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Possible cyberattack against US internet infrastructure

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no, a DDOS attack just overwhelms the recipient. Like having to answer the door everytime someone knocks and then close it for each, in the order for as many times as each visitor knocks.

The bigger issue is the purpose of an attack like this. It can be used to shut out communications, be a diversion to something else, and you can also monitor the response and other failover mechanisms that may be in place. It can also just be a geopolitical middlefinger.

I'd stay away from your bank websites until the attack stops. Everyone should enable some type of fraud protection as a just in case.

But isnt in a ddos attack on a dns host? If so, ip's should work
 
I don't usually put my thought into crazy internet theories, but why not on a day like today.

A couple of months ago there was some article written by someone, who is apparently in the know I believe was pointed out, that this sort of thing was coming. I'll have to see if I can find it, but he talked about how over the last couple of years "someone" has been testing the waters with ddos different parts of the internet and seeing how they react. These parts being focal points and by attacking them continuously they are learning how they defend themselves so that if need be, they could essentially disrupt the entire internet for a country.

As I said, I don't usually believe this sort of thing, but after today where a couple points of the internet in the US were hit which takes down a number of large websites and companies.

I'll have to see if I can find it again, it was an interesting read non the less.
 
I don't usually put my thought into crazy internet theories, but why not on a day like today.

A couple of months ago there was some article written by someone, who is apparently in the know I believe was pointed out, that this sort of thing was coming. I'll have to see if I can find it, but he talked about how over the last couple of years "someone" has been testing the waters with ddos different parts of the internet and seeing how they react. These parts being focal points and by attacking them continuously they are learning how they defend themselves so that if need be, they could essentially disrupt the entire internet for a country.

As I said, I don't usually believe this sort of thing, but after today where a couple points of the internet in the US were hit which takes down a number of large websites and companies.

I'll have to see if I can find it again, it was an interesting read non the less.

To quote myself, I found the article I mentioned. Written by a Bruce Schneier, a blurb about him:

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by The Economist.

He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Chief Technology Officer at Resilient, an IBM Company.

Anyway, here is the article he wrote a couple months ago about current cyber attacks in the US. A snip from the article:

Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet
Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.

First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it's overwhelmed. These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don't like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion. There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense. But largely it's a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins.

Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they're used to seeing....

Can read the rest at his website. "Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet"

Now I don't know if he does actually know anything, but anyway, I just thought it would be an interesting read considering what has been going on today and recently.
 
To quote myself, I found the article I mentioned. Written by a Bruce Schneier, a blurb about him:



Anyway, here is the article he wrote a couple months ago about current cyber attacks in the US. A snip from the article:



Can read the rest at his website. "Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet"

Now I don't know if he does actually know anything, but anyway, I just thought it would be an interesting read considering what has been going on today and recently.


That is interesting. Gunna throw it up into the OP
 
If you want to hobble an adversary with stronger military forces, you turn their population against themselves.

While the seemingly weak point in America is the infrastructure, this type of attack is limited and would actually strengthen the resolve of the populous once an adversary was named.

The real way you turn an adversaries populations against their government is with annoyance and paranoia. Stopping banks from quickly dispersing funds, creating annoyance in entertainment distribution, introducing fear that the local government can administer its basic duties. That last one, during election years, is pretty important. We already have 30-40% of the voting population that doesn't trust the election outcomes. This is poison to a system that relies on acceptance by the losing side of the results.

I fully expect that massive DDoS attacks will happen on Election Day. Whoever is responsible for messing with the political party's email (Russia?) doesn't have to change vote numbers, they just have to make enough chaos in the County/State tabulation systems, or even the media's infrastructure to slow dissemination or counting and encourage already existing vectors for conspiracy theories. Whoever is interested in hobbling our transition of power isn't expecting a 'kill shot' in 2016, but wants to add another brick to a wall of paranoia and distrust and hopefully encourage already apathetic pockets in America to further distrust its government and institutions.

[Bedwetting Intensifies]
 
If you want to hobble an adversary with stronger military forces, you turn their population against themselves.

While the seemingly weak point in America is the infrastructure, this type of attack is limited and would actually strengthen the resolve of the populous once an adversary was named.

The real way you turn an adversaries populations against their government is with annoyance and paranoia. Stopping banks from quickly dispersing funds, creating annoyance in entertainment distribution, introducing fear that the local government can administer its basic duties. That last one, during election years, is pretty important. We already have 30-40% of the voting population that doesn't trust the election outcomes. This is poison to a system that relies on acceptance by the losing side of the results.

I fully expect that massive DDoS attacks will happen on Election Day. Whoever is responsible for messing with the political party's email (Russia?) doesn't have to change vote numbers, they just have to make enough chaos in the County/State tabulation systems, or even the media's infrastructure to slow dissemination or counting and encourage already existing vectors for conspiracy theories. Whoever is interested in hobbling our transition of power isn't expecting a 'kill shot' in 2016, but wants to add another brick to a wall of paranoia and distrust and hopefully encourage already apathetic pockets in America to further distrust its government and institutions.

[Bedwetting Intensifies]

everyone should just be able to vote early
 
If you want to hobble an adversary with stronger military forces, you turn their population against themselves.

While the seemingly weak point in America is the infrastructure, this type of attack is limited and would actually strengthen the resolve of the populous once an adversary was named.

The real way you turn an adversaries populations against their government is with annoyance and paranoia. Stopping banks from quickly dispersing funds, creating annoyance in entertainment distribution, introducing fear that the local government can administer its basic duties. That last one, during election years, is pretty important. We already have 30-40% of the voting population that doesn't trust the election outcomes. This is poison to a system that relies on acceptance by the losing side of the results.

I fully expect that massive DDoS attacks will happen on Election Day. Whoever is responsible for messing with the political party's email (Russia?) doesn't have to change vote numbers, they just have to make enough chaos in the County/State tabulation systems, or even the media's infrastructure to slow dissemination or counting and encourage already existing vectors for conspiracy theories. Whoever is interested in hobbling our transition of power isn't expecting a 'kill shot' in 2016, but wants to add another brick to a wall of paranoia and distrust and hopefully encourage already apathetic pockets in America to further distrust its government and institutions.

[Bedwetting Intensifies]
Damn dude. I gotta say, you're on fire with the quality posts today.

(re: your joke earlier in the PoliGAF thread :p)
 
Can read the rest at his website. "Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet"

Now I don't know if he does actually know anything, but anyway, I just thought it would be an interesting read considering what has been going on today and recently.

That was a spooky read. I assumed the attack was just someone flexing that botnet, but a state actor calibrating the effort needed to attack sounds eerily plausible. That nationwide supercomputer/ AI thing china is working on is looking more and more suspicious.
 
tumblr_nmhrnkwKcC1tpri36o1_1280.jpg


What now, Penny Arcade?
 
Damn dude. I gotta say, you're on fire with the quality posts today.

(re: your joke earlier in the PoliGAF thread :p)

Thanks!

This shit is scary. No matter who wins this years election, we have to figure out how to find some common ground, otherwise we're gonna eat ourselves alive.

I like to say, our biggest problem is that we lack a national goal/narrative. We're concerned about next quarter, China is concerned about next century.
 
I tell you what, the surest way to unite the USA is to take away our internet, especially if we uncover it is due to a foreign nation's actions.

I double-digit dare them to knock out cable TV during Sunday Night Football.
 
I think you can pretty much count on there being large scale DDOS attacks on election day.
Luckily election systems are highly decentralized as each individual state or local government runs the election, not a single federal government.

Also, electronic voting booths are not connected to the Internet.

The main issue would I think would be registration systems, in which sometimes I think it can be done online or the application be requested online. However, most if not all registration deadlines have passed already.

Edit: Although I see from the NYT article, in some limited instances, Internet voting is allowed. We are clearly not ready for that. I hope Alaska and any other state allowing Internet voting has contingencies in place in the event they are targeted.
 
I tell you what, the surest way to unite the USA is to take away our internet, especially if we uncover it is due to a foreign nation's actions.

I double-digit dare them to knock out cable TV during Sunday Night Football.
I would assume so as well but I had people at work tell me that it was actually the us govt. (false flag) doing it and they were probably going to place a Russian footprint so that we can push our hawkish agenda against them.
I told them stop listening to Alex Jones....
 
In that article it states that our routers(also baby monitor and other things but I'm focusing on that)...is there anything we could do to secure them even more?

That is assuming those cheap ip nanny cams and baby monitors and such even have any security to begin with. The devices that do have security, the routers and such, are left with default credentials a shockingly high percentage of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cWck_xcH64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pas_EB3bhEc

Securing the billions of internet connected devices isn't really the point, though it would help if people took responsibility for the devices they connect to the internet. The question is why vital infrastructure like credit card processors rely on DNS at all, much less publicly accessible DNS servers.

We've known for basically as long as they have existed that the name server is the weakest link in the chain. Nothing critical should ever rely on one name server, or even two hosted by the same organization or in the same datacenter.

A DDOS is the least of your worries in that situation, an attacker could do a lot more damage with DNS cache poisoning.
 
Things look like they've cooled down.

1) I wonder if anyone learned anything.
2) When's the next time?

1) Hopefully the US authorities are somehow figuring out how to prevent this from happening again this year.

2) It's all but guaranteed to have another attack occur in November 8th.
 
I don't usually put my thought into crazy internet theories, but why not on a day like today.

A couple of months ago there was some article written by someone, who is apparently in the know I believe was pointed out, that this sort of thing was coming. I'll have to see if I can find it, but he talked about how over the last couple of years "someone" has been testing the waters with ddos different parts of the internet and seeing how they react. These parts being focal points and by attacking them continuously they are learning how they defend themselves so that if need be, they could essentially disrupt the entire internet for a country.

As I said, I don't usually believe this sort of thing, but after today where a couple points of the internet in the US were hit which takes down a number of large websites and companies.

I'll have to see if I can find it again, it was an interesting read non the less.
Almost word for word that is actually been the main point of various cyberthriller novels
 
What's the over/under on days until some conspiracy theorist pedals anti-government paranoia on their radio show/TV show/etc.?

'cause I'm going for two.
 
This has taken down the HP Enterprise support website.

I now have to deal with HP over the phone. The horror just got real.



In that article it states that our routers(also baby monitor and other things but I'm focusing on that)...is there anything we could do to secure them even more?
The devices used will be ones where the owner never changed the login password from password. There are a ridiculous amount of internet connected devices out there like that. There are entire websites that link to various home security cameras that literally anybody can login to with the default credentials and just watch the owners house.
 
Another one going on? A couple of different Canadian clothing stores site are down right now, maybe others too. Those are more on the west coast though.
 
Still spotty for me. Can access a few sites, but can't connect on my 3DS and most websites are still inaccessible. Hell I'm typing this post on my phone.
 
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