BlueSecurity Fall-Out Reveals Larger Problem

mdrebelx writes "For anyone following the BlueSecurity story, sadly the anti-spam crusader has raised the white flag. Brian Krebs with the Washington Post is reporting that after BlueSecurity's announcement, Prolexic and UltraDNS, which were both linked with BlueSecurity through business relations came under a DNS amplification attack that brought down thousands of sites. While much of the focus about the BlueSecurity story has been centered on the question of what can be done about spam, I think a bigger question has been raised - is the Internet really that fragile? What has been going on is essentially cyber-terrorism and from what has been reported so far the terrorist clearly have the upper hand."

Re:Yes, the internet is that fragile

[__aaclcg7560]

Like everything else in the computer world, you have to wait for the next great upgrade of the Internet called Web 2.0! Of course, I'm going to wait for SP1 to come out before jumping on the bandwagon.

Yes this was cyberterrorism

[jmorris42]

> What has been going on is essentially cyber-terrorism and from what has been reported so far the terrorist
> clearly have the upper hand.

Yup, and I'd have loved to have seen the US gov use this as a perfect 'live fire' exercise. After all, if they can't stop a few punk spammers how can we have any confidence they could stop a determined attack by the usual terrorist suspects?

Perfect opportunity to test all the phases of response, from tracking the responsible parties all the way to eliminating them. Ok, in this case a SEAL team would probably have to be tasked to capture em instead of just dropping a few bombs on their sorry asses. Or if, as I suspect, the ringleaders are in the US or other western representive nations, just have em all arrested.

Maybe they pay more for a tiered solution....

[colinbg]

Seems to me maybe the solution is a tiered internet where spammers pay more to use the bandwidth... oh wait, sorry wrong discussion.

Hesitant to out source

[dave562]

It sort of makes one hesitant to out source IT operations to a place like India. Hmmmm... maybe it's time to DDoS India and bring those jobs back to the US. If the Indian's are such technology mavens, maybe they'll find it in their best interests to resolve the DDoS / DNS Amplification issue and then we can all welcome our new, outsourced Indian overlords. =)

Dear Homeland Security

[subl33t]

Dear Homeland Security: please look closer at Redmond.

This is terrorism. Everyone with a trojaned Microsoft box is aiding and abetting.

Thank you, Linus and Steve.

Re:interesting question about fragile

[stfvon007]

I would think being dead would be a major inconvienence. Anyway with lives actually on the line if the internet goes out ( Such as a failure of a 911 call to go through when its needed via VOIP, or a doctor unable to access a patients medical information at another hospital to know a person has an allergy to a certain medication. People can die due to a DoS attack.

Re:motivation

[vertinox]

As much as we hate the NSA and other invasive orginizations they impose structure and laws. Chaos is the alternative.

Emperor Palpatine, is that you?

DON'T WORRY GUYS!

[Anonymous Coward]

I backup the internet every night at 10 pm (PST).

Re:Just to give you an idea...

[6ULDV8]

"I work for an unnamed backbone provider"

Makes it kinda hard to cash the checks, huh?

Re:Yes, the internet is that fragile

[Rix]

Web 2.1 [blartwendo.com] is out and ready.

Re:interesting question about fragile

[paedobear]

No, they are interested in terrorising people, that's why they're called terrorists not killorists.

Re:interesting question about fragile

[Rekolitus]

There's this program available for Windows called FastCache [analogx.com] which has been more than handy when my ISP's DNS servers have gone down and so forth. You use it as a nameserver by setting your DNS addresses to localhost, and it caches entries for several days.

It's not something you typically thank every day, but when for whatever reason DNS fails for me, it's a lifesaver.

Does anyone know of equivalents of this on Linux/Mac?

Re:Interesting how things change

[tsm_sf]

Myth. See the entry on Paul Baran here

I did, and you're sort of wrong. Here's the relevant bit from your link:

This design, which included a high level of redundancy, would make the network more robust in the case of a nuclear attack. This is probably where the myth that the Internet was created as a communications network for the event of a nuclear war comes from. As a distributed network the ARPANET definitely was robust, and possibly could have withstood a nuclear attack, but the chief goal of its creators was to facilitate normal communications between researchers.

So it wasn't designed to survive a nuclear attack, but it might be able to. Sort of like Donald Trump's hairpiece. (he's on billboards all over town right now... we're so sick of his mug)