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posted by takyon on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the points-of-failure dept.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/someone-learning-how-take-down-internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses.

Sounds like as good a reason as any to develop a more distributed internet. Fight fire with fire - When the attacks are distributed denial of service on centralized systems, the solution is decentralization and distributed delivery of service (P2P).


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 15 2016, @08:33PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday September 15 2016, @08:33PM (#402457) Journal

    Incidentally, this has been part of Chinese strategy for years--cyberwarfare as part of a full-spread attack on the United States. Also included in that arsenal are financial warfare (China dumping US debt, etc), antisatellite weapons to blind the Pentagon, space-based weapons, economic espionage & securing important resources (SEE: Chinese investment in Africa), key strategic sabotage at places like the Panama Canal (controlled by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd.), and of course all the standard bombs, planes, etc. Their defense posture has been focused around retaking Taiwan by force, but they have made great strides in the last couple of decades toward better force projection.

    At the moment the US could bring an emphatic end to Chinese civilization in 15 minutes, thanks to its fleet of nuclear subs, but that edge won't last forever.

    (Sorry I don't have the right links to give you at the moment, but keywords "China" "Defense" "Congressional Whitepaper" should see you on your way to the right sources.)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @04:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @04:40AM (#402620)

    More likely to be groups of criminal hackers looking to see what price category on their price list each target belongs to. "So you want to take down Qualcomm globally and for how many hours? That's a category A target, you're going to have to pay a lot", "You want to take down this highschool? That's a category F target, oh we're running a weekend special for that category at the moment".

    I don't think the Chinese Gov would bother trying to DDoS just a few corporations. The cost-benefit for them isn't there. It would be "nuke" the whole thing or not at all and if anyone is trying to DDoS much of the USA, figuring out all that "precision" is a waste due to the pipes leading to the targets and other confounding factors. It's like trying to figure out how many cars to send to clog up the streets near an organization, when you are doing one target you might know a fairly precise figure, but when you have 10000 targets you might find the highways get clogged too ;). Why would the Chinese Government be interested in exactly how much "explosive" is required to destroy a particular corporation? All they need is a rough figure based on the known bandwidth of their pipes (which they might be able to find out in some cases if they ask Huawei ;) ). A state actor can buy that bandwidth beforehand from AWS, CDNs etc.

    Also included in that arsenal are financial warfare (China dumping US debt, etc),

    You might think dumping US debt is a good idea too when the USA was creating trillions of US dollars. That's like you owing the Bank two trillion "Phoenix666 dollars" and then one day you publicly create hundreds of billions of "Phoenix666 dollars" via Quantitative Easing. The Bank may try to sell off or convert the debt ASAP.

    antisatellite weapons to blind the Pentagon, space-based weapons, economic espionage

    All par for the course of being a responsible nation state protecting itself from the USA and nothing to be bogeyman scared about.

    & securing important resources (SEE: Chinese investment in Africa)

    What? Worried that China might actually improve Africa instead of messing it up like the USA? And somehow that threatens the world? ;)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @09:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @09:39AM (#402693)

      I don't think the Chinese Gov would bother trying to DDoS just a few corporations.

      You apparently didn't RTFA. Those are not "just a few corporations". They are the corporations on whose services a large part of the Internet relies to work properly. Even completely taking down Google would be a minor incident compared to taking down those companies.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @04:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @04:02PM (#402847)

        Well the article is full of shit:

        Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there's a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains.

        If Verisign goes down there are other root servers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server#Root_server_addresses [wikipedia.org]

        And if somehow all the registrars go down it doesn't affect the root server stuff. They are not the same thing.

        One company told me about a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks: testing the ability to manipulate Internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services.

        Who would do this? It doesn't seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do.

        That's more bullshit. Why wouldn't blackhats do something like this? There's money in it.

        Lastly, if you can somehow trick Verisign into making a mistake or having a crack in their defences (e.g. maybe a failover site/server is not as well secured) and get one of their signing keys that would be like stealing their crown jewels. You could sign malware and forge websites and have them trusted by millions of devices and people. China doesn't necessarily need this as much since they have control over CAs whose certs are trusted by millions of devices.