Free Speech and DDOS Attacks

http://blog.name.com/2012/04/free-speech-and-ddos-attacks/

by kmfrk • 14 years ago

39 29 14 years ago

blog.name.com

tptacek• 14 years ago

Attack? No! "Digital equivalent of a sit-in"!

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

so who had the balls to take the name?

http://registrar.schlund.info these fine people, apparently.

aes2562• 14 years ago

The domain was most likely registered with 1&1 Internet; both companies are subsidiares of United Internet AG, and from what I recall, domains purchased from 1&1 are registered with Schlund + Partner

sauteedbiscuits• 14 years ago

This isnt a good thing, its a bad thing. Name.com basically buckled from a threat and made this user move to a new registrar.

Hopefully next time they dont demand name.com reveal private whois or something else. Good on them for not suspending the domain/user, but this was NOT the customers problem. They had a legitimate website and you chose to take the easy way out. You should not have asked the customer to leave to another host, you should have fixed the problem yourself.

It is your responsibility as a infrastructure provider to have adequate DDoS prevention in place. Passing the buck to every extortionist that comes in is not acceptable behavior.

Now that people know that name.com is easy to push around, I suspect much more of these attacks will be likely. Best not to use name.com nameservers apparently.

res0nat0r• 14 years ago

It isn't that simple. Every provider has to weigh keeping up a single site, or having thousands of other customers impacted. Also there are few companies in the world that can handle gigabit DDoS attacks without a scratch, all of these things have to be considered.

justauser• 14 years ago

When large entities are involved, it's not unheard of these days for a DDOS attack to be in the size of 50+ Gb/s . There are not many providers that can withstand this and maintain a responsive platform for other customers.

If DDOS attacks are now being organized by nation states, how would you keep your business running? I don't think Name.com did anything wrong here.

rwallace• 14 years ago

Name.com did, to their credit, resist the demands long enough to allow the domain to be moved to a new registrar instead of being simply dropped or handed over to the attackers.

Having adequate defenses in place to withstand any attack, even one of unprecedented scale, would of course be the ideal. Are you offering to pay higher fees to finance this?

Monotoko• 14 years ago

I sympathize with the provider here, if the systems weren't designed to take the heat, do they continue trying to defend (at the risk of the other 1.5 mil) when they believed they couldn't keep everything online, or discuss with the user how to put their domain somewhere with more resources to defend against this kind of attack?

Any small company would do the same (hosting etc) to stop everything going offline. You can't blame name.com for being overwhelmed, because this sounds like a DDoS from an organized group who knew what they were doing, which is quite hard to mitigate against.

alain94040• 14 years ago

What if, instead of asking for the domain, they had asked for $10,000, would you have paid? What about $1M? Where do you stop?

I sure hope that my registrar would never give in to anything like this, and would actually know how to defeat DDOS.

toomuchtodo• 14 years ago

Since when is providing advanced DDOS/DOS protection included with sub-$100/month hosting plans?

rollypolly• 14 years ago

The attackers need to read up on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

eru• 14 years ago

Their might be more interested in chilling effects than on boxun.com alone?

gojomo• 14 years ago

Not enough people know about the Streisand Effect; perhaps we should threaten Wikipedia to take the article down?

kijin• 14 years ago

The Chinese don't give a damn about Streisand effect.

Which sadly means that ISPs around the world will need to watch out for attacks every time there's political turmoil in China.

NHQ• 14 years ago

I had imagined the linked page was going to say "We got DDOS'd and we're proud!" b/c DDOSing is a kind of free speech, like spending money.

jsprinkles• 14 years ago

Why are DDoS attacks still a problem? Can't we, the network engineering community, figure this out? It's 2012, for God's sake.

I feel like if every network engineer cared about DoS attacks and actually watched traffic leaving their AS for such attacks (they're relatively easy to identify), the world would be a much better place. I can't tell you how many times I've e-mailed abuse contacts in APNIC regions and heard nothing but silence -- or, occasionally, the attack intensified. And you can't tell me the big telcos like Comcast don't already have packet sniffing gear in place to penalize BitTorrent and so forth; can't you quickly identify LOIC and the other bullshit and yank that customer offline or shape the hell out of them?

This is ridiculous, and might have a solution as simple as, "if your network DoS attacks mine and you don't deal with it, I reserve the right to depeer you. Good luck explaining to your customers why they can't hit Google any more."

I might have high expectations, though, since countless ASNs still let packets with forged addresses out.

sohn• 14 years ago

Unpeer the whole China.

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

cloudflare http://www.cloudflare.com/ were quite popular here a while back. i had the impression that they had solved this.

runeks2• 14 years ago

The reason we haven't solved DDoS attacks is because we're working on solving the problem at the wrong level. We're trying to solve the wrong problem. This video explains very clearly how this is the case: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8

Short(er) explanation: we no longer use the internet primarily for the purpose of communicating between two parties. But the infrastructure of the internet forces us to obtain data by having a conversation with a supposedly trusted party, even though a line of communication is not really what we want; we want a specific piece of data (an internet page, the latest exchange rate of USD to EUR, the ISO for the daily image of Ubuntu 12.04, etc.). It doesn't matter where we get it from (location is irrelevant), it only matters that it's the right data. Our use of the internet today is all about data. Yet, the infrastructure of the internet (TCP/IP) is location-centric; not data-centric. Data is shuttled between computers based, not on the data, but on the location of the computers. This creates the possibility of DoS attacks. The TCP/IP protocol is designed to efficiently route packages from a source to a destination, and a DoS attack simply uses this feature maliciously. When someone is hit by a DoS attack, the routers aiding in this are just following the rules of TCP/IP: routing packages to a destination. That's their job. What we need is a data-centric infrastructure. An infrastructure where data is not obtained via a connection to some location, but an infrastructure where data is simply accessed by sending a request for a specific piece of data into the cloud, and receiving the data from someone (and verifying that piece of data via its hash and signature).

Instead of me obtaining the NY Times front page like this:

* Wireless USB dongle sends out signal. Signal is picked up by my router (and everyone else's routers in near proximity, but all these other routers discard the signal). Router sends out a signal which my dongle (and all other routers/dongles pick up), but only my dongle uses this signal to obtain an IP address that the router knows. Over this connection I tell the router I want to connect to nytimes.com. Router connects to a server (name server) and asks it what the IP address is for nytimes.com. Router establishes a connection to nytimes.com, based on the IP it got from the nameserver. I send some commands over this connection where I ask for data, nytimes.com sends data, router hands it over to me. I now assume that I have the correct data - the front page of the NY Times, because some name sever said some IP address corresponds to nytimes.com, and this IP address sent me this data.

I would obtain it like this:

* Wireless USB dongle sends out a "data ID" for the NY Times front page. Any of the routers in my near vicinity that has a copy of the NY Times front page sends out a signal containing this data. My USB dongle pick up this data (and all other routers/dongles do so as well, the difference is that they are able to use this data as well, if they're looking for it). My computer checks if the data is signed using the public key of the New York Times. If the "date" field of the data is equal to or newer than, say, "now minus on hour", I accept this data as the NY Times' current front page.

A DoS attack is easy in the former case, because there is a connection. Not so easy in the latter case, because routers don't willingly forward any data; they are data-aware and if they receive a copy of the NY Times that isn't signed by the NY Times' signature, it's discarded/ignored.

If you want to understand it better, watch that video. It's an excellent talk. Really puts things in perspective.

chc• 14 years ago

It sounds like you're essentially talking about caching proxies, since if the data only lived on NYT's server, it wouldn't matter whether you were looking it up by "data ID" or IP address. Don't we have that already? Is there some significant difference I'm missing?

viraptor• 14 years ago

> actually watched traffic leaving their AS for such attacks (they're relatively easy to identify)

Are they? Are you talking about a trivial "let's use the whole bandwidth everywhere" attack, or a more sophisticated "find a bug in website X and make every visitor do one request to DDOS target" class? While any brute-force attack is easy to spot, how do you propose dealing with well organised attack relying on involving random unsuspecting users? (suppose you don't have the Referer header like in the website attack scenario)

Of course this depends on the destination. If you want to DDOS the network, you need lots of traffic and a small, well organised attack may not be possible. But if you want to kill someone running a couple of servers on a 100mb connection, that's trivial.

codexon• 14 years ago

DDoS attacks are way too easy to do now, and something needs to be done about it.

Anyone can go to www.hackforums.net for a free UDP flooder (called shell booters there), or rent one capable of over 1 gb/s for $5.

Or if you want to do it yourself, pick a cheap throwaway vps from www.lowendbox.com, go to www.gametracker.com and grab IPs from COD4, Wolfeinstein ET, Medal of Honor, etc... and send UDP query packets with your IP spoofed as the victim. This will amplify the size of your attack 20x or more and hide your IP address. You can easily get 10-20 gb/sec attacks like this.

TomGullen• 14 years ago

"At this point we helped the customer transfer the domain to another registrar"

Seems a bit off to pass a customer with a lot of baggage over to a competitor, AND actively help them do so.

credo• 14 years ago

boxun's manager claims that the attack was ordered by China's security service. name.com is a US company and boxun.com is also a US website.

Why is the US government not doing anything to stop the attackers ?

aes2562• 14 years ago

Speaking of DDoS attacks, this article is showing:

> Error establishing a database connection

Free Speech and DDOS Attacks

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