified in shooting somebody who invades your house, so why can't you take out the computer that's attacking your network?
Where there's smoke... (Score:3, Funny)
This is brilliant (Score:5, Funny)
Again? (Score:5, Funny)
Just smile, nod politely, and let the lawyers take care of it.
Now if they sell 2 of these... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've just been through extortionist DDoS (Score:3, Insightful)
I have helped a customer who was suffering several DDoS attacks from sub humans from Eastern Europe. The attacks took out an entire Australian state for days at a time and in one 30 minute period, all of Australia at 4.30 in the morning, not just one ISP or one customer. We're not talking small attack fleets here.
Now... where to start?
This product is the stupidist, most lame, and idiotic idea I can think of. I don't know what the hell they were thinking, but all I can think of is that they've never ever had a DDoS attack aimed at them.
In Australia (where I live), this type of counterattack *IS* illegal, and I have real lawyer advice from IAL (I am a lawyer) types at a big firm. If you want to prosecute, you sure as hell should not have retaliated... or you'll end up facing prosecution too, and unlike the scuzz buckets in eastern Molvania, you will go to jail and be Bubba's Vegemite Valley Viking buddy for some time.
You want to know how to prevent spoofed attacks? Force * by law * Cisco and the two or three other manufacturers of telco equipment (DSLAMs, cable head ends, and digital modems) to not pass packets with spoofed IP addresses. Make it illegal to acquire equipment without these controls. Make it illegal to modify the equipment to allow such usage. Followed up with the "Good" ISPs null routing "Bad" ISPs who pass packets from "customers" (sources) who spoof. ISPs *know* the BGP AS's they route at their edge. They are the best placed not to allow spoofed packets to originate from them. This solution is SO simple, I'm surprised no one has done anything about forcing Cisco et al's hand yet.
You want to know how to prevent DDoS attacks being used for extortion? Clueful law enforcement. Too many times, the victims of these attacks have to establish an uncontaminated body of evidence, keep a chain of custody for all evidence they collect, and show exactly how they've filtered the raw evidence to demonstrate the links between the few unspoofed packets and the badly written e-mails with the attacks. This is like a mugging victim collecting evidence swabs from themselves, taking the photos, doing a few PCR DNA tests (or three hundred), ensuring all statements are taken, keeping the evidence safe from contamination and doing the leg work of the investigation. ENOUGH! It's time for the police to get a fscking clue and employ real investigators in their "high tech" forces.
Until then, companies like this one will be allowed to peddle their wares to customers who just want a large piece of 4x2 and to whack someone... anyone. I know because I soooo wanted that 4x2 so many times during January and February.