Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/business/internet-problems-attack.html

by pouwerkerk • 10 years ago

309 229 10 years ago

How long could this go on for?

cryptoz• 10 years ago

This particular attack will likely eventually be mitigated (hours? days?). But it seems there is nothing preventing similar attacks from starting at any time, and be less possible to prevent each time.

Personally, I fear we are closer to global-scale, machine-learning-based attacks that find vulnerabilities, exploit them, and change patterns on the fly. We may not have a stable internet any more.

Am I blindly fearmongering? I hope not. But these are new waters. Insecure IoT is growing every hour and there's no clear path to stop it from being exploited more and more.

leephillips3• 10 years ago

Trying to fight a war purely with defense is usually a dangerous strategy. The only long-term solution is to find the attackers and take them out.

codecamper4• 10 years ago

Not fully understanding TCP/IP, but could routers installed at ISPs disallow direct traffic to mid-point infrastructure?

I mean.. only allow traffic from/to leaf nodes.

consto• 10 years ago

Sure they could, it's called disconnecting your internet connection, unless you are arguing for every ISP to implement some sort of proxy, which itself would be mid-point infrastructure.

kylelibra• 10 years ago

Can't recall ever seeing the NY Times embed tweets in a story, is this a first?

edit: apparently it's because I mostly read the site within the app.

jlebar• 10 years ago

No, they do it all the time, especially for politically-related stories.

augustt• 10 years ago

They've done it before, especially for trump: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/us/politics/trump-apprenti...

tedmiston4• 10 years ago

I wonder if the embeds break when a tweet gets deleted. That was always one of my biggest concerns when using them: that someone else can change / break your article in the future.

danso• 10 years ago

The embeds resolve to plaintext when a tweet is deleted. In fact, the standard embed code includes the Tweet text in plaintext, so that at least the content is preserved

thomasthomas• 10 years ago

why i think adding an edit feature to twitter is thorny issue

tedmiston4• 10 years ago

Extensive commentary on this topic is in the update from Dyn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12759697

codecamper4• 10 years ago

If these sites hosted with google cloud, would they be less susceptible to ddos attacks?

atishay811• 10 years ago

This attack is on the DNS and niṛ in the sites themselves. The sites are working fine. We need better infrastructure for the internet.

palunon• 10 years ago

Google cloud can host your DNS zones for you.

cerved• 10 years ago

Typical Dark Army

codecamper4• 10 years ago

Is this the end of the Internet that news.com predicted back in 1995?

djsumdog2• 10 years ago

Are you talking about this Newsweek article?

http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...

pyre• 10 years ago

Looks like that author has continued down the path of that line of though though, if you look at the books listed on his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll#Books

codecamper4• 10 years ago

I just remember seeing this article on news.com cira 1995 that predicted the imminent demise of the Internet due to the commercialization of it. It worried that the net just couldn't handle all the traffic from all those 56k dialup hitting and getting email all at once.

So my comment was a bit on the ironic / goofy side.

tbihl• 10 years ago

I have no doubt we'll see the end of the global internet in the next couple decades, but it's going to take quite a few more of these before we get there.

lifeisstillgood2• 10 years ago

We seem to be needing more concerted action on what is a consumer minimum standard for an internet connected device.

Consumer devices have to be more secure because if the low user skill level - and interest.

I am always reluctant to say "there should be a law against it" but frankly if we cannot mandate minimum standards of uogradbility and security for devices we will just keep handing over our devices to the first person to scan them.

tapoxi• 10 years ago

It's controversial, but I kind of agree. You need FCC approval to broadcast a radio signal due to the risk of interfering with other traffic, and you should have FCC approval that your IOT device meets minimum security standards before being sold.

dwheeler• 10 years ago

It may be controversial, but I think there ought to be a law. Some ideas: http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/law-security.html

ozaark• 10 years ago

If only there were an app for consumers to securely scan their own network for unspoken traffic in these connected devices.

The amount of consumer IoT currently connected with default and often outdated device settings is beyond belief.

mjevans2• 10 years ago

Or you need to make it easier for the 'black hole' solution to be pushed further and further back to the sources of the bad traffic.

A remote site shouldn't be able to get you banned from the Internet (by it's self); but it MUST be able to say, "This host is being abusive, restrain them from sending me data". ISPs SHOULD use that information to evaluate if a host from their network might be compromised or otherwise a negative player. ISPs SHOULD also take steps to inform, and link to educational resources, customers which are being bad citizens of the Internet. ISPs SHOULD also be financially motivated (punishments to them) for allowing too many uncivil customers online; this might take the form of instead banning that ISP from the Internet as a whole.

snarfy• 10 years ago

this might take the form of instead banning that ISP from the Internet as a whole.

I agree with some of your points, but fracturing the internet is not a viable option. It might make sense if it were a healthy, competitive market instead of the near monopolies that exist today. Imagine banning Comcast, or AT&T.

jlgaddis• 10 years ago

So, as your ISP, I'm going to be held responsible for the actions of you, my customer/user?

Okay, if I'm going to be liable, financially or otherwise, well, then we're gonna have to make some changes around here.

First off, I'm going to have to heavily filter and restrict what traffic you can send out to the Internet. What isn't filtered or restricted is going to have to be inspected, logged, and retained for a period of time.

Next, because I can't be certain that you're RFC3514 compliant and that at least some of the bits you're sending aren't malicious, I'm going to have to prevent you from sending out any encrypted traffic. Instead of allowing you to use any DNS servers you want, you're going to have to use mine (DNS is heavily abused for DDoS attacks). Outgoing e-mail will be automatically redirected to my internal smart host (STARTTLS will be blocked, by the way) and I'm gonna have to log, read, and retain it all. HTTP traffic will be transparently proxied and all requests and responses will be logged and retained.

That's just the beginning. Are you sure this is what you prefer as your "solution"?

As a network operator, I believe that your ISP should be nothing more than a dumb pipe and allow the bits that you send to pass through freely. As an ISP customer, that's how I want my ISP to act. (If something gets reported or I "notice" you for some reason then, sure, I'll look into it. Otherwise, I try to fuck with my customer's traffic as little as possible.)

I'll agree that there is certainly a problem, but it is not because of ISPs.

mhaymo• 10 years ago

The standards don't need to be raised much. Banning the sale of internet-connected devices with non-random default passwords doesn't seem too intrusive for the benefits it will bring.

codedokode4• 10 years ago

Why rely on end devices? The infrastructure itself should be designed so that it cannot be broken that easily. Maybe we should return to metered connections, maybe we should implement a protocol to control routing.

The Internet has grown without proper planning using a lot of "quick and dirty" hacks (for example NATs, peering agreements) and today we just see the result. It reminds me of poorly designed email protocols that resulted in spam being the biggest part of email traffic.

woliveirajr• 10 years ago

I'd say [i]the Internet has grown using a lot of "quick and dirty" hacks [/i]

If internet should wait until all use cases were created, it wouldn't exist. It's power was exactly that people could think on how to create things on top of was available. Many RFCs came afterwards.

lifeisstillgood2• 10 years ago

As noted below, you need FCC or similar licences for wifi radio, why not something similar for the packers emitted.

Downside is that radio leakage licensing is fairly simple scientifically. Proving something is unhackable is harder ...

csallen• 10 years ago

Schneier wrote about related attacks just over a month ago in a post titled "Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet" (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/someone_is_le...)

msane3• 10 years ago

Hopefully it's not related threats about hacking during the election.

Remember that recently Biden openly threatened cyber attack on Russia if they make any attempt to tamper with the election. Which is completely unprecedented, as is the notion that DOD is openly saying Russia was behind DNC and other attacks.

cm21874• 10 years ago

Also what amazed me is that he would casually threaten to strike Russia. It seems that no one considers these attacks as an act of war. But that's what they are.

lambdadmitry• 10 years ago

It's not just DoD, eset found strong evidence to back the claim [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12764898

vacri• 10 years ago

Schneier's post is hardly prophetic. The idea that "china is attacking the internet" is so well ingrained, that this 2-year-old fake security attack map has "china mode", to make most of the attacks seem to come from China (part of the mockery of such maps): https://github.com/hrbrmstr/pewpew

optionalparens2• 10 years ago

Thank you, missed this piece but it was interesting.

I disagree with him on the point of "Who would do that?" He might be right about state level actors, but I think he discounts the motivations of crazy/disillusioned people, bored and curious people, and especially teenagers.

When I was a teenager, the Internet wasn't a thing yet, but we sure dreamed of all kinds of crazy schemes for taking out the phone company, power, anything really. We talked about anarchy and many "taboo" topics I can't mention here. The thing is we were good kids at heart and we had the discretion and morals not to act on those things. All of this happened in a time where our instant communication was the phone or meeting up in person. Today, it is infinitely easier to seek out like-minded people and to replace those who drop out. The ability to seek out confirmation and push is easier than ever as well.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people that don't have that. Just because someone is a misguided teenager or crazy person does not mean they do not have intelligence, organization, and skills. Many of us certainly did our share of things and had the power, but I wonder what might have happened if we didn't stop ourselves in some cases. While perhaps the organization and probing nature likely hints at something else, it's really not that unusual for people to just mess around. Some people as they say also just want to watch the world burn. A couple of rough years in my teens, I certainly felt that way at times. I did plenty of things I'm not proud of, many people just have no shame and will take it that much further.

In the end I probably agree in terms of who is most likely, but I am kind of surprised that there were not more possibilities mentioned. Even 20 years ago, attacking Internet infrastructure seemed an obvious thing to do to us and we used to love talking about fun ways to ruin things over a burger at lunch. I mean is it really that hard to fathom people would think about attacking targets other than some organization, government, or other kind of company's servers?

owaislone• 10 years ago

or Jen just dropped the internet.

cyberferret• 10 years ago

LOL - I just re-watched that episode last night, as it turns out. Hilarious. The Elders of the internet will be miffed!

tedmiston4• 10 years ago

It is too early to determine who was behind Friday’s attacks, but it is this type of DDoS attack that has election officials concerned. They are worried that an attack could keep citizens from submitting votes.
Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow internet voting for overseas military and civilians. Alaska allows any Alaskan citizens to do so.

I had no idea any states allowed voting online. I wonder if the general population will ever get access to that.

tptacek4• 10 years ago

Many of us in the industry hope not.

djsumdog2• 10 years ago

If they're absent T ballots, they're not counted until several weeks later (unless the total amount of absent T ballots is larger than the margin between any candidate to ballot measure).

combatentropy• 10 years ago

What does the T stand for?

function_seven• 10 years ago

"Absent T"

Is this a reference I'm not getting, a speech-to-text error, or a simple misspelling of "absentee"?

matt40774• 10 years ago

"absentee" – for those grasping for meaning in a sea of autocrat.

deepsun• 10 years ago

I wonder, how much electricity do these attacks spend on average? Is it significant for economy?

laurentdc2• 10 years ago

I don't think so. Modern botnets are mostly made of devices that are operating 24/7 already, such as compromised IP cameras, set top boxes, SOHO routers, IoT devices, etc.

The energy spent for TCP/IP stack usage is negligible at best, even when pushing those embedded CPUs to 100%.

msane3• 10 years ago

The energy spent for TCP/IP stack usage is negligible at best.

Not true, especially en masse. Even less true for wirelessly connected devices.

bogomipz5• 10 years ago

There is still real cost to moving those unsolicited bits at the target though. At the receiving end a server that that has all cores operating at capacity has a higher power consumption than a server that is somewhat idle - lower P states or even a C state. Power consumption is fairly dynamic in a datacenter chassis with Xeons. In addition there is an increased cost of cooling this increased heat dissipation as well.

e_e_e• 10 years ago

Brainstorming: We should make DNS mines like for Bitcoins

h4nkoslo• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

fowlerpower2• 10 years ago

The U.S. has changed the rules of engagment to state that any cyber attack can be met with real military counterattack.

If the Russians are behind it, after being emboldened by Ukraine and Syria, the United States has to respond. I'm not saying all out war but I am saying we have to show the Russians that this affects everything we are about. It affects our businesses, our elections, and our way of life.

I am saying there should be military action and if that leads to war then so be it, everyone will think twice about this sort of thing again and we will all be safer because of it.

drdrey• 10 years ago

if that leads to war then so be it

Well gee, slow down there buddy

JohnStrange• 10 years ago

That's a great way into a nuclear holocaust, and I appreciate it. I always wanted to test my prepper skills, although I have to admit that I'm not really a prepper, more like a guy who makes fun of them, and don't even own a Geiger counter (because the good ones are fucking expensive).

carbocation• 10 years ago

I am saying there should be military action and if that leads to war then so be it

I don't think that war with any nation, much less Russia, should ever be such a casual consideration. Measured in human suffering, military conflict is inestimably more awful than brief internet downtime.

fowlerpower2• 10 years ago

Of course I agree with you but it's not about the internet downtime.

It's about messing with or elections it's about the invasions. You let it all go on long enough and you will have much bigger problems in a few years time.

j1vms• 10 years ago

I disagree. A cyberattack that were a short/medium-term risk to lives being the exception to this. But a cyberattack that plausibly affects at most the economy (and a fraction of it at best), if it be so proved, should be responded in a way that affects an economy or the like. The world, as it is, already has enough human lives being ended each day or put at risk for what are often tenuous reasons at best.

codedokode4• 10 years ago

Would not disconnecting a cable from Russia or installing a firewall be a cheaper solution?

Jerry22• 10 years ago

Their next move would be disconnecting the US.

http://www.hisutton.com/Yantar.html

What then?

rohit89• 10 years ago

everyone will think twice about this sort of thing again and we will all be safer because of it.

Sure. Respond to an cyber attack on infra by starting a physical war that will permanently remove all infrastructure. Its the equivalent of burning down your building because a neighbor cut your cable.

War should always be a last resort - only when all other options are exhausted. Especially nuclear war.

gamegod4• 10 years ago

Irony alert:

"But technology providers in the United States could suffer blowback. As Dyn fell under recurring attacks on Friday, Mr. York, the chief strategist, said such assaults were the reason so many companies are pushing at least parts of their infrastructure to cloud computing networks, to decentralize their systems and make them harder to attack."

Pushing your infrastructure to cloud computing is not decentralization - it's centralization, and we're all doing it. Imagine if an attack like this was against AWS... we'd all be screwed.

Symbiote• 10 years ago

You're correct, it's centralisation, at least for the whole community.

It decentralises that one company's DNS -- instead of having one or two DNS servers, perhaps at two sites, they now have 20, at 20 sites. If someone wants to target them, they're probably better protected.

But it's the same 20 servers as a million other companies, so the chance of those servers being a target is much greater.

gamegod4• 10 years ago

But it's the same 20 servers as a million other companies, so the chance of those servers being a target is much greater.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I feel like my chances of being collateral damage on an attack against someone else is way higher in the cloud.

Even today with GitHub and other SaaS platforms going down, we were all affected.

smegger001• 10 years ago

The cloud can be more decentralized but it more expensive, Done properly having redundancy across multiple clouds aws, rackspace, google, azure, in geographically different areas with different internet service providers it can be done in a very distributed decentralized fashion, just no one actaully does that. Instead they throw everything on one provider and pray its is backed up and secured by that cloud provider better than the IT guy down the hall they just laid off.

paulddraper• 10 years ago

If you're talking rendering some VPS's, sure that's possible.

But that's a fraction of the cloud. It's hard to integrate every service the hopeful equivalent of every other service.

traskjd• 10 years ago

Interestingly, in some ways this is a big selling point of AWS/Azure/Goog. The absolute scale they can handle is way up there.

The downside of course, is that whilst their infrastructure can likely handle it, handling the bill associated with 'just scale up your service' could be worse than the attack itself.

deegles• 10 years ago

That's a good point. If anything, it makes DDOS attacks more effective since you can't easily scale up your bank account :)

stcredzero• 10 years ago

If Azure and Google would like to gain a competitive advantage over AWS, then I would suggest this: Build out a suite of tools for fighting DDOS. Enable private consultants and companies to provide this as a service. Do this in such a way, that cloud customers save money and have to worry about less. Hell, let companies jump in structured as insurance companies! Also bring in cooperation with law enforcement and use data gathering to catch and prosecute DDOS-ers.

atmosx2• 10 years ago

Isn't that the meaning the having multiple AWS regions? :-)

If you want HA at local level you'd go with AWS AZs but if you need real HA you need can do the same at region-level.

Of course not everyone has the money/need to go down that route, but it's possible and even advised for some AWS services.

JshWright• 10 years ago

Yup until this morning, AWS was using Dyn as the sole provider of nameservers for the us-east-1 zone. So this attack did have a pretty substantial impact on some AWS services until they updated us-east-1 to use the more diverse set of nameservers their other datacenters use.

unexistance• 10 years ago

so it will be eventually Cloud VS DDoS eh, both can scale indefinitely so the limit is money, which makes the DDoS guys wins, they practically stole CPU/RAM/NET where cloud providers need to buy hardware as usual

Unless we can somehow secure every net-connected devices, ha (I don't know whether to cry or laugh right now)

benmac• 10 years ago

AWS has considerable defenses against DDOS attacks of all types - here's the video from Reinvent 2015 which introduces many of Amazon's defenses as well as best practices - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys0gG1koqJA

Interestingly, the presenter notes that Amazon had seen a drop in DNS as an attack vector in 2015. I asked the presenter (Product Manager) why they hadn't productized the DDoS attack dashboard so you could be aware if you were being attacked (and it was being absorbed by AWS) and his response was that there was insufficient demand at that point to justify the developer staffing. He gave me his card and asked to request the feature so he could us it to make the case internally.

Does anyone here have stories of being successfully DDoS'd on AWS (other than by their own staff :) ?

duaneb• 10 years ago

It's orthogonal to centralization. Abstracting your infrastructure allows you to easily replicate infrastructure providing the same services.

This is only ironic if you expected moving to the cloud to be what provides the redundancy.

cookiecaper• 10 years ago

This is one of the many reasons AWS and cloud computing in general are way overrated.

I know of a company that pays an AWS bill sufficient to buy the equivalent of their pre-cloud datacenter's hardware every 1.5 months. The extra staff required to perform hardware maintenance would also cost about 2 months' worth of AWS each year (that means they're paying ~3x more than they would with hardware). Yet they moved to the cloud because it's the hip thing to do.

Cloud has upsides and things that are useful, especially for smaller proprietors who can take advantage of cheap droplets from DigitalOcean et al, but for grown-up companies, moving off your hardware shouldn't be automatic.

brazzledazzle4• 10 years ago

I think in some cases it might simply be the means to dump 1) people/groups that just don't have a large scale mindset and 2) bypass business processes that are absolutely not designed for large scale systems.

In that scenario you have a bunch of entrenched groups fighting about capex, capacity planning and budget all to get barely enough hardware to account for what you're doing in the next 3-12 months. Instead of taking a step back and creating a long term simple process for regular growth and replacement they get caught in the weeds because they have very old school mindsets.

Then you have your old school finance groups who are using terrifyingly delicate and complex interconnected spreadsheets to manage hardware expenditures and depreciation while maintaining old school draconian policies concerning CapEx budgets but allowing you to basically go nuts with OpEx.

You could try to change the culture in these entrenched groups who will view your attempts to make things better as political moves against them or you could just say "we're moving everything into the cloud" and make a complete end run around all of the people and baggage. The former is probably the "right" thing to do but the latter is going to let you focus on your product letting you get you back to being competitive.

abluecloud• 10 years ago

AWS was hit today, we saw a spike failures. Got hold of one of AWS guys and they basically noticed that the issue they saw in the US earlier in the day happened again in EU west. Funnily enough they probably could have avoided it if they'd deployed their mitigation to the other zones.

matt40774• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure DDos against http resources have become quite hard to pull of, which is why there was string of attempts to blackmail smaller email provider but nothing like it happens to similar startups relying on the web. Even the Linode attacks are only possible because they're highly target at a few critical systems there.

intrasight• 10 years ago

It's harder, but you can distribute your web resources across multiple cloud providers

gamegod4• 10 years ago

If GitHub and Twitter are struggling with this, what chance do the rest of us have?

mancerayder3• 10 years ago

AWS was affected at one point.

I fully agree with you about the paradox of how, in the intent to de-centralize we centralize into cloud VPSes and managed services.

The real reason for the move is that same showtune that we keep hearing in our heads and wish we could tune it out: it's cheaper to move from physical infrastructure to the cloud. It's cheaper to skimp on security by not updating IoT devices. It's cheaper to skimp on security because features need to come first. It's cheaper to outsource operational management to parties with less expertise in places that pay less. To spend less time securing infrastructure perimeters because it costs money.

We feel almost as if we feel comfort hiding behind heavyweights like Google and Amazon will protect us from the bad elements of the world, where we hear about major breaches every few weeks (eg., Yahoo being the most recent). Will this strategy pan out long-term?

With this DDOS, articles about machine learning picking up better password-cracking/guessing algorithms by having previously analyzed large volumes of passwords, major breaches in the financial world, talk of state-sponsored attacks (a la DNC emails) it certainly FEELS like the Internet has gotten a little bit more wild.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

There's also the difference between cabled systems, in which multiple elements can independently support load, and chained systems, in which any given link can fail.

The BBC was affected by the Dyn outage not because they themselves relied on Dyn, but because components of their site did.

adamiscool82• 10 years ago

It's fashionable to blame Russia these days, but what country manufactures the most IoT devices, and has the type of government that could mandate backdoor access?

dimino• 10 years ago

Who is... China?

tptacek4• 10 years ago

What "backdoor access" are you talking about? These botnets spread via static admin passwords.

danieltillett2• 10 years ago

I think what the OP is implying is that these static admin passwords were put as a deniable backdoor. If it was a Chinese gov scheme it is quite clever as a real backdoor would have been obvious, while this just looks like total incompetence.

msie• 10 years ago

It's been fashionable to blame China not so long ago.

lucb1e• 10 years ago

Did I miss it going out of fashion?

golergka• 10 years ago

This is true. Does this make the accusations less credible?

throw2016• 10 years ago

This seems so out of the blue, the last attack was targeting krebs for exposing extortionists. Who is being attacked this time and why?

There is a lot of talk of iot botnets but little to no evidence. This seems too vague and up in the air.

If all it takes is script kiddies and random extortionists to generate such large 1 Tbps scale attacks then we appear to be reliant on an unbelievably fragile base.

There is a growing realization of the need for more decentralization of services but these kind of attacks is going to drive more centralization if only Google scale companies can manage to stay up. I think this is drop everything and fix time for the IT profession.

cdvonstinkpot• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12763501

orthoganol• 10 years ago

WL's Twitter has claimed it was WL supporters. Although no one can really confirm what's going on with them since the Ecuadorian embassy events the other day.

cognivore2• 10 years ago

Kind of makes me wonder - why let up? Can it be mitigated at all? Wouldn't they have done so by now. Be interesting if they just kept piling it on until they've got the whole internet on it's knees.

nodesocket2• 10 years ago

Well because a lot of the companies that went down today, addressed the problem by now running a blend of different dns providers.

cognivore2• 10 years ago

But it hasn't really dropped off since earlier today.

misrab• 10 years ago

could we just move along with ipfs and a distributed web please guys, it's about time!

woodandsteel• 10 years ago

I agree. From what I understand, ipfs is designed to solve this problem (and several others). Maybe this will motivate the big actors to look into it seriously. Anybody disagree?

niftich• 10 years ago

I love IPFS but how exactly does IPFS/IPNS solve the DDOS problem? The FAQ entry on this is not very convincing [1].

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/171

mancerayder3• 10 years ago

Is it confirmed yet that so-called IoT devices were the bots?

Bruce was on point if so, arguing a couple weeks ago that accountability needs to happen on the manufacturers:

"What was new about the Krebs attack was both the massive scale and the particular devices the attackers recruited. Instead of using traditional computers for their botnet, they used CCTV cameras, digital video recorders, home routers, and other embedded computers attached to the Internet as part of the Internet of Things.

Much has been written about how the IoT is wildly insecure. In fact, the software used to attack Krebs was simple and amateurish. What this attack demonstrates is that the economics of the IoT mean that it will remain insecure unless government steps in to fix the problem. This is a market failure that can't get fixed on its own.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/10/security_econ... ("Security Economics of the Internet of Things")

rayuela• 10 years ago

I feel like I hadn't thought of this as a market failure until reading your post calling it that. You're absolutely right about it. That's exactly what it is and the need for government involvement is quite obvious now. Suppliers are going to need to be held liable for the negative externalities their product offerings create, otherwise we're stuck at an equilibrium point where this situation does not improve.

exolymph• 10 years ago

Yup, it's a classic externality.

Splines2• 10 years ago

If ISPs were treated like a utility and charged per bit, customers would have an incentive to ensure that their devices weren't dumping traffic onto the internet. It's rare that you can see a dashboard showing your usage, even rarer to see a dashboard showing your usage, broken down by device.

orblivion• 10 years ago

You can call that "getting the government involved" but it's allowing suing for damages due to negligence, which is a fairly basic form of involvement, the sort of thing at the base of the market to begin with. That is to say, it's a bit strange to call this a market failure, because the market will (imo) take care of it once you can assign liability.

nradov• 10 years ago

Could the market failure be addressed through private class action suits against manufacturers of insecure IoT devices?

gamegod4• 10 years ago

And what about software developers? Should we be suing the kernel developers for leaving that privilege escalation bug in for 9 years?

speedplane4• 10 years ago

Nope. Many of these compromised routers and webcams are not based on U.S. soil, so they're outside of U.S. jurisdiction. But even if some enterprising lawyer could attach a legal claim to them, most of these guys are tiny, and while you could easily sue some individual companies out of existence, it would not have much impact on the broader problem.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

That's probably too distributed a set. You'd have to hit the device manufacturers (say, ARM or Intel), or vendors (Amazon). Hold them liable for problems.

Hit the distribution channel and I suspect you'll see a rapid increase in accountability and security measures.

codedokode4• 10 years ago

I think the main problem is that the Internet is decentralized. As it has no single owner nobody is responsible for mitigating the attacks and noone wants to pay for developing and implementing new protocols, installing new hardware.

Falkon1313• 10 years ago

More the opposite, because it's too centralized, an attack can take out the few 'authority' servers and knock off everything downstream.

nodesocket2• 10 years ago

"And in a troubling development, the attack appears to have relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors and home routers that have been infected..."

Is that really confirmed or just the reporter writing gossip.

tyingq• 10 years ago

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-powe...

According to researchers at security firm Flashpoint, today’s attack was launched at least in part by a Mirai-based botnet.

Seems in-between. Not confirmed, but not just conjecture either.

netcommentator• 10 years ago

Given national security interests, we need new laws: 1. IOT devices should not ship with default passwords. 2. Internet infrastructure companies should not be allowed to get "too big to fail".

cderwin• 10 years ago

As far as (2) goes, they actually need to be too big too fail. Otherwise, it's plainly impossible for internet infrastructure companies to be able to financially weather ddos attacks like this. These sorts of attacks are very expensive to mitigate, and part of the way we can do that is to centralize under services like AWS and collectively pay for ddos protection (short of the government doing so and separating our network from those of major malicious foreign actors').

dsr12• 10 years ago

Wikileaks tweeted:

"Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point. "

Link: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/789574436219449345

If their claim is true, does anyone think, it will turn many sympathizers against them? I don't think attacking normal bushiness is a good thing to do.

idlewords• 10 years ago

I think this tweet says more about Assange's vanity than anything else.

The motives of the attackers are much less interesting than the fact that such attacks are now possible.

virtuabhi• 10 years ago

"Assange's vanity than anything else" -> Don't get too ahead of yourself. Has there been any instance where Wikileaks had made a false claim?

peterwwillis• 10 years ago

So. Can we start talking about changing internet protocols to strengthen the integrity of internet network services against DoS attack?

Currently, the internet is very very open (as long as you don't live in certain countries). A baby monitor in Kansas can send arbitrary traffic to a router connecting a major financial services company in Hong Kong to an internet backbone. The idea, in a very hippy, world peace kinda way, is nice. But... probably not something we need to happen, much less should want to happen or allow, if good sense prevailed.

We have hacks in place that can prevent that particular situation from becoming too much trouble, but if you have enough baby monitors, something somewhere is going to choke. And really this is the point to me: you [as the network service provider] should not have to have carrier-grade infrastructure to avoid this scenario. If Casey Brogrammer wants to prop up a start-up on her DSL line (do people still have DSL?) she should be able to without fear of DoS. How do we do that?

I have no idea. But i'm betting it would require some rearchitecting of the internet and heavily modified protocols. Personally, I think the global BGP tables are gross (and, let's face it people, depending on RAM to perpetually increase in size while simultaneously decreasing in cost ad infinitum is not a realistic scaling mechanism), I think the many flaws in modern tcp/ip protocols are not designed with specific enough use cases in mind, and that the generalist design of the modern Internet has become more of a hindrance to efficiency and progress than a benefit. There is absolutely no requirement that we keep engineering ourselves into a corner, and IPv6 sure as shit isn't going to solve it.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

This would make an interesting Ask HN (or StackExchange or Reddit) question.

seanharr11• 10 years ago

Harold Martin held without bail (high risk of flight) accused of theft of 20 years worth of government (NSA) tools/data, Trump stating he will not concede the election, tens of millions of IoT devices used in DDOS attack, Assange (wikileaks originator) cut off from internet, DNC hacked and exposed.

A conspiracy theorists dream.

marmot7772• 10 years ago

Would longer, say, week long TTL along with some redundancy have prevented this problem? Can it be done now to prepare for next attack? That is, TTL shortened when making updates, etc., but then set to a week the rest of the time. Here's an article that I think could be useful: https://medium.com/@brianarmstrong/youre-probably-doing-dns-...

rms_returns• 10 years ago

Yet another thing to show us that IoT is a can of worms. Yes, the technology is very helpful, but from security perspective, are we ready for it yet? Why not make existing CCTV cameras and nanny monitors more secure before having IoT?

ThePhysicist• 10 years ago

I wonder why companies affected by these IoT-enabled DDoS attacks don't sue the companies building those devices, as they currently often choose security over convenience when it comes to securing them. If you can forensically prove that a large fraction of the attack was carried out using a given type of device it should be possible to hold the manufacturer liable for the damage, at least if no reasonable measures were taken to secure it (using blank or default passwords on the device could count as gross negligence).

I even kind of wish that somebody would do this, as it would finally provide a strong incentive for the manufacturers to think about security.

rasur• 10 years ago

Poul-Henning Kamp had this proposal on the subject back in 2011: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2030258

I think it's a good idea.

rmchugh• 10 years ago

Wikileaks seem to be claiming the attack for their supporters here: https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7895744362194493...

Any evidence to support that?

Chirael• 10 years ago

One of the Krebs articles mentioned an idea of a certification (similar to UL) which could be on products like DVRs and web cams. You can't ever certify something as completely secure of course, but the certification could indicate "firmware updatable", "no hard-coded default passwords" and "where there are passwords they are generated randomly and unique to each specific product" (not family of products). Maybe even "consumer can change all passwords to new randomly generated values". I can't say that all or even many consumers will care, but if ISPs stepped up and started emailing customers about suspicious traffic coming from their home networks indicating one or more devices may have been compromised, maybe a good number of consumers would start to look for that certification when they buy. Which is important because, let's face it, if insecure products don't actually impact sales then a lot of companies aren't going to care at all. You can try to punish bad behavior after the fact, but only if their government cooperates and even then I think many times they'd just fold up shop under one name and open again under another. You really have to address it at the point of purchase to affect company behavior IMO.

collinmanderson2• 10 years ago

"if ISPs stepped up and started emailing customers about suspicious traffic coming from their home networks indicating one or more devices may have been compromised" - I remember Comcast doing something like that back in 2008ish.

ehudla• 10 years ago

Worth noting that even of stories such as these (new media, tech heavy) coverage by traditional media end up on the home page of HN. Beyond this observation, it seems that this election cycle brought home the importance of journalism for many people.

tedd4u• 10 years ago

Since it's impossible to update many permanently-insecure "IoT" devices we may need laws to legalize gov't permanently bricking them.

progman• 10 years ago

Are there any downloadable DNS lookup tables which could be used as hosts.txt or /etc/hosts in case of emergency?

I know that DNS is organized in root zones with hierarchical subqueries. A global hosts file which contains the whole IP space is sort of unfeasible because domain names change within seconds.

However, in face of the current attacks the DNS maintainers should seriously consider to offer downloadable hosts files so that we could use them temporarily to circumvent DNS queries in cases of further attacks.

marmot7772• 10 years ago

Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

Related Stories