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posted by mrpg on Tuesday August 01 2017, @11:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-captcha-2.1 dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Federal Communications Commission has told members of Congress that it won't reveal exactly how it plans to prevent future attacks on the public comment system.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Democratic lawmakers have been exchanging letters about a May 8 incident in which the public comments website was disrupted while many people were trying to file comments on Pai's plan to dismantle net neutrality rules. The FCC says it was hit by DDoS attacks. The commission hasn't revealed much about what it's doing to prevent future attacks, but it said in a letter last month that it was researching "additional solutions" to protect the comment system.

[...] "Given the ongoing nature of the threats to disrupt the Commission's electronic comment filing system, it would undermine our system's security to provide a specific roadmap of the additional solutions to which we have referred," the FCC chief information officer wrote. "However, we can state that the FCC's IT staff has worked with commercial cloud providers to implement Internet‐based solutions to limit the amount of disruptive bot-related activity if another bot-driven event occurs."

[...] When responding to another question about what hardware resources are being committed to improve the comment system's uptime, the CIO again said that revealing specific details would undermine the FCC's security.

[...] There are apparently no law enforcement agencies involved in the FCC's ongoing investigation because the attacks weren't significant enough. "The FCC consulted with the FBI following this incident, and it was agreed this was not a 'significant cyber incident' consistent with the definition contained in Presidential Policy Directive-41 (PPD-41)," the FCC said in its letter to House Democrats.

[...] Pai told House Democrats to trust him that the situation is under control.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday August 02 2017, @01:05AM (2 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday August 02 2017, @01:05AM (#547808) Journal

    DDoS protection shouldn't be rocket science anymore?

    Hmmm, sounds like something you could find carved in your headstone.
    What was your IP again?

    OTOH, maybe your question mark suggests you had some other meaning intended.

    If they want to get away from a DDOS attack maybe they go back to postal mail.

    The Quality of the input would probably be better.
    Why would submitters take seriously an on-line popularity contest?
    If you have to invest 49 cents, you probably believe in your position and can defend it far better than a Click Here vote. And it reduces the number of whack-the-monkey voters and their bots.

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 02 2017, @03:01AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday August 02 2017, @03:01AM (#547829) Journal

    If you have a high capacity links and agreements with backbone operators. It surely can stem some of DDoS attacks as they can be blocked before even being sent to the destination machine or its links. We are not talking about a home computer with a single link to a joke ISP.

    Otoh, maybe FCC is a joke these days..

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @04:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @04:09AM (#547836)

    There's a whole industry of companies that mitigate DDoS attacks, specialized like Arbor or as part of a CDN service like Akamai. Sure, theoretically someone could overwhelm or bypass them, and when that happens it will be news.

    That's without ISP controls and the flood protections on any current firewall.

    It is not rocket science. Are you seriously advocating postal mail?