Chinese authorities say massive DDoS attack took down .cn domain The China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) has reported that on Sunday it suffered the largest ever DDoS attack it has ever experienced against the .cn domain, an assault that took ten hours to knock down. In a statement, the CINIC said that attacks began around midnight Sunday on Chinese time and intensified a few …
The large scale failures are not just recent. The DDOS DNS attack on October 21, 2002 if kept up for another hour or two (attackers voluntarily stopped attack probably to prove a point) would have knocked down DNS worldwide. The other recent large scale failures are more due to corporations and the government covering their butts and pulling the NSA servers out of corporate infrastructure.
I don't follow that remark. Is there are growing trend of DDOS attacks, or is there are growing trend of system failures as a result of stress? Different things.
Problems in the financial sector are only to be expected because the hedge funds and traders are trying to game the system in ways that stress it to the limit. It's fairly obvious (well, to me it is) that if you ramp up the volume on a system while demanding ever shorter response times, you are doing a severe stress test and at some point things will go pear shaped due to a failure mode never before encountered. Whether we should allow the market to be gamed in this way is another matter. After speed limits were removed in this country, they eventually had to be reduced again, but not till the death rate on the roads had reached nearly 8000 a year.
The .cn issue seems to be a straight DDOS, which is possible (a) for architectural reasons and (b) because of all the unsecured computers around the place connected to the Internet. It's only a volume effect in the sense that with a lot more bandwidth available and a lot more computers available to misuse it, it gets easier.
Until recently only countries, nations or religious leaders had the power to create wars. Today network experts are just as capable, it really does change a lot of about histroy will be written.
The enemy can now be thousands of kms away or even in your own back yard. He is unknown, even "Anonymous", he could be 17 years old, alone or in a team. He could be the government or a poor individual with a grudge.
And he doens't even own a gun, spear, catapult or even a stone.......but he sure does know how to use a keyboard.....
The times they are a changing......
Today network experts are just as capable, it really does change a lot of about histroy will be written.
Oh that old trope again....
Really - nothing is better than a cruise missile leisurly cruising into your refugee camp / hospital door / aspirin factory. As you will witness momentarily when bomberprez unleashes another show of amazing fireworks, totally not okay by any democratic consultative process.
All this cyberwar hype is just hype, momentarily hypeable because open networks are currently, well, open, not very well built and not very well managed. This please MIC people because they can cream off. It also pleases politicians because they can call for more control.
Subversion," Rid notes, has quite different meanings and effects in liberal and authoritarian regimes. Occupy Wall Street was a form of more or less legitimate subversion in the U.S.; Occupy Tahrir Square in Egypt has quite a different political valence. "In liberal democracies subversion has been successfully legalized and institutionalized," Rid writes. Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia tried to push for the United Nations to adopt an "International code of conduct for information security." The proposed code of conduct would have specifically obligated nations to “combat” the use of information and communication technologies that “undermines other countries' political, economic and social stability.”
Rid frets, "The real risk for liberal democracies is not that these technologies empower individuals more than the state; the long-term risk is that they empower the state more than individuals." Given the NSA spying scandal, this observation seems disturbingly prescient. "Open systems," Rid argues, "no matter if we're talking about a computer's operating system or a society's political system, are more stable and run more securely." That much is absolutely right.
Cyberwarfare is not only about being able to destroy networks, it is also about being able to use the networks to your advantage.
Twiiter and Facebook were/are extremely powerfull tools used during the ArabSpring.
Knocking out WallStreet, DNS servers, the Banking Networks ( backbones) all create minor but very rapid disurbances. We've seen quite a bit of these recently.
Hacking ; The capacity to feed false information or modify existing information can be an extremely powerfull tool. Knocking our or modifiying distribution chains or networks, modifiying transport lines.
If you deploy a few of these ideas from a yet unknown botnet you have the power to create minor havoc. One element on it's own is never a problem but the accumulation of several can really have an impact.
> "The attackers showed they were capable of knocking the
> .cn infrastructure offline but that doesn’t mean that they
> could knock .com infrastructure offline – but it may," he said.
He might just be right. But then again, maybe he's wrong. I'd say it's 50-50.... Laurie Anderson is right. It really does take an expert sometimes.
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