Sun Grid DOS'd

feronti writes "So, it didn't take long... CNET is reporting that Sun's new Grid computing service (reported yesterday) has already been the victim of a DDOS attack. "

Jackasses

[AKAImBatman]

Why do people do this? Sun provided a publicly available text to speech service as a cute little marketing gimmick. Thanks to the efforts of these yahoos, however, Sun has moved the service inside the grid so that it is only available to subscribers. Cool things that could have been done with this free service (Sun suggests making blogs into podcasts) now can only be done by GridEngine subscribers.

And what have these self-righteous "hackers" proved? Abso-fracking-lutely nothing. Sun's Grid was never in danger, and they had no problem moving the service.

So thank you very much for spoiling things for everyone. I hope you "hackers" enjoyed it.

Sun Grid

[daeg]

Pretty damn cool idea, actually. I'm not sure about their demo application (unless the speech quality was superb), but a cool idea nonetheless. Could especially be nice for cracking passwords on things like RAR archives where you have to use brute force attacks. I imagine opening up old password protected archives could be very valuable to businesses (particulary since businesses tend to repeat passwords, e.g., discover one and you probably discovered a bunch).

Not very useful to the public at large, though.

Re:Jackasses

[networkBoy]

They proved something alright (from TFA):

That position dovetails with one long held by Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy. "Absolute anonymity breeds irresponsibility," he said in a 2003 interview. "Audit trails and authentication provide a much more civil society."

Re:Jackasses

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure some bozo will now chime in how the hackers were "white hats" and they were only trying to "help" Sun improve their security.

Yeah, sure.

This continual barrage of so-called "hackers" is doing only one thing: turning our computerised world into a gigantic "police state" of sorts. There will NEVER be a day when all security "issues" have been addressed. NEVER. But, thanks to the efforts of pinheads like these, our operating systems and environments are becoming more and more encumbered with security of every kind and type. We can't write a C program without having to worry about stack-smashers. We can't open a ZIP file without a virus scanner. It's hit and miss browsing the web...you may be the lucky winner of some kind of embedded trap Microsoft/Mozilla/Opera/whomever hasn't accounted for yet. And the arms race continues!

Remember the days when no one had a firewall? When you could happily "finger" someone's account on another system? Forget it..those days are long gone. We all live in gated communities now. Can't put your system on the raw internet without half a dozen kiddies with portscanners hitting you up within seconds. Oh but it's for "security". Sure. They're only doing it for my own good, as the apologists say.

Please, rewrite this in english.

[Tei]

Please somehome with good english rewrite this post.

Sun, as always, have some very good futuristic ideas. Ideas too good for nowdays, but will work on the future.

You already know Java, and "The network is the computer", and theres is another The Grid.

The Grid is another use of the internet, as The Web is the net of web pages, The Grid is the net of network resources shaped in a way that A Single Execution can run on a virtual giganteous virtual computer. Its not magic, only code written to use this level of paralelism will work, and you need to use some "standard" framework, but is still C, (or perl if you want) code. As I write this, theres some guys migrating applications to the Grid framework.

Actually the need for that giganteouse computational power on a simple C executable is experiemental data generated by particle accelerators like the LHC (aka, from the CERN, the same guys create the World Wide Web). Withouth the Grid you have not enough computational horsepower to analize that much data.

Sun, and these guys think this interesting use of technology will grown, and soon guys like Liberty, Visa, Bayer, etc.. will use that horsepower to crunch hugue computational problems, problems that huge that actually looks not feasible. And because The Grid use some sort of "p2p" alike technology ... You Can Join The Grid!.. and theres are lots and lots of grid nodes on universitys around the world. So your scientific app is calculated trough 90 nodes, that where 90 computers around the world, but you only execute a single C app (a C batch app).

With this setup, Its a non-sense that hackers attack sun. WHY?!!!.. The Grid is a idea a true hacker sould LOVE, not hate or attack. Imagine a world where "hackers" attacking the first web server to shutdown the worldwideweb idea. What lameness...

I am a hacker, and I think these guys hare not more than vandals withouth respect for technology, or withouth pride for scientific effors on IT.

Donkeys and Bureaucrats

[fm6]

There's no excuse for vandalizing somebody's system. But it wouldn't be so bad if Sun weren't so damned bureaucratic. I read in the article that the demo was still available to people who had grid accounts, which you just need a verified PayPal address to open. I have one of those, so I thought I'd sign up just to get a look at the demo. After 5 minutes of answering strange, intrusive questions (who do I work for? what projects do I have in mind? where's the money coming from?) I gave up. Of course, Sun didn't lose anything by failing to satisfy my idle curiousity — but I'm sure that serious potential customers are also being turned off by this.

I've contracted at Sun a couple times, and I'm continually amazed at their bureaucracy. The amount of pointless paperwork (now done through the web, but still tedious and time-consuming) is just mind-boggling. And I'm actually more patient with it than the regular employees, who vent like a volcano whenever the subject comes up.

Also, I have to point out that any freely available web application with high visibility has to be designed with a potential DDOS attack in mind. It's kind of disappoint that nobody though of this when they created that demo.