42 replies to this topic

[Henshaw]

Yes and when our server is hit by the falling moon, it's dead, so we better not do anything to protect it against attacks, it's all useless anyway, if we can't protect it from everything.

Don't get me wrong! To fight something you must first understand what it is and its horizons.

Remember that DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is far far different from DoS
(Denial of Service) attack. Just to give you an example: a few months ago, the US government
asked certain organizations to help them bring down Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
Certain financial systems abided to that call. One of those was Master Card, which abided by
blocking all donations to Wikileaks through their portal.

Shortly later, through various social networks, volunteer hackers teamed up and fixed precise dates
and targets while shielding Wikileaks servers and mirrors. As a result, Master card 
went down for about three hours one monday mourning. So did PayPal and others. Monetarily you
understand the consequences. It was considered  by the hackers to be a form of civil strike in support
of WikiLeaks, so, they made it last shortly. The outcome is: today people keep donating to support WikiLeaks.

I don't want to talk here pro- or contro- WikiLeaks. I just want you to understand this phenomenon that
has the potential of hijacking even the greatest governmental forces. Because, to combat such phenomena,
you need to have deep insights of hacking techniques, net security and ultimately, a good approach.
Whoknows? Sometimes, your enemies may understand you better than your friends and team-up with
you for a better tomorrow.

[Sha0]

...
Shortly later, through various social networks, volunteer hackers teamed up and fixed precise dates
and targets while shielding Wikileaks servers and mirrors.
...

And if they used resources that they were not authorized to use, there's a chance that the resource owners might be upset about it.

If they used resources that they were authorized to use, their strike affects other users of MasterCard (and whoever else). People who have nothing to do with MasterCard's participation in a conflict with Wikileaks are dragged into a battle they know nothing about.

Now let's suppose that people inquire and ask, "Why did MasterCard go down?" and research reveals that "Volunteer hackers brought it down due to a conflict that MasterCard participated in against Wikileaks." This raises awareness of the conflict. Some people will be sympathetic to Wikileaks. Some people will be upset with "hackers" for disrupting the expected flow of business. Either way, the hackers' agenda has influenced many people, unsolicited.

Now suppose that I have an agenda that I feel is worthy enough to impact many people. If I choose to pursue it, who will judge me? If I accomplish my goal, is that all that matters? Do I need to take any responsibility for any damages I might cause, or can I dismiss such as casualties? What if I make a mistake or overlook a possibility?

...I just want you to understand this phenomenon that
has the potential of hijacking even the greatest governmental forces. Because, to combat such phenomena,
you need to have deep insights of hacking techniques, net security and ultimately, a good approach.
Whoknows? Sometimes, your enemies may understand you better than your friends and team-up with
you for a better tomorrow.

A difference I perceive here is that in a strike, the resources/service-providers are the ones striking. In the scenario you provide and that the hackers considered to be a "strike," you have a small group of people who do not choose only to cease doing business with MasterCard, but instead cause all people to cease doing business with MasterCard. Do you understand how I perceive that to be different? Do you understand how one might perceive that to be unbalanced?

"I have such power, and I shall use it to do good!"
"Good for whom, and how do you know?"

I've asked questions to "hackers" I've caught before, and they've become irritated or bored with my questions and ended the discussion. I guess my questions aren't for everybody.

[Henshaw]

... ...

Did you understand a single phrase of what I was talking about?
Did you grasp my point of view or you just criticize my words for criticism sake?

I am simply trying to layout the building blocks of a framework to solve a serious issue.
If you don't know or care to know what they do and what they are capable of doing,
then you really seem to have no intention of trying to stop them.

You seem to know little about cyberwar and cybersecurity.
I believe ideas should be analyzed from different points of view to make them mature
rather than just for criticism sake.

I thought we could be discussing hacking and cybersecurity techniques in order to
converge to a certain goal.
Obviously, I'm in the wrong place for such a discussion. Not your fault!

[MedEvil]

Henshaw, the goal of a DoS or DDoS attack is always the same. To make the server so busy with useless tasks, he can no longer serve it's purpose. NOT to crash the server.
If that happens, the server was eighter badly set up or simply faulty programmed.

Now back to our special case. Like i tryed to explain to you, this all boils down to a race or battle of resources, if you prefer.

The following things are known:
- resources of both parties are limited
- we can not reduce the resources of the other side
- striking back actively requires resources

From the above follow two things, to actively fight back during an attack while the server is already very busy, would cause us to reduce our resources further and bring our server to an halt even earlier. So we would need a second server to do the fighting back. But if we had a second server, we could use it to share the load, requiring the attackers to double their resources too.
Or if we use a more efficient (faster to respond to requests) server, than that would also require the attackers to increase their resources to 'win'.

Ok the attackers don't buy their resources, else they would have given up a long time ago, they steal them. But also stealing resources has limits.

btw. If we were attacked by billions in a coordinated attack like you suggest, our server would go puff in the very first second. Since that doesn't happend, it'save to assume, that our attackers lack the resources, you think they have.

The fact, that one can't outrun in a car a jet in a race, is completely besides the point, if the other racer has only a bycycle.

[Wonko the Sane]

The fact, that one can't outrun in a car a jet in a race, is completely besides the point, if the other racer has only a bycycle.

I guess it depends on the actual bycicle....

Spoiler

As I see it real problem is brakes..... (or length of track)


Wonko

[Henshaw]

Henshaw, the goal of a DoS or DDoS attack is always the same. To make the server so busy with useless tasks, he can no longer serve it's purpose. NOT to crash the server.

Well, depends on what they have in mind. Sometimes, someone would purposfully drive your server to a crash. DDoS is just one of many attack techniques  

If that happens, the server was eighter badly set up or simply faulty programmed. ...

I don't think Master Card and PayPal had setup their servers poorly to be crashed by a mid-level cyberattack.

The following things are known:
- resources of both parties are limited
- we can not reduce the resources of the other side
- striking back actively requires resources

Honest people and businesses have limited resources, hacktivists DON'T! A strike-back or a decent work-around may or may not need a wealth of resources. Depends on your technical skills and your imagination.

... Ok the attackers don't buy their resources, else they would have given up a long time ago, they steal them. ...

You just hit the point! Thousands and thousands of poorly shielded computers and networks around the globe are silently been hijacked by trojan horses and scams to serve a dynamic cloud. Cloud Computing is the art of summing the free resources of inter-connected terminals in a LAN, WAN, or the internet under the control of some light-weight operating system which perceives them as periferals of a single virtual super-computer.
Just imagine a trojan horse that sneaks into 1 million computers connected to the internet. It dynamically summs up their free RAM, rips some disk space for its dynamic virtual storage, summs up dynamically their free CPU power, takes advantage of their unused connection bandwidth, then uses them to build up a virtual super computer, remotely operated by ..."God ???". Now tell me how much RAM, CPU, etc. must a company buy to beat that trojan horse.
Some spyware go further to rip info from their victims and perform a bunch of public operations. A well programmed trojan horse, may not be perceived by even good antivirus software. So, you imagine how serious a DDoS attack can be. If at a certain predefined time, each of such infected terminals starts to fire tens or hundreds of concurrent connections towards a specific target.

... But also stealing resources has limits.

Educating computer users of the importance of network security, driving TV and internet campaigns for informative security, promoting the birth and growth of decent antivirus software, supporting anti-spyware, anti-cyberfraud, etc. may be a gigantic step towards confining exploitable hactivists resources. For the moment, they have plenty of exploitable resources.

... If we were attacked by billions in a coordinated attack like you suggest, our server would go puff in the very first second. ...

Since that is provenly technically possible, that is why the US government and many other European governments are actually restlessly concerned about the matter. You may be very surprised to know how much money is currently been spent by governments around the globe to fight cyberwars. The major threat is that more and more hackers are been generously hired by terrorist groups.

... Since that doesn't happend, it'save to assume, that our attackers lack the resources, you think they have. ...

You certainly need some informative updates in regards. Such things are very common today. Cloud technology, like some others, has been profoundly exploited by hacking groups since the early days of ARPANET that has long way evolved to be known today as the INTERNET. A couple of years ago, I personally experimented the power of cloud computing in a large-scale implementation for the telecommunications industry. No doubt, today, most major resource-hungry web hosts and business organizations are quickly migrating their systems to cloud computing.

[MedEvil]

Well, depends on what they have in mind. Sometimes, someone would purposfully drive your server to a crash. DDoS is just one of many attack techniques

If a system crashes during a DoS or a DDos, it's by own fault not the attack.
Such an attack does nothing but create lots and lots of requests for the server, more than it can handle. That's all!
If the server is poorly set up, it will waste all it's resources, in a futile attempt to meet the demand. A properly set up system, will always protect itself first and do it's job second. And not crash.

I don't think Master Card and PayPal had setup their servers poorly to be crashed by a mid-level cyberattack.

Where their server farms really crashed or just inaccessable to the public for days, due to the attack? I heared the later.

Honest people and businesses have limited resources, hacktivists DON'T! A strike-back or a decent work-around may or may not need a wealth of resources. Depends on your technical skills and your imagination.

First of all, stop with those cool new words. They're not hacktivists just hackers and second, i can asure you, that hackers are not wizards, Bond super villians or greek gods, they're human beings just like you and me. They can't snap their fingers and have resources appear, no matter how cool that lore sounds.
Think Ninjas here. Nothing magical, just very, very good PR.

You just hit the point! Thousands and thousands of poorly shielded computers and networks around the globe are silently been hijacked by trojan horses and scams to serve a dynamic cloud. Cloud Computing is the art of summing the free resources of inter-connected terminals in a LAN, WAN, or the internet under the control of some light-weight operating system which perceives them as periferals of a single virtual super-computer.

Again stop with the cool marketing language. Long before anyone ever heared about 'clouds' in IT, computers were interconnected. Wasn't cool back then, just useful, so it wasn't all over the tabloids.

Just imagine a trojan horse that sneaks into 1 million computers connected to the internet. It dynamically summs up their free RAM, rips some disk space for its dynamic virtual storage, summs up dynamically their free CPU power, takes advantage of their unused connection bandwidth, then uses them to build up a virtual super computer, remotely operated by ..."God ???".

I can also imagine to fly to other stars with superluminal speeds in my pyjamas, still the channce that that will have anthing to do with reality, is rather slim.
Remember that all computers infected with 'Trojan A' at any given time are not under a single control, EVER! Cause there are lots of hackers, each with his or her own goal. So the available resources always get split up. Not to mention some technical limits.
Why do you think all those hackers had to work together?
Why did not one do the job alone?

Now tell me how much RAM, CPU, etc. must a company buy to beat that trojan horse.

Actually very little. When a bull comes charging at you, you don't need big muscles or an armor to stop it. You just need to move aside to not get hurt.
The true problem arises, when you wanna stay reachable for anybody. <-- That includes always the bad guys!
We had some years back, a real bad attack. Our public server wasn't reachable each day for hours.
Still our intranet worked flawless, no server crashed and all external working employees as well as our costumers, that had service contracts, with us, had full speed access.
The bull always charges at the red flag, so don't stand behind the red flag!

A well programmed trojan horse, may not be perceived by even good antivirus software.

And we're back in the fairy tale land.
By now i'm faily sure, you believe magicians perform real acts of magic.

Since that is provenly technically possible, that is why the US government and many other European governments are actually restlessly concerned about the matter. You may be very surprised to know how much money is currently been spent by governments around the globe to fight cyberwars.

They spend money to protect systems against being hacked and secrets being spyed out, not to fight DDoS attacks! Though cyberwar sounds way cooler.

No doubt, today, most major resource-hungry web hosts and business organizations are quickly migrating their systems to cloud computing.

Yes, i'm absolutly sure they just started yesterday, to create clusters, once some marketing guy came up with the cool C word.
Cause you know, resource-hungry enterprises don't care about what's useful, just what's cool.

[Wonko the Sane]

Cause you know, resource-hungry enterprises don't care about what's useful, just what's cool.

Just as a side note, and OT , the trend for random promotions inside organizations has been mathematically proved to be effective (or, "cool"):
http://www.isgtw.org...-bad-and-random
Online simulator:
http://oldweb.ct.inf...p_material.html


Wonko

[Henshaw]

{...  ...}

May I ask you a question?
Are you a programmer? 

One of the mistakes believe to have made from the on-set of this thread is to assume
I am discussing with programming geeks or to people aspiring to some cool style.
I now believe this discussion is not in the right forum.
I'm sorry, I will now unsubscribe from this thread ! 

[Sha0]

... ...

Did you understand a single phrase of what I was talking about?

I don't know for certain.

Were you offering that, in general, an awareness of the usefulness and effectiveness of DDoS attacks could benefit people?

Were you suggesting that it's a realistic approach that reboot.pro could itself employ in order to help protect the web-site?

Were you suggesting that the reason why reboot.pro was under attack is because reboot.pro is (unbeknownst to its users, perhaps) involved in a campaign against some entity and hackers are fighting back on behalf of that entity?

Were you simply sharing a story about hackers and DDoS? That's honestly what I thought you were doing, and I'm sorry if my response didn't come off as a criticism against the hackers in that story. It was supposed to.

Did you grasp my point of view or you just criticize my words for criticism sake?

I don't know, you tell me. I didn't mean to criticize you, I meant to criticize the strategy of stealing resources and the strategy of aggressively pursuing agendas using vast resources.

I am simply trying to layout the building blocks of a framework to solve a serious issue.

Ok. But if I ever found rogue software running on my computer, I'd be boiling-hot mad that someone took advantage of whatever vulnerability let the software in, instead of discretely alerting the relevant vendors in order to help them to address the vulnerability.

Even if a wealthy benefactor was donating prizes to reboot.pro users and I got a non-web-browser pop-up window to inform me of my entitlement to such a prize, I'd still be just as boiling-hot mad; it's not the channel that I expect (and want) such a communication to come through.

If you don't know or care to know what they do and what they are capable of doing,
then you really seem to have no intention of trying to stop them.

If we're discussing people who take advantage of security vulnerabilities to further their agenda without authorization, then feel free to tell me: Why do they do that? Is it because the results are more effective than some other, less upsetting, means?

If we're discussing people that DoS or DDoS one or more web-sites to further their agenda (be that raising awareness of a conflict, or any other agenda), feel free to tell me: Why do they do that? Is it because the results are more effective than some other, less upsetting, means?

You typed about "what they do and what they are capable of doing." I'd just assume that the most skillful people can do whatever they want and can bring any computer resources of any adversary they might perceive to total destruction. If you're simply pointing out a specific instance of possible behaviour with your story, thanks for that. But when you say,

Sometimes, your enemies may understand you better than your friends and team-up with you for a better tomorrow.

I'll say, "thanks, but not so fast... Is means XXX to achieve goal YYY effective and civil behaviour?"

You seem to know little about cyberwar and cybersecurity.

I'm not sure why you've concluded that.

I believe ideas should be analyzed from different points of view to make them mature
rather than just for criticism sake.

Fully agreed! And that's why

I've asked questions to "hackers" I've caught before, and they've become irritated or bored with my questions and ended the discussion. I guess my questions aren't for everybody.

Sure I'd like to understand their perspective(s) better. But my personal experience so far has been as above. Too bad for me!

I thought we could be discussing hacking and cybersecurity techniques in order to
converge to a certain goal.
Obviously, I'm in the wrong place for such a discussion. Not your fault!

I haven't yet seen a moderator step in and end the discussion or suggest that it's off-topic. Maybe that will happen. But I'm certainly going to share my opinion that taking advantage of security vulnerabilities to "do good" warrants some extra careful consideration and carries some strong risks.

...
Honest people and businesses have limited resources, hacktivists DON'T! A strike-back or a decent work-around may or may not need a wealth of resources. Depends on your technical skills and your imagination.

Are you typing above that "honest people" != "hacktivists"? I'm under the impression that some people honestly believe that attacking some entity's computer resources is for a "greater good." The biggest problem I have with that approach is the lack of balance. As skillful as someone might be, their great scope of influence carries a proportional risk of damage.

Please consider, if you will, the Wikipedia story for Netsky worms (whether or not you believe it), suggesting that one virus writer included code for removing other viruses. And consider the story for Sasser.E, which attempted the same. Perhaps that could be considered a noble intention? But note that a coding error caused LSASS.EXE to crash! (Apparently.)

You just hit the point! Thousands and thousands of poorly shielded computers and networks around the globe are silently been hijacked by trojan horses and scams to serve a dynamic cloud. ...then uses them to build up a virtual super computer...

And imagine the associated costs and risks to the unknowing users.

Some spyware go further to rip info from their victims and perform a bunch of public operations. A well programmed trojan horse, may not be perceived by even good antivirus software.

0-day viruses cannot be prevented by lookup in virus signature databases that don't yet have the associated signatures, so sure.

So, you imagine how serious a DDoS attack can be. If at a certain predefined time, each of such infected terminals starts to fire tens or hundreds of concurrent connections towards a specific target.

Please consider I2P. Here is a project and efforts to produce something like an "anonymous Internet." One might still have some concerns about using it (I'm certainly not claiming that any of these points are true):

• It might be a social engineering attempt to actually keep a close watch on "sneaky people"
• The vast majority of the nodes might actually belong to a single entity, who can then try to identify you
• The algorithms used might be vulnerable to expertise that is not publicly known to exist

If you can review the codebase and if you know your cryptology, you might be in a better position to draw conclusions.

Now assuming that it works and becomes immensely popular, what happens when someone takes advantage of a vulnerability, but causes damage? Maybe you get an Irish Potato Famine. Most terrible!

Educating computer users of the importance of network security, driving TV and internet campaigns for informative security, promoting the birth and growth of decent antivirus software, supporting anti-spyware, anti-cyberfraud, etc. may be a gigantic step towards confining exploitable hactivists resources. For the moment, they have plenty of exploitable resources.
...

Some people might think that Microsoft products are popular targets for attacks because hackers dislike Microsoft or are trying to re-balance a perceived monopoly. Some people might think that they're targets due to exceedingly poor design. Some people might think that they're targets due to their popularity and the proportional scope of influence that successful attacks could achieve. Yeah, there're plenty of exploitable resources. I agree that education is a good thing, and so is: Stop doing it. Blah, blah, blah... (me)

[Wonko the Sane]

May I ask you a question?
Are you a programmer? 

Assertedly an ex-one :
http://reboot.pro/7244/page__st__12

But what is the point of the question?

Do, according to you, programmers (or non-programmers or ex-programmers) have more (or less ) rights to post/contribute/debate here?

What about Golgafrinchan phone sanitizers and hairdressers?



Wonko

[Brito]

Hello,

Henshaw, no need to unsubscribe from this discussion. We value constructive criticism and educated talks with different opinions.

As far as reboot.pro goes, we keep ramping up our defenses since 2005 to this point and still continue to be attacked often. Despite our humble resources to match their offensives, daily visitors hardly notice a difference. Sometimes these kiddies find something new to play and might take a few days for us to adapt and recover our feet. We always did.

Within a few months, a new security platform called Remedium will be launched at Reboot. Consider this forum slowdown as the fireworks before the party, because these attacks will only get worse from here forward if our new tool works as intended.

[Wonko the Sane]

because these attacks will only get worse from here forward if our new tool works as intended.

You mean that the new tool provokes more and harder attacks when it works as expected?

Or that the effects of similar attacks will result "worse" because of the new tool?




Wonko

[Brito]

If it works as intended, it will frail the bot masters most precious resource: zombies.

Indirectly, we'll see more people interested in blocking our service.

[MedEvil]

May I ask you a question?
Are you a programmer?

I spend my whole life in the IT business and yes, a good part of it as a programer. That's, why i know the difference between theory and praxis. In theory one can connect all computers of the world into one super computer. In reality this is not possible, due to technical limitations and even long before those are reached, the point is reached where it makes no sense anymore to add new computers, because it will not increase performance of the whole system anymore.

Look at the current multi core CPU, as a common known example. One with 2 cores is not twice at fast as one with one. And the more cores you add, the smaller is the added benefit for each additional one, while the power consumption and material, required for each, stay the same.
So long before you even come to the point, when an extra core will exactly add 0% performance, the cost-benefit ratio will be negative.

There used to be a nice white paper on the topic, but i can't find it. Maybe Wonko can whisk it up, He's great at finding things.

[MedEvil]

If it works as intended, it will frail the bot masters most precious resource: zombies.

I think for a long time, that our best defense would be Wonko.
He would just need to work his magic and find the $%&# turorial on 'hacking for beginners' that names Boot-Land reboot.pro as a good starting point.

[Wonko the Sane]

That's, why i know the difference between theory and praxis.

You don't need to be a programmer to know that, though.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

I think that the root of all evil is the reboot.pro name.

It's only natural for a wannabe hacker to attempt re-booting the pro's.

A concept surprisingly old, conceived well before the internet era:
http://en.wikipedia....ive_determinism

Nomen est omen

and

nomina sunt consequentia rerum

are commonly used - even nowadyas - Latin phrases

Another approach, one that Nuno will like a lot , is to change board name, domain and server every three hours so to give not the hackers the time to target it....




Wonko

[MedEvil]

You don't need to be a programmer to know that, though.

Nope one does not, it's quite sufficient to be smart.

I think that the root of all evil is the reboot.pro name.

It's only natural for a wannabe hacker to attempt re-booting the pro's.

Nomen est omen!