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back to article Man accused of DDoSing conservative talking heads

Federal prosecutors have accused a man of carrying out a series of botnet offenses including attacks that brought down the websites of conservative talking heads Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rudolph Giuliani. Mitchell L Frost was an undergraduate student at the University of Akron at the time of the distributed denial-of- …

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  1. James Woods

    whooptie doo

    To do a diagram of the number of sleeper cell zombies we have on the internet in the US alone would probably be rather frightening.

    Connect that with all the good liberal deeds of getting the third world connected (at everyone elses expense) and then having those networks taken over leaves you with a rather bumpy internet.

    We've seen our sites get attacked by zombie cable isp computers and it's virtually impossible to ever do anything about it. Even if you do manage to track down all 100 isps, 99 of them probably will do nothing.

    Back in my dialup years, I had my PPP account terminated by my ISP when someone called my ISP claiming I was ICMPing them (with my dialup). I wasn't, was a screw job but never-the-less my isp dropped me.

    Things sure aint' like that anymore, not that I condone blackmailing however when you email abuse@ today you might as well stick your finger in someones ear because nothing is going to happen.

    There is a silver lining to this however. There are more right-wingers and conservatives then bottom-feeding leftists and if the left continues to poke the right it'll be fun to watch who comes out on top.

    The smart money isn't on the broadband powered ghettos that we have courtesy of Obamas get everyone online stimulas.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Defending against DDOS

      As a server sysadmin defending against all but extremely sophisticated distributed DDOS attacks is easy enough.

      On Unix taking a look for excessive numbers of open sockets (or http requests from your webserver logs) can help identify attacking hosts:

      netstat -anT | grep tcp | awk '{ print $5 }' | awk '{ split ($0, a, ":"); print a[1] }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r

      Gives you a of source hosts sorted by volume of open tcp sockets.

      Then add a firewall block rule to drop all network packets from the offending host -

      iptables -I INPUT -s <attacker-ip-addr> -j DROP

      Freely available utilities like fail2ban will automate this kind of logfile monitoring. When attack access patterns are detected eg. number of requests exceeds a set quota within a given interval, fail2ban can enter a temporary firewall block rule.

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      1. Tom Chiverton 1
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        fail

        It's called a DDOS because each IP only makes a few connections, not enough to trigger a rule like you proposed.

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      2. mrobaer
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        @AC - Defending against DDOS

        Clearly this will work against millions of spoofed source ip addresses, will it not? How does this deal with the overwhelming amount of data that would be directed to the target that the target's link to the internet cannot withstand?

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    2. Bumpy Cat
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      However ...

      There may be more right-wingers/conservatives than left-wingers, but both are outnumbered by normal people who think both sides are idiots and nutters. So your fantasy of some kind of war between left and right is just another reason for us to point and laugh.

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      1. CD001
        Reply Icon
        Joke

        uh huh

        Stalin on the Left of me, Hitler on the right... here I am, stuck in the middle with you ;)

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Thumb Up

          Re: uh huh

          Almost,

          Except in the case of Coulter et al (and presumably James Woods) Hitler is somewhat on the left....

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Well

    Surely the fact he "rendered each website inoperable" means he should be in line for a medal? I mean, Ann Coulter? Bill O'Reilly?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Maybe

      he originally wanted to render the sites unreadable, but found they already were.

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  3. Flugal
    Grenade

    Bill O'Reilly

    Until the story is that a hit man has taken out Bill O'Reilly, there really is nothing to read.

    Bill O'Reilly...making sure large chunks of America get dumb, and stay dumb.

    Grenade.....just an idea.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    There appears to be an error in the article

    The damages seem WAY to low - $5K and $10K? These seem to be out by at least a factor of 1000.

    From previous hack reports, I got the impression that it cost at least $1M just to wake up a sysadmin to have a look if something was happening let alone identifying the issue and identifying fixes or workarounds.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone

    Anyone who listens to any of those 3 is an ignorant moron.

    They're so full of hate and miss-information it's ridiculous.

    Go on down-vote me and show them their brain”dead”washing works.

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  6. Tom 13

    No need to aggregiously punish the idiot.

    Just give him 30 days per account he stole.

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