Country tries to censor YouTube, inadvertently launches a massive DDOS on itself.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=548

by mercurio • 18 years ago

41 20 18 years ago

blogs.zdnet.com

TheTarquin2• 18 years ago

Nothing says "Epic Fail" quite like DDoSing one's whole nation into submission. At least Pakistan got what it wanted: none of its citizens are going to be seeing any blasphemous internet content . . .

Xichekolas2• 18 years ago

If I read it correctly, they also successfully screwed YouTube over for an hour... so a pyhrric victory at the least.

Lately Pakistan has been 'Epic Fail' in general...

TheTarquin2• 18 years ago

Pyhrric victory indeed. To paraphrase Pyrrhus himself: "One more such victory will undo Pakistan (at least on the internet)."

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

By "Pakistan"...do we actually mean "Pakistan" or do we REALLY mean Musharraf?

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

Should Google look to litigate? After all, they could probably quantify how much they lost during the downtime, and I'd imagine it's a pretty big number.

dkokelley• 18 years ago

What does Youtube actually make for Google? I thought I read somewhere that it's not that much, considering what was paid for it. For 2006 it looks like it was $12.9m. If that rate is the same for now (it's probably more), then 1 day of Youtube earns $35,000. I doubt they would go after a country for that amount, though they would probably be upset about the outage and use whatever political muscle they have to pressure Pakistan to rethink.

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

Ha, I'm pretty sure YouTube is highly unprofitable currently, in which case Google should be paying Pakistan.

xirium• 18 years ago

From the article: The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour. I suspect the second repercussion was that Pakistan's Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world.

Law and technology is rarely good. However, it seems that religion, law and routing tables is a particularly bad combination.

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

Can someone more knowledgeable about the internets than me please explain how someone can just hijack YouTube's IP address?

kogir• 18 years ago

Many routing protocols commonly used (BGP, OSPF, etc) don't have sufficient authentication built in. They instead rely on ISPs setting up proper filters and everyone playing nice.

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

Cool. Can you show me how to redirect Yahoo's traffic to my blog?

socmoth• 18 years ago

i asked the same question of a network phd student. i got the simple text version, and i have no idea if it is valid or not, but the guy i know is very smart.

he says in all likelihood, a guy in charge setup a malicious route or "report" saying they could access youtube faster than they really could. which means, everyone trying to get to youtube, went through pakistan because it was the fastest way to youtube. so all youtube traffic went to pakistan, which was the ddos part.

why isn't this a huge problem? it kinda is. the system shouldn't be able to be taken down. But, it isn't a huge problem because nobody actually does this.

Apparently, isps pay a lot for their access, and this kinda thing is a good way of paying a lot more and loosing all your money and not having internet, which is the opposite of the business they are in.

i've never ever heard of something like this happening, or about these 'reports.' so... maybe nobody should listen to me. but my friend is usually right about this stuff.

ntoshev• 18 years ago

It is a problem if a hacker does this to an ISP in order to push his political / religious / whatever agenda.

patrickg-zill• 18 years ago

BGP is a protocol used to exchange routing information. Pakistan's main provider is a company called PCCW, so they are Pakistan's "upstream" provider.

Each BGP peer announces which set of routes they are the final destination for, e.g. Level3 announces themselves as the final dest for my Class C, 206.192.23.0/24 .

In blocking YouTube, they either meant to be malicious, or, they meant to null-route YouTube inside Pakistan but instead fat-fingered it and issued commands that instead of null-routing, made them the final destination for those YouTube IPs.

Mistake that YouTube made was that this Class C was also where their DNS servers were, so they were unable to redirect people elsewhere once they were aware what was going on (since corrected).

Also see http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube...

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

Interesting. Thanks.

dmoney• 18 years ago

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and... fights back.

Retric• 18 years ago

Ok, you win. I hereby forgo my right to post one-liners on this site as doing so would be a pale imitation of your greatness.

Xichekolas2• 18 years ago

The Internet decided to change it's name... it'd now like to be known by it's porn name... Skye Net.

Country tries to censor YouTube, inadvertently launches a massive DDOS on itself.

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