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Communications The Internet Network United States

Some Believe the US Has Been Hit By Large-Scale DDoS Attack — Others Are Skeptical (forbes.com) 112

Posted by BeauHD from the anyone's-guess dept.
Forbes reports major internet outages across many companies including T-Mobile, Fortnite, Instagram, Comcast, and Chase Bank. Some experts believe it is the result of a coordinated attack, others not so much. Slashdot reader bobthesungeek76036 shares the report: On June 15, a flurry of reports on a number of different services in the U.S. have indicated that the country may be experiencing a coordinated DDoS, or "distributed denial of service" attack. These attacks are malicious attempts to disrupt or shut down targeted servers by overwhelming them with traffic from multiple sources. According to outage aggregator Downdetector, users reported outages in major mobile carriers (T-Mobile, Metro, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Consumer Cellular, US Cellular), Internet providers (Spectrum, Comcast, CenturyLink, Cox), social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitter), games and game services (Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty, Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network), streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, Twitch), banks (Chase Bank, Bank of America), delivery services (Doordash), and other major platforms like Google and Zoom.

Of yet, the would-be source of these attacks is still unknown. @YourAnonCentral, a popular Anonymous twitter account, speculates that it, "may be China as the situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating." The same Twitter account cites the Digital Attack Map, which tracks the "top daily DDOS attacks worldwide" offers a visualization of the map of these attacks, but some, like cybersecurity expert Marcus Hutchins, claims that the map is "badly plotted" and does not currently "indicate an attack against the US." All major carriers are listed on Downdetector, but Verizon claims its problems are being artificially represented through attempts to connect to T-Mobile. [AT&T also cites "other carriers' networks" as posing problems for users.]
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Some Believe the US Has Been Hit By Large-Scale DDoS Attack — Others Are Skeptical More

Some Believe the US Has Been Hit By Large-Scale DDoS Attack — Others Are Skeptical

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  • No. (Score:5, Informative)

    by troutman ( 26963 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:36PM (#60188096) Homepage

    It is not a DDoS attack. T-Mobile's problems are self-inflicted from work to merge their network with Sprint.

    CloudFlare has a lot of visibility about these sort of things, and they say there is no major DDoS. No Internet Exchanges are showing any increased traffic levels verses recent levels.

    https://twitter.com/eastdakota... [twitter.com]

    • Well, there sure was something amiss yesterday, which caused me some stuttering while streaming TV and radio from the US, but it is over now.
    • My organization had a full outage. We're still investigating, but dont think it was a DDOS either. But it is possible it was targeted to some vulnerable software version on one of our appliances. Or maybe it was also a coincidence. Because once we bupassed it, we got services back up.

      • I had an intranet app go down yesterday. (It was a standout because it rarely goes down.) It would look like A DDOS attack but the fact that I stopped and restarted the app it worked fine. I couldn't find any high usage. I didn't give it much thought, except for me trying to find the RCA on why it hung is difficult.

        There may be a glitch in some software. I would probably see if the others reporting the DDOS were all using the same software/os/hardware combination.

    • Cloudflare can't tell botnet traffic from kick in the pants.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      I've been watching live attack maps for the past two days. Cloudflare needs to maybe pay some fucking attention. The majority of shit was coming out of Brazil. T-mo and Sprint barely have jack shit there. Reddit was knocked out, most of my game servers were throwing 1,000ms+ pings, I even had problems getting slashdot to load.

      Wanna try again when you actually have information?

  • usual conspiracy theories (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:19AM (#60188182)
    So basically one company fucked up, everyone else impacted and some idiots ("experts") blame it on attacks without any evidence.
  • ....far across the universe. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man, who even now fight to survive .

    • ....far across the universe. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man, who even now fight to survive .

      Is that why researchers are looking for intelligent lives with instruments pointing _away_ from the earth?

  • Then, starting yesterday: silence.

  • The Internet is an easy target by my estimation. System security just about everywhere is a joke. So far as I can tell the big players out there have had the capability to more or less brick the Internet anytime they want. They just haven't had a reason to do it.

    • Ah, but all their lowest-paid, most disgruntled and most bribeable employees have always had ample reason, and lacked only coordinated timing. I believe that is what we're seeing now.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by edis ( 266347 )

      then, so even more, are comments

      create an account, or welcome as an ac, and you are that voice missed

      then, intelligence still can tell the difference, thus ruin shallow kagebistic hopes

  • My 10yo was disappointed because he couldn't join a big fortnite event on a US server last evening (we're in Europe).

    Could the Fortnite event have been mistaken for a DDOS attack? I don't know how massive these things get...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ModelX ( 182441 )

      Could the Fortnite event have been mistaken for a DDOS attack? I don't know how massive these things get...

      Probably not, there were only about 1M reported online.

    • I was writing up a traffic comparison to show why a Fortnite event would be much smaller than a significant attack, and probably less bandwidth than an episode of Stranger Things. Then I saw an article that said the event hit it's cap of 12 million players before it started. 12 million sure is a lot of people.

      Articles say Fortnite uses about 100 MB per hour per user. With 12 million users, that would be 1200 million MB.

      A very large DDOS was reported to be 1.3 Tbps.
      That's 450 million MB.

      Yeah, the Fortnite

  • What level of writing is this? If SOME believe, then it means not ALL believe, which means OTHERS don't believe. Including your "Some are skeptical" part is ridiculous and unprofessional.

    • This is a traditional example of how not to write a headline or argument.

    • What level of writing is this? If SOME believe, then it means not ALL believe, which means OTHERS don't believe. Including your "Some are skeptical" part is ridiculous and unprofessional.

      Um, no, if "some" believe, it means some believe, period. You can not infer the beliefs (or disbelief) of anyone else form that. You are incorrectly applying logic to degrade others.

  • Of yet, the would-be source of these attacks is still unknown.

    Christ on a cracker. Does Forbes not have copy editors?

  • But I was working all day, remotely, using my Comcast connection to connect to our university’s servers. I saw no issues, and seemingly neither did any of our other staff or faculty (at some point we would’ve heard about it, guaranteed - even if they had to find a landline and call us).

    I’m sure there was a cell phone issue, given the coverage... but let’s not make it bigger than it is, Forbes.

    • Are we now seeing Comcast's revenge for Trump's tweets being cast upon all other service providers?

  • All DDoS attacks do is reduce our access to quality porn which, in itself should be a capitol crime.
  • I thought Fortnight was a game that was made by Epic Games.

  • If you had the capability, why would you demonstrate or test it in a way that would cause such an impact ahead of an actual conflict?

  • Anonymous? (Score:3)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @10:31AM (#60189064) Journal

    @YourAnonCentral, a popular Anonymous twitter account, speculates that it, "may be China as the situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating."

    Only an imbecile would make a statement like that. Not that Anonymous had much credibility in the first place, but this is just lame. So China is going to show their hand and demonstrate their cyberwarfare capability to cause some minor inconvenience to a handful of US companies because the Koreas are having their usual spat of the month? Absurd, and such nonsense shouldn't have even been mentioned in the summary.

  • suits blamed system outages on DDOS, I could retire today.

    DDOS happens, but it is rare in my experience.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by troutman ( 26963 )

      A nickel? Maybe just a penny... DDoS and "cyber attack" are always used as the convenient excuse. DDoSes do happen all the time, all day long -- but they are usually not big enough to cause much of a problem except for their target. Any volumetric DDoS under the single digit gigabits per second is not a problem for the Internet as a whole. If you or your website server is the target, it will knock you offline, and maybe also your neighborhood for a bit, until your ISP blackholes the destination IP. Y

  • Some Believe the US Has Been Hit By Large-Scale DDoS Attack

    Yes. It's called Covid-19.

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