Has Progress Been Made In Fighting DDoS Attacks?

alphadogg writes "As the distributed denial-of-service attacks spawned by this week's WikiLeaks events continue, network operators are discussing what progress, if any, has been made over the past decade to detect and thwart DoS attacks. Participants in the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) e-mail reflector are debating whether any headway has been made heading off DDoS attacks in 10 years. The discussion is occurring while WikiLeaks deals with DDoS attacks after leaking sensitive government information, and sympathizers launch attacks against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and other significant e-commerce sites."

This reminds me of WW 1

[Fluffeh]

How a large chain of treaties, relationships and friends slowly spiraled downwards through a set of "Hey, you said you would help if..." into basically a war of people who weren't even remotely connected to the original event (assassination of a prince from memory) and general chaos for quite a while.

Amazon, Paypal, Visa certainly weren't connected to WL in any way prior to this, but have shown relationships and friends, and of course this means that friends to WL have now escalated the parties. I do wonder where it will all end.

Tired of this term...

[Anonymous Coward]

"sympathizers", when has this word ever been used in a good way
Nazi sympathizers
Russian sympathizers
Terrorist sympathizers

It's a term used to describe supporters of those who you think of as bad.
A neutral term would to be used is simply "supporters".

Re:This reminds me of WW 1

[Fluffeh]

The main reason that WWI started though was because the doctrine of mobilization still existed.

Yes, a spark set of a large chain of events. Sort of like a company refusing to deal with a website due to pressure and is now under a continued DDoS? Say what you like, WL has caused pretty much everyone to take a side in this ongoing and developing scenario. If that isn't the first steps to mobilization in a digital world I don't know what is.

DDOS = Digital Sit-in

[Palmsie]

A number of sources have begun describing DDOS attacks not as cyber-attacks but rather as digital sit-ins that are completely legal. A DDOS (Note the Distributed) is basically a ton of people visiting the site at once so that others can't. In essence, the unknowing visitor to mastercard.com is also contributing to the DDOS by merely visiting the already flooded site (albiet in a small way) just as an unknowing visitor to a bank is contributing to a sit-in by disrupting the flow of work. Their mere presence is making the work more difficult. However, there is nothing illegal about one person visiting a bank and standing there, just like there isn't anything illegal with a number of people going to a bank... at the same time. Ultimately, the question isn't "has progess been made" to stop DDOS attacks, but SHOULD there be progress to stop them? Sounds like an easy question to answer but in the case of freedom of expression, it makes the waters a bit more muddied.

Ironically criminal botnets are helpful here...

[antifoidulus]

The article talks a lot about botnets, but how many botnets are actually involved in the wikileaks attacks? I haven't read about any and my bet is that there probably aren't a lot. Why? Simple, the purpose of most botnets has turned from fun into profit. 10 years ago most of the botnets were designed just to screw with people, delete files, open ports, ddos ebay etc. However over the past 10 years a lot of the creators of botnets have found that they can use the botnets to generate lots of cash by moving spam, selling information etc. I doubt that very many of them would want to risk subjecting their botnets to discovery and removal by getting involved in in such a high profile attack.

Re:This reminds me of WW 1

[jhoegl]

Escalation is only a matter of time.
If these groups do continue to attack, then they will escalate because DDoS wont work.
The war on freedom on the internet has been escalating for some time now. I believe the recent events such as the DNS hijacking of torrent sites, the restrictions on Netflix network by Comcast, and DDoS attacks on wikileaks are possibly the tipping point. Its not that they all werent expected, but it is a lot to deal with within a few weeks. The internet we had is slipping away thanks to corporate greed and no one listening to the issues people have been talking about for years.
I say fight on, for it is important.

Re:how to fight off ddos attacks, in one step

[alvinrod]

I think you've inadvertently stumbled upon the difficulties of fighting DDoS attacks. Sometimes it's just a flood of legitimate traffic with no malicious intent behind it at all.

prevention is the best cure

[thej1nx]

Pretty easy. Make it standard for all OSs to default to updating/patching *without* prompting the user. I believe Chrome etc. do this already? A DDOS usually requires a botnet with lots of infected drones. And those in turn, usually require vulnerable un-patched systems. If someone actually wants the system to prompt them for applying updates, they can configure it so, instead of that being the out of box behavior.

Microsoft alone is responsible for majority of these. The old excuse of *this is because windows is most popular OS" is pure hogwash. When dozens of unix variants can update system components without requiring a reboot, it simply implies a horrible design on part of Microsoft. And the reboots and the required prompting for updates are what is responsible for at least half of the infected systems on internet. If the user needs to control the updates, it should be configurable, not the default. The reaction of your mom and pop, after seeing the usual "updates are ready" pop-up, is to simply ignore it.

Perhaps all that is needed is for someone to do an analysis of the compositions of Botnet systems and simply launch a class action suit against Microsoft. If they want to charge the public hundreds of dollars for a product that has a fixed cost and requires near-zero cost to replicate, they better be ready to provide a hell of a better product.

Re:Treating Us Like...

[Nursie]

The proper action to stop future leaks is three-fold.

1. Stop classifying anything and everything. Classified documents should be classified for a damn good reason.

2. Stop behaving like arseholes and then expecting secrecy to protect you. There should be no reason for politicians to be embarrassed because they shouldn't be pulling this shit in the first place.

3. Yes, improve security. But not without the other twqo steps, because then we'll just get better protection for corrupt ass-hattery.