Possible Vendetta Behind the East Coast Web Slowdown

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-21/internet-service-disrupted-in-large-parts-of-eastern-u-s

by whiskypeters • 10 years ago

187 181 10 years ago

bloomberg.com

thesteverichey• 10 years ago

Any evidence this is using the IoT botnet that was reported on earlier this year?

micaksica• 10 years ago

Mirai? With the source of that being public, there are probably quite a few Mirai botnets now.

meira• 10 years ago

Not working, is bloomberg down too?

jerf• 10 years ago

For a long time, I've wondered what would finally be the Securitypocalypse, the thing that finally caused our industry as a whole to take security seriously. These IoT DDoS attacks are as good a candidate as any I've seen in a long time. They are fundamentally very difficult to fix in light of the non-updateability of many of these devices, and this is only the beginning, because the IoT has hardly begun to develop. And in the short-term, I'm not sure I see any hope, because the forces that make people throw out cheap devices with broken firmwares with no update capability aren't going away.

If we could somehow mandate that these devices were supported with firmware updates for the indefinite future, that would simply destroy the entire market. And you can't do that, because even the devices created by an entity that no longer exists and didn't sell its IP to anybody else will eventually be enough to do these DDoSes, if they aren't already.

seanp2k2• 10 years ago

Yep, and manufacturers have not much incentive to update firmware for a device which is not their latest greatest or update firmware while not adding more features to help them sell more. Security isn't a feature that the vast majority of consumers would pay extra for or know how to verify anyway. There was plenty of demand for that one "unhackable" android phone, but I'd be blown away if it wasn't 100% snake oil.

My prediction is that it'll get worse before it gets better and that these type of botnets will be around for at least 5 years. Look at what happened to unsecured-by-default routers, android phones, Windows PCs, cars...the way consumers will get more secure stuff is by manufacturers being publicly embarrassed / sued over problems until caring about security makes business sense, then they'll have it in their hands when their old insecure gadgets die.

My cynical side side thinks this will be a problem until all the old endpoints supporting these insecure things are shut down eventually in 5-10 years.

Angostura• 10 years ago

This isn't just small manufacturers either. I bought a new Samsung tablet for my kid two weeks ago. It is running a three year old version of Android with no updates available. Pretty shocking.

JoelBennett• 10 years ago

There'd be something ironic about a manufacturer's website being made unavailable because of a DDoS caused by their own poorly secured devices.

NKCSS• 10 years ago

It's easy to fix; back in the day when a machine was infected; an ISP would just block outgoing traffic, contact line owner and re-enable when the issue is resolved.

gaius2• 10 years ago

If the "machine" in question is my ADSL router as supplied by my ISP, I will be deeply unimpressed if they block me due to their own negligence in updating it!

sparky_z• 10 years ago

Possibly stupid question: why is that no longer done?

rev_bird• 10 years ago

"Fix" is a relative term, especially if IoT devices are in play – yes, turning off the internet to customers stops the attack, but then (at least?) thousands of people lose internet connectivity because of a vulnerability that they could very well be powerless to fix. I'm not saying it's ok with me that an army of smart refrigerators could be taking out big chunks of the web, but it's a lot easier to tell someone, "Hey, either get the infection off your computer or re-format" than it is to make someone buy new lightbulbs and appliances.

rasz_pl2• 10 years ago

and dont forget the part where user is charged $ for violating contract.

gtrubetskoy2• 10 years ago

These attacks are mostly possible because of the complacency of operators at many sites and companies. This is not a new problem and many of RFC's talk about methods for preventing and mitigating them, but most people don't care and prefer to just outsource everything to a single provider, which becomes the weakest link.

The Internet wasn't envisioned with a single email provider, single DNS provider, single app container provider. (Ok, for most of these you have two, sometimes three choices, but still, that is too few). The centralization makes everything very vulnerable - imagine what would happen when Gmail is knocked out for a day.

supergeek1332• 10 years ago

The problem with these devices in particular is the weak point is the user. As is the case in most attacks.

Your average user says "Sure I can setup cameras" then sees "remote access" in the menu, sets it up, maybe it has some UPNP to the router and BOOM. Magic remote login without any type of mitigation.

brongondwana• 10 years ago

Seriously? It's OK if only one site/company gets taken offline at a time?

There's no RFC that talks about methods for preventing or mitigating hundreds of thousands of machines all sending arbitrary traffic at you at the same time.

The only way to protect yourself from that sort of attack is to buy filtering from someone who has a bigger pipe than the largest DDoS available, and have them filter the packets so that you only get clean traffic. Unless you know of an alternative that nobody else has heard of yet.

So you wind up buying transit / scrubbing from one of a few big providers, because that's the only way to avoid being sniped by DDoSers.

HipHopHacker• 10 years ago

For a long time, I've wondered what would finally be the Securitypocalypse, the thing that finally caused our industry as a whole to take security seriously.

Nothing. If the economic system revolves around capital's valorization of itself, security is a distraction from that. I have to spend five seconds typing my password in every time I sit at my desk? I can't just easily e-mail this executable file to my co-worker and have them run it? My desktop is locked down by the desktop admins to prevent me being able to do this, and many other things? Every implementation of security costs money for the personnel to do it and possibly the product cost. Plus any lost productivity it might cause (15 seconds to type in a password each time one sits at their desk, compounded).

Donn Parker wrote one of the first books on computer security in 1976, Crime by Computer. The opening words are as apt for corporate security now as it was then. The #1 fear for the corporate manager are the employees of that company. They are the ones with the greatest control over the means of production, so to speak, even more than the managers themselves who are de jure in charge, but are de facto one step away from actual control. Look at how much access someone like Snowden had at Booz Allen.

Obviously, if all products have wide open holes, script kiddies will be able to get control. Some minimal security will always be done to stop this sort of thing. On the other hand, one (or better yet, several) dedicated people who want to get past some security arrangement can almost always get in. Even if the firewall is supposedly impenetrable, the wifi or the building security or the social engineering credulity of employees or something will be there. There will be some weak link in the chain. Especially for a company that needs to make a profit.

The real security is that semi-intelligent, persistent agents that seek to access and control systems without authorization are lacking. Things depend on the conditions that cause this to rise or diminish. Because once it rises, there is little that can be done. I forget who said that the czar's Russian Okhrana was one of the largest, most extensive security forces that existed. That meant little when Russia began collapsing in 1916 though - all it meant was that they were even more aware that virtually everyone in the country was becoming the czar's enemy.

Securitypocalypse events due result in business and government putting more focus on security for a while, but time moves on, and attention drifts back to the main focus. These things go in waves, and total security is never something of the highest priority.

trhway• 10 years ago

They are fundamentally very difficult to fix in light of the non-updateability of many of these devices

as you proved, fixing the situation by fixing the devices wouldn't be a feasible approach. The traffic from those devices is carried by ISPs and this is there this traffic should be stopped. To me the situation reminds about email spam. We didn't get rid of spammers, instead the email traffic is analyzed and dealt with accordingly. I'm sure that ISPs easily see the patterns of such massive DDoS attacks and could just drop (or throttle down into oblivion, like 100s times down) the participating traffic.

kakarot2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, forced firmware updating is an area our governments should not be mandating. That puts unnecessary strain on small companies and creates a larger gap that companies must cross to become commercially viable

snovv_crash• 10 years ago

Just like with bridges. Getting certification by a professional engineer is just too much barrier to entry for small construction companies.

Edit: forgot the /s

Ar-Curunir2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but isn't that a good thing?

the_watcher• 10 years ago

Yea, it's a hard problem. While there's clearly a lot of vulnerabilities out there that emerge because it's cheaper to ignore security until you're large enough for a breach to be a big issue, forcing mandatory updates is a great way to discourage anyone from attempting to try something new. There might be a tipping point at which the costs of a breach outweighs the benefit, and maybe we've hit it already, but government mandates should be something we discuss cautiously and should prefer to avoid.

DashRattlesnake2• 10 years ago

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. If a company doesn't have the resources to create secure products, then maybe it shouldn't be in that business in the first place.

Jtsummers9• 10 years ago

The problem is not whether they can create a secure product, but whether they can afford to certify their products as secure.

From my experience in the aviation software world, we spend a great deal more on demonstrating reliability than in producing it. This forces a huge amount of overhead on our projects. This isn't a bad thing, mind you, but it is a thing to consider.

It is hard for a couple engineers to start a new company making these sorts of systems. The only practical way is to have a truly good and demonstrably better solution, or be inside a large corporation with already deep pockets.

throwaway729• 10 years ago

Firmware updating isn't exactly a "hard tech" problem, even if it is hard to do right. I suspect we'll see some generic firmware update frameworks/solutions emerge in the coming decade, and at that point adoption will pick up rapidly because being able to push updates is good for business.

avip3• 10 years ago

Firmware updating isn't hard tech. Secure firmware update over public network is.

odbol_• 10 years ago

Google's IoT solution offers this. But no one seems to want to use it.

Analemma_2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, forced firmware updating is an area our governments should not be mandating.

It absolutely is an area that governments should be mandating, because the problem is an externality. These attacks are a cost imposed on neither the producer nor the consumer of the device itself, and (apart from some highly speculative libertarian conjectures) the only things that can fix externalities are taxes, regulations, and lawsuits.

Lawsuits are infeasible in this case since we probably can't prove whose devices were involved in any given attack, so that leaves taxes and regulations - and the latter would be better so we don't have to go through the business of collecting taxes from manufacturers and then distributing them to the victims of attacks.

That puts unnecessary strain on small companies

Clearly it isn't unnecessary, because I can't get to any friggin websites today. If small companies don't have the resources to update the devices, they shouldn't be building them in the first place.

lalalandland• 10 years ago

If you are a chemical company you have regulation on the stuff you put out and the environmental hazard of you product and waste products.

Something similar could work for IT.

ptaipale• 10 years ago

But then there is also the risk of government mandating a firmware update that has government features.

Falkon13133• 10 years ago

Which business model works best:

- planned obsolescence cranked to 11, you must replace everything in your house every month

- monthly subscription fees for each lightbulb, refrigerator, and everything else

- all products must refuse to operate unless they can connect to a central update server (which is being DDOSed by competing products made in a country without that government mandate, that are still working, while no products made in your country work)

- company shuts down, goes out of business, and a new company with a different name (but all the same employees and products except for the logo) opens every month

- all software created must be maintained indefinitely into the infinite future for free by...magic elves?

kakarot2• 10 years ago

The consumer takes on some of the cost. But the only reason you are so for this legislation is because you don't understand the full-scale logistics involved in mandating such a feat as well implementing them as a tech company. If you want to mandate security to include well-established, cost-appropriate solutions, that's cool, but requiring future updates to these IoT devices is not the correct solution. It brings into question free speech issues for one, requiring companies to support the life of products they no longer wish to support. And the only companies who will not feel the full brunt of this would be the elite.

ams61102• 10 years ago

Liability should be on the people who connect these things to the public internet. The owners of the devices. Like with cars, you have certain responsibilities and liabilities when you operate a potential dangerous machine on the public roads.

In the case of ISPs providing cable modems and routers and DVRs and other boxes to their customers, they should be responsible for keeping those secure.

If people start getting fines or sued over what their internet-connected devices are doing, they might stop connecting them to the internet, or shop more carefully for devices or providers that are secure.

zzleeper4• 10 years ago

True, but then botnet owners would be using foreign IPs to do US attacks and viceversa. So you need punishments that you can actually enforce.

Florin_Andrei2• 10 years ago

So grandpa goes to Home Depot, buys a fancy new thermostat and installs it at his home, the device gets hijacked by the archetypal 400 lb hacker, and is used to take down a major commercial site, and then grandpa is liable for the whole thing?

I don't think so.

You make a little gizmo with shitty security, you are liable. Full stop.

acomjean• 10 years ago

This makes a case for data caps or charging internet by usage which frankly nobody really likes. Maybe outbound caps for home users (if thats where a lot of the DDOS are coming from). The risk of getting shut off or a higher bill if your transmitting to much data might make people start noticing and securing their devices.

Analemma_2• 10 years ago

Like with cars

That's not the same thing at all. For a car to hurt somebody, the owner has to be actively using it, and doing so in a reckless or negligent manner; and furthermore, note that reckless operation of a car can hurt somebody even if the manufacturer built it perfectly. (if your car somehow did hurt somebody when nobody was using it, then the liability probably would belong to the manufacturer).

IoT devices are the exact opposite: they can cause harm when the owner has done nothing wrong, and they can only cause harm if the manufacturer screwed up and did not secure it propertly.

All the liability belongs to the producer.

joe5150• 10 years ago

Car owners are not liable if the car is designed to be dangerous and they don't know it.

Ar-Curunir2• 10 years ago

In an age where security vulnerabilities can cause your thermostat to overheat your house and your smart lock to lock you out, maybe it'll be a good thing that companies that don't have good security practices and update mechanisms will be locked out of the IoT market.

davidhowlett• 10 years ago

I think that the negative externalities of poorly secured IoT devices scale linearly with the number attached to the internet whereas the cost of writing more secure software and keeping it updated scales much much more slowly with the number of installs. I think this means that the best solution is to have tiered levels of certification and regulatory burden based on the number of times a piece of software is installed. Ideally tiering would be done on the total bandwidth of all devices with a piece of software installed but this would be much more difficult to measure and enforce then counting installs.

If no product with less then X thousand installs has to deal with the regulatory overhead of certification then experiments and early stage companies are less likely to be squashed. I would also exempt open source software from having forced audits or minimum standards for security. This would have the side effect of encouraging more companies to publish their firmware open source which would also not be a bad outcome.

To prevent companies manufacturing lots of almost identical product lines each individually under the limit for audits I think it would also be necessary to count all products that share more then half their code as one product.

pdkl95• 10 years ago

Ok, then they should be liable for any damage their lack of maintenance causes. The cost of properly maintaining your product is nothing compared to the lost business and repair costs caused by these DDOS attacks.

Being a small company doesn't mean you should be able to ship a defective product that is guaranteed to eventually become part of a botnet.

trendia• 10 years ago

If you are unable to connect because of DNS problems, switch your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 (Google).

Edit: sorry there, this worked for me but apparently it's not guaranteed.

lell• 10 years ago

Didn't help me, heroku is still unreachable with DNS servers changed to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

cafard• 10 years ago

That would resolve neither python.org nor cpan.org this morning.

rashkov• 10 years ago

Having good luck with opendns 208.67.222.222

They have other IPs as well, but that's what I'm using

esharte• 10 years ago

I had to move my DNS servers off google today to get twitter to load.

LeoPanthera• 10 years ago

That didn't help me this morning. Switching to OpenDNS worked for Github but not for Twitter.

losvedir• 10 years ago

I switched temporarily from those to Open DNS's 208.67.222.222 and things are working for now.

But, just to be clear, it's not Google's fault: 8.8.8.8 are not the authoritative name servers for the sites that are down. Rather, Dyn, the provider of the NS is down, and I presume Google (8.8.8.8) is correctly not returning any IP address because the underlying authoritative name server is not.

Presumably Open DNS is working because it's not abiding by the TTL it's supposed to? It's caching the underlying authoritative name server longer than it was told?

detaro• 10 years ago

Yes, the call it "SmartCache": https://www.opendns.com/about/press-releases/opendns-introdu...

elmigranto• 10 years ago

No luck with Google DNS for me, but Yandex seems to work:

    77.88.8.8
    77.88.8.1

https://dns.yandex.ru

drinchev• 10 years ago

Probably, but I would definitely avoid giving all my DNS resolutions to a *.ru domain.

The reputation of the government - shutting down access to websites that hurt them is kind-a no-go for me.

Jerry2• 10 years ago

US government is not much better... or have you forgotten all those hundreds of FBI/ICE domain seizures. How many have Russians taken down? If your'e gonna use DNS servers and you don't want someone to track you, use the DNS server based somewhere where your government cannot access them. If you're in the US, it's easy to assume that US DoJ/FBI will not be able to subpoena Yandex or some Chinese internet provider.

CalChris• 10 years ago

Yeah, that worked for me in SV. But I'd rather not rely on anything Putin related.

nik736• 10 years ago

Thanks!

jpeg_hero• 10 years ago

bloomberg was down for me.

I had disabled adblock at their insistence...

i re-enabled adblock and I could get the article. hmmmm. maybe something about the 50 unrelated js calls?? perhaps?

gorbachev• 10 years ago

Here's a better article from Mr. Krebs:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/ddos-on-dyn-impacts-twit...

Personally I think his case is pretty convincing.

dates• 10 years ago

krebs is loading reaaaaal slow for me...i wonder if its related? or just a lot of people linking to it today.

ComodoHacker• 10 years ago

502 already. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

And the article about BackConnect mentioned by Bloomberg: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

dom02• 10 years ago

Guess what, Krebs' site also receives a spanking at the moment. (Given that it's hosted by Google I find it highly unlikely to go down under normal traffic)

brightball2• 10 years ago

From the article:

"Last month, a hacker by the name of Anna_Senpai released the source code for Mirai, a crime machine that enslaves IoT devices for use in large DDoS attacks. The 620 Gbps attack that hit my site last month was launched by a botnet built on Mirai, for example."

I repeatedly hear people refer to IoT devices that are notoriously difficult to update...yet this Mirai code is technically able to access millions of devices and bend them to its will.

So what I'm wondering is just, what prevents the good guys from using Mirai to slurp down every available device to patch the vulnerability that allowed Mirai to work in the first place?

It seems like if vulnerabilities in these devices can destabilize the entire internet that it should be perfectly viable as a response to actively look for those vulnerabilities, patch/minimize them and notify their creators of the issue.

tw04• 10 years ago

The problem is you're reading the situation wrong. Mirai isn't about an exploit, it's IoT devices that haven't had the default username/password changed.

Now, you might say "why doesn't a good samritan just login to all of those devices and change the password to something random?"

OK - ignoring the fact that THEY would be committing felonies in several countries... what happens when the device manufacturer wakes up and decides to patch these devices via that remote access? Suddenly the password doesn't work, and the end-user can't change it because... what's the procedure for changing the default ssh password on a light bulb?

Technically you could make the situation better by writing a worm that changes the passwords, but at this point even that is a lost cause since mirai has a command that will change the pw on all infected hosts.

inostia• 10 years ago

More specifics about Mirai bots and their numbers:

https://threatpost.com/mirai-bots-more-than-double-since-sou...

raverbashing• 10 years ago

Not only East Coast, Twitter can't be resolved in Ireland/UK right now (I assume the mobile app uses some kind of 'dns pinning' as that is working)

profmonocle• 10 years ago

(I assume the mobile app uses some kind of 'dns pinning' as that is working)

The app was down for me until I switched my WiFi network to use OpenDNS. It's possible your phone has the DNS record cached, or it's using a different DNS server. (Is it on cellular?)

Hardcoding IPs into a mobile app typically isn't done because it makes changing your infrastructure extremely painful.

ilaksh• 10 years ago

DNS is actually fairly centralized the way it is actually used.

We need protocols and systems that are designed to be distributed from the outset.

bcheung• 10 years ago

I know the TTL is set really low for a lot of DNS entries but this recent outage got me wondering if it makes sense for servers further down the chain to hold onto it for longer than the TTL, honor it when they are able to get a new DNS entry within a reasonable amount of time, but fall back to the "expired" version if the authoritative server is not reachable.

I'm wondering what would be the negative consequences of this and if they outweigh the benefit of being more resilient to these types of attacks.

idlewords• 10 years ago

There was a good discussion on this in a sibling thread earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12762110

nastyasiwannabe2• 10 years ago

I'm suggesting this just so someone more knowledgeable can debunk it. Suppose FBI or someone up there had a meeting and said "in three weeks, there could be millions of armed Americans who believe that democracy was just stolen from them by some evil dictator in a massive globalist conspiracy. These people love twitter. Is there a way to make twitter go down without making it look like we're suddenly pulling the plug?" The answer was yes, we'll do a test run Friday.

galdosdi• 10 years ago

I'll bite.

It would take a lot longer than a couple of hours of twitter being down for that to have a useful effect. For something as major as the presidential election result, it would probably take minimum a week before people got bored and moved on to a different topic.

So this kind of attack that only takes something out for a few hours would have no useful effect for an actor that wants to prevent people from discussing a recent event.

IMHO, it would be hard in general to take out a service run by a serious IT organization (of which there are admittedly few, by my definition of serious) for more than a few days unless the attacker carried out non-trivial physical damage (eg, bombing multiple datacenters, murdering multiple system administrators, etc) or managed to somehow destroy enough backups (which in a serious IT shop, should be hard, as there should be some offline cold backups that require physical human activity to destroy)

nastyasiwannabe2• 10 years ago

Sure it wouldnt work for an extended time. I'm just thinking that in an unpredictable situation, a few hours might be all you need to diffuse it. For example suppose someone claims they have evidence of some crazy shit happening at the polling places, and the only thing that can be done is to for Patriots to seize the equipment at the polling places before the globalists can cover their tracks.

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

Do you really think of twitter as the center of right-wing lunacy?

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

Why do a test run at all? So that every security expert is on edge when it does happen?

... Perhaps if you try to argue that they did it in order to make sure everyone was on edge for the election... but even then it makes very little sense.

jlgaddis4• 10 years ago

If the government wanted to shut them down, it would likely be easier for them to just get a judge to issue an order (an NSL, perhaps?) to Twitter's upstream Internet providers to cut off their service.

pc2g4d• 10 years ago

I always thought DNS had enough redundancy built-in that this sort of thing wouldn't really have much effect. But here I am unable to access websites, simply because name resolution isn't working. If my local DNS server were caching things longer there would largely be no issue.

Falkon13133• 10 years ago

Yeah, DNS entries are usually (or at least used to be) cached for what would seem like long enough, but I guess it doesn't really work the way it sounds. "a hierarchical decentralized naming system [that] provides distributed and fault tolerant service and was designed to avoid a single large central database" doesn't sound like it should be so fragile. Having single 'authoritative' servers for the sort of thing that should be inherently distributed sounds more like an Achilles heel.

rrggrr• 10 years ago

These attacks are possible because the US Congress hasn't extended tort liability to manufacturers of software and network hardware. The full weight of the US products liability bar will quickly and rapidly motivate manufacturers to ship secure devices. The lack of accountability is enabling vulnerability.

nradov2• 10 years ago

Who is the "manufacturer" in the case of FOSS?

niftich• 10 years ago

Whoever puts the FOSS on the device

egypturnash4• 10 years ago

I am a non-programmer who reads HN and keeps up with tech news in general.

And every time I read about the IoT botnet, my immediate response is to look around my apartment at my Internet-connected lights, and wonder if they're part of it.

How can I find this out?

Is anyone making a tool that a non-technical user can run to squint at their network and look for evidence of Mirai, or anything else trying to take advantage of this niche?

There are plenty of tools with a reasonably simple interface that will tell me if my laptop/desktop computer is infected with something. But what can I use to diagnose the health of all of the other computers proliferating around my house?

How can a non-technical user easily monitor the overall health of their connected household? Is this a project anyone is building? Because I think it's definitely something that needs to exist now.

dmourati• 10 years ago

The best place to do this is at your border. You probably have a cable modem or router or some such that connects your home to the internet. You would typically install software known as IDS (Intrusion Detection System) such as Snort there and look for anomalous traffic.

As for a non-technical solution, it will be difficult to implement. It requires some computer know how and time. Such a secure device could be created or better yet offered by the manufacturers of the modems/routers frequently deployed in homes.

pmlnr3• 10 years ago

The last time I played around with Snort[1] I realized I'm lightyears away from being paranoid compared to the default settings :)

It would be good to have an IDS with bare minimum settings, easy to turn on layer after layer, though I understand it's tricky.

[1] https://www.snort.org/

Retr0spectrum• 10 years ago

I might be wrong, but in the case of Mirai I'm fairly sure you're safe if all your devices are behind NAT.

robolange• 10 years ago

Doesn't Mirai use UPnP IGD to work around NATs/firewalls? I imagine a lot of people have that activated on their router to play video games and whatnot.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/who-makes-the-iot-things...

Edit: I guess it's more accurate to say that a lot of poorly designed devices use UPnP IGD to work around NATs/firewalls and Mirai takes advantage of this to infect them.

rfrank• 10 years ago

WireShark is the first thing that jumps to mind, although I'm not sure if easy for non-technical users is the way I'd describe it.

https://www.wireshark.org/

avip3• 10 years ago

To be part of Mirai network, your device needs to have telnet access open to the world AND use default factory credentials (which in turn must be on the lines "admin admin" or "root root").

pmlnr3• 10 years ago

For non-technical users, I'd suggest the following:

Turn off the devices you don't want to check; leave only those up you want to investigate.

Visit your router on the web interface and see if there are any graphs are possible to check for things like requests/second or packets/second. If it's really high while you're not actively doing anything, that's a clue.

Visit the UPnP settings on the router. If there are ports listening for incoming internet connections, turn the UPnP off on the router.

If you can SSH to your router, log in and start collecting data with tcpdump[1]. This later can be analyzed with tools like wireshark[2], which can show you per protocol what is going in. Most of the botnets use telnet- or IRC-like interfaces which are, in most cases, plain text commands, so it's possible to spot them.

Apart from this: reset everything to factory and change all the passwords before letting anything on your network.

[1] https://www.linux.com/blog/tcpdump-tutorial-beginners

[2] https://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/ChapterIntr...

mcbits• 10 years ago

For non-technical users, ... routers ... packets ... UPnP ... SSH ... tcpdump ... wireshark ... protocol ... telnet ... IRC ... plain text commands ...

I think you unintentionally helped to cement GP's point. There is a huge opportunity for some kind of little box - vetted/certified or even insured - that non-technical users can plug in, click Next > Next > Finish, and be notified when any device on their home network starts acting suspicious.

egypturnash4• 10 years ago

Looking over all the replies this comment received, I think my plan for seeing if my apartment's Internet Things are on any botnet is going to be "bribe that security researcher I flirt with sometimes to visit my place and run some tests". Which is not really a solution that scales, either for that friend, or for people who don't happen to run in the kinds of circles where that's someone they could conceivably trade favors with.

And it's probably not gonna get any better any time soon, either. Because I'm not sure there's a money stream in making this something a non-programmer can do. And maybe there shouldn't even be a money stream in this - maybe there should just be huge-ass fines to motivate as many people as possible along the chain from "my Internet Thing" to "the Internet" to include a white/grey hat or three on their team very early in the design process of making their camera/light bulb/pacemaker/router/modem/whatever. Although if someone reading this can figure out a way to get a money stream out of making it a lot easier to see the health of your home's devices, and keep them safe, that might be a decent YC app for you.

How do we add an immune system to the Internet Of Things? Because we sure as hell need one.

jnbiche2• 10 years ago

bribe that security researcher I flirt with sometimes to visit my place and run some tests...[w]hich is not really a solution that scales...

Assuming the flirting displayed is sincere, that security researcher may prove much more scalable than you'd imagine.

smartbit• 10 years ago

Dowse is trying to help you out http://dowse.eu/#sec-2-2 Dowse is a transparent proxy facilitating the awareness of ingoing and outgoing connections, from, to, and within a local area network. ... Dowse communicates with users in various ways: via a web interface, but also pushing messages via audio (synthesized speech), Bonjour and simple apps interfacing with personal mobile devices.

You can even hook up Dowse to your TV set and show a live animation of where on the your internet your devices connect to https://youtu.be/vquh3IXcduc?t=74

egypturnash4• 10 years ago

Oooh. I think I may have finally found a use for the Raspberry Pi sitting around my apartment.

rabboRubble• 10 years ago

My reading of Krebs On Security (krebsonsecurity.com), Mirai scans for factory default passwords or hardcoded default admin credentials. Going at this as a non-technical person, I would:

* Inventory all IOT devices in your possession.

* Find the device manuals and make sure you've changed the default password(s). Note there may be devices where it appears you've updated, but that have secret credentials you can't modify.

* Make note of which of your devices do not have an obvious way to change the factory default password.

* Keep an eye out for lists of devices that are known problems, here is one such sample list: https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/09/iot-home-router-botnet-lever...

* Check each manufacturer to see if they have issued a firmware upgrade to address security issues. Apply update.

* Think about retiring devices that appear on the "bad" hardware lists or the devices with unchangeable factory defaults.

Hope this helps.

reacharavindh2• 10 years ago

Perhaps a naive question, but Why can't a DNS provider identify such participants in a DDOS and ban their IPs forever?

JayNeely• 10 years ago

Because IP addresses are often shared resources. Your ISP gives each customer an IP address (often a temporary one), and then that customer's router system handles assigning private, local-network-only IP addresses to any devices connecting through the network.

So if a DNS provider starts banning public IPs (which are the only IPs it sees), you could end up with an entire college getting banned because of one hacked webcam in one student's dorm room.

Or someone in an apartment somewhere with (unknowingly) a hacked thermostat finds their internet no longer works (DNS provider has banned them), so they reboot their modem, which causes their ISP to provide them with a new IP address. Guess what happens to their old IP address? It goes back into the pool of available IPs that that ISP can assign to other customers, and more and more banned-from-DNS addresses keep getting passed along to innocent, un-hacked customers.

reacharavindh2• 10 years ago

Ah, (inter)networking 101. Thanks! Then, is there a way for the DNS providers to know the ultimate recepient at all? MAC address? (or does it get truncated at the lower levels and not passed over IP protocol?)

jlgaddis4• 10 years ago

Yep. The effects of this can be seen when someone sets up a new e-mail server on an IP address they've just acquired, a.b.c.d, and -- as soon as they connect it to the Internet -- are unable to send outgoing e-mail because the IP has previously been blacklisted due to another user's actions.

anotherevan• 10 years ago

Did any one else find the style of writing in this article really annoying? Things like using prefacing statements with "so-called" or putting terms in quotes to make them seem suspect.

e.g.s:

a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack

York said Dyn was “actively” dealing with a “third wave” of the attack.

GrinningFool• 10 years ago

I tend to assume that the larger publications use it in the underlying sense of "..as it is so called".

davidf18• 10 years ago

The failing here as in many cases such as a number of security breaches was a lack of investment. As someone with an engineering degree that worked as a VLSI design engineer, good engineering requires * backup systems *. This costs money that people don't want to spend. In some cases such as a startup they might be cash short, but many firms have the money but don't want to spend it ensuring that they have well engineered software that includes backups, up-to-date software and security upgrades, hiring (expensive) highly competent software engineers and consulting firms.

The mistake in this case was relying on one vendor for DNS. Amazon Route 53 would be a good alternate vendor for DNS, for example.

patrickg_zill• 10 years ago

I think even basic home routers these days, have enough cpu power to handle egress filtering.

If you have an iot device, by its nature it only needs to connect to a few services and hosts.

The manufacturer can provide this in their docs, and give an automatic config url that the router uses to load its egress rules.

The rules to load are displayed and the user checks they are legit by comparing to the printed version in the manual, then clicks ok. Or something like that.

Rate limits in terms of packets per second, total bandwidth both instantaneous and over time, are set also.

woliveirajr2• 10 years ago

I love those comments about IoT and who should be responsible for error-proof products, or ISP monitoring traffic, or ...

Internet, in the beginning, was even more insecure. Including the computers and OSes. There were less abuse because few had resources and knowledge. Read some old software and you'll find all bad designs in it. Software didn't become worst, it's just targeted with more knowledge and intensity.

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