Pardon my ignorance, but was the attack the reason some websites (like Slowtwich) have been running a slow as molasses today? Others (like Yahoo) are fine. But, certain sites have been insanely slow.

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

Yes I can't imagine living in a world without the internet. I'm sure it simply couldn't be done :)

Hey I am old enough to remember Prodigy and when we went from a 14.4 to a 28.8 modem! That 486 processed was the biz.

Just too old to start from scratch and too young to say fuck it and buy a ranch and retire.

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/kj

http://kjmcawesome.tumblr.com/

Not sure about ST specifically, but yes, the attack slowed a lot of things down. One of the targets was reported to be Amazon Web Services - they are the server platform on which many, many websites and cloud services companies sit.

Agree with the OP - as a tech lawyer, this was a bit of nervewracking day.

Maybe.

To use moron terms, someone went in and ripped up the internet's phone book.

To make a little more sense - a DNS service was crashed. DNS is what puts words to locations - ie. slowtwitch.com vs. 192.145.250.7 or what ever it would be. The particular DNS service handled a lot of major sites, but not all them. Twitter is one, and Reddit, and Spotify, and HBO.

If you went to a site that it couldn't fine, it would take a while to find it. If you went to a site that it could find, but then the site went and looked for ads that it couldn't find, it would take a while too.

I'd not put 2 and 2 together but now this makes sense

Thank you! That was the best I have heard it explained and it finally made sense to me! ;-p

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

So basically it was the ads' fault

It's going to get worse before it gets better. This is from mid-September of this year:

https://www.schneier.com/...someone_is_lear.html

Definitely work a read. This was around the same time as Brian Krebs being taken down with the largest DDoS in history at that point, which was around 620gbps. I've heard this latest one was over a terabyte per second!

I wonder if it is Russia flexing its muscles in response to some of our politicians.

Psshh.. that's Romney talk. Or is it Clinton talk? Hell, I'm not sure anymore.

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"The right to party is a battle we have fought, but we'll surrender and go Amish... NOT!" -Wayne Campbell

I had no problems, but I use Google DNS servers on all my routers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

no doubt if facebook or twitter went down tomorrow we'd probably all be better off for it. but the degree to which the internet pervades everything now is just insane. banking, tax, email communication, etc etc . . . if a strike hit the wrong place, there would be real pain for just about all of us, not just people trying to post a selfie on instagram.

-mike

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

I was listening a little bit about this on the news. Probably an ignorant question but what is the point of something like this ?

Is something like this a single person or group just being jerk offs ? Kind of like on a smaller scale what prank phone calls or things like that used to be ? Is it government espionage ? I don't understand why someone would go through the trouble of doing something like this with out an end goal.

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"I think I've cracked the code. double letters are cheaters except for perfect squares (a, d, i, p and y). So Leddy isn't a cheater... "

As per an article posted earlier in the thread. Likely an attack from China. The guess is that they are testing the defense systems in place.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

It's usually a group of people working together. Unless it's something like wikileaks I don't think their is a point to this stuff. It's vandalism in the digital age.

Not an ignorant question, but enough time on the Internet has taught me not to try and guess why anyone does anything anymore. /pink

For a more serious answer, you can't give a motive to it unless you know who was behind it. We don't know. There's a lot of speculation as to who was behind it, but the fact is that there are a lot of people who could pull this off. There is a network of corrupted computers that exploited Internet of Things (IoT) devices which was responsible for a VERY large DDoS last month against the website http://www.krebsonsecurity.com . If you're interested in learning more, that website has a very clear explanation of it.

But, the source code for building that network of corrupted computers was released at the beginning of October. For anyone to see, and use. So it really could be anyone. The scale of it makes people thing of state sponsored actors, but the reality is that it could be just about anyone as far as I can tell.

Why do they do it? For "teh lulz". They do it because they can (assuming it's not actually state sponsored). Other groups in the past that did similar attacks (Lizard Squad, for example) did it because they could and they then monetized their network of computers offering it up for public use for a fee. For lizard squad, it started in August 2014 and at that point I know 100% for a fact that they were doing just because they could. No motive. Just being dicks. The Internet is full of people like that.

Just like the lavender room. /pink

Baby monitors took out our credit card processing (paypal) on Friday. Yeah. Think about that.

Here's a partial list of devices used to mount the attack:

http://oi67.tinypic.com/t87rlx.jpg

I have said for years that the Internet of Things will be the downfall (maybe not the downfall but there will be some MAJOR internet carnage) of the net. All it takes is one shitty device on a network and your entire network is compromised. Think about how many devices are out there on networks where the default admin account/password hasn't been changed. It is going to get a LOT worse before it gets better.

Here is a GREAT video of how easy it is....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqKafI7Amd8


Anyone can do this.

Absolutely. Let me blow your minds. This conference room phone is really a Linux computer. Ancient 2.8 kernel. Ancient Apache web server build listening on port 80. And a telnet server enabled.

Here's a Cannon printer hacked to run the classic video game Doom. The security implications are well understood here, yes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPWi5yJK3zo

Nearly everything that has wifi or a network jack has a full computer inside it. Your smartphone is a computer. It can do everything a real computer can do, if hacked just right. The user interface we are all familiar with (icons, apps) is more restrictive than what the device is actually capable of.

I guess that's what I don't get and will probably never understand.

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"I think I've cracked the code. double letters are cheaters except for perfect squares (a, d, i, p and y). So Leddy isn't a cheater... "

They did it for the LULZ.