Anonymous is planning to bring down the internet. March 31.

[Flonne]

Let's just wait for @Eos to essentially make us all look like idiots about this.

I'm interested to hear what he has to say. I know my networking, but I'm not a coder, so I'm missing half the picture here, currently.

[FenixR]

You underestimate the evil of the world, my friend.

Im not underestimating the evil of the world, at best im underestimating the capability of each person to ACTUALLY carry their "evil plans"

[Rick]

Let's just wait for @Eos to essentially make us all look like idiots about this.

It's one of his favourite hobbies.

[Eos]

I'm more shocked that the internet has 13 root servers.

It doesn't. They're 13 clusters. Each of which has an unspecified number of machines involved for failover and redundancy.

I'm interested to hear what he has to say. I know my networking, but I'm not a coder, so I'm missing half the picture here, currently.

It's bull.

Those 13 clusters aren't some margical portal by which all traffic must pass through.

They're just the master list of TLD DNS authority entries that gets shared out through the world.

Even if all 13 of them were gone for a full 24 hours I doubt most would notice because the only thing that wouldn't happen is DNS entries wouldn't update, but that's meaningless because most DNS entries don't change in the first place. Every ISP that knew google was Addresses: 74.125.65.113, 74.125.65.100, 74.125.65.101, 74.125.65.138, 74.125.65.102, 74.125.65.139 will still know google is those addresses, they just wouldn't know if google wanted to add or remove one from the roots. The cached values across the rest of the net are hit more than 95% of the time. Big woo. We'd be operating on a stale cache of the internet.

It'd take a sustained attack of days for this to be all that meaningful and I'd be impressed if they could manage it. A subtle takeover and poisoning of the 13 clusters would be far more damaging and impressive because depending on how hushed they kept it that could feed the downstream cache's and take ages to clean up.

[FenixR]

So its possible, but they are doing it wrong. No?

Also what does this exactly means?:

While some ISPs uses DNS caching, most are configured to use a low
expire time for the cache, thus not being a valid failover solution
in the case the root servers are down. It is mostly used for speed,
not redundancy.

[KhainiWest]

D'aw eos you never dissapoint me

[Eos]

It operates on the assumption that caches empty then try to update, rather than doing a merge if/when data is available.

[Corn]

Im not underestimating the evil of the world, at best im underestimating the capability of each person to ACTUALLY carry their "evil plans"

You'd think at least one person out of the 6 billion of us would do it.

Even if it was a "good" person he/she might do it just for the laughs and to see if they could.

[Flonne]

It'd take a sustained attack of days for this to be all that meaningful and I'd be impressed if they could manage it. A subtle takeover and poisoning of the 13 clusters would be far more damaging and impressive because depending on how hushed they kept it that could feed the downstream cache's and take ages to clean up.

Actually, that makes sense to me; every couple weeks I have to let a few new IPs through my filter because nexon changes a few of their web server IPs. Until a site makes that change, even if anon managed to take out all 13 of those clusters, the site would still load.

Also, my former question still remains; any idea if that UDP trick they are touting will actually work to the extent that they are claiming it will?

You'd think at least one person out of the 6 billion of us would do it.

Even if it was a "good" person he/she might do it just for the laughs and to see if they could.

There's no way in hell a single person could do this, unless they were a billionaire with hundreds if not thousands of state of the art PCs and were some sort of genius-savant with PCs on top of that. I can only think of one person I've actually met that was good enough with computers to figure out some loophole that would work well enough to take down the entire internet, and he was a teacher at my school who made his own personal programming language, and built an operating system for his computers from scratch. And yes, he was VERY insane, like, clinically, if you tried to sit down and have a real talk with him. They just kept him around as a head of the netsec department to answer questions from exceedingly precocious students, and he taught one or two of the highest end classes for it as well.

[Eos]

Also, my former question still remains; any idea if that UDP trick they are touting will actually work to the extent that they are claiming it will?

Work? Sure. Probably.
to the extent they claim? Depends entirely on participation and the defenses employed to harden those clusters.

Considering how many geeks love the internet more than they care about anonymous' agenda, meh. 2 out of 5 odds.

ETA; When a malicious group wants my attention in one direction, I tend to wonder what they're trying to do where everyone isn't looking.

[Viaje]

D'aw eos you never dissapoint me

You know, I'd like to think that, with all the people who have the potential to be pissed off at the world and show it they mean business, at least one of them would know networking better than Eos.

Seems that's not the case.
One thing you can't deny: the man knows his stuff.

It'd take a sustained attack of days for this to be all that meaningful and I'd be impressed if they could manage it. A subtle takeover and poisoning of the 13 clusters would be far more damaging and impressive because depending on how hushed they kept it that could feed the downstream cache's and take ages to clean up.

Seeing as the same group hasn't managed to keep a singe unprotected corporate homepage down for more than a couple hours, I'd be surprised if we even heard a sigh from this.

[Flonne]

Well, this is a relatively small MS fansite. He's the go to person for information of this sort around here, though, so we take advantage of that whenever possible!

[Fiel]

Dear Terrorists,

We're going to attack you on Thursday. Attached is our outline for how our attack forces will look. Also attached are the blueprints of all of our tanks, vehicles, and troop movements to get into position for that day.

We are very deadly. Expect us. We mean business.

~USA

[Arrg]

You'd think somebody would've done it already.

Well...there are a few reasons someone wouldn't have done already...

1) This is going to need a pineappleton of manpower. Getting this kind of recruitment is vastly different from having a few friends helping you. You'd have to go very public to get enough people or not even bother.

2) So you took down a DNS server. What then? This op is a protest, anything else would just be for lulz, nothing to be gained.

3) Maybe the IPs of the DNS servers weren't very well known aside from those who had an interest in hacking or networking, so only those determined enough would be able to figure them out.

[Corn]

Actually, that makes sense to me; every couple weeks I have to let a few new IPs through my filter because nexon changes a few of their web server IPs. Until a site makes that change, even if anon managed to take out all 13 of those clusters, the site would still load.

Also, my former question still remains; any idea if that UDP trick they are touting will actually work to the extent that they are claiming it will?



There's no way in hell a single person could do this, unless they were a billionaire with hundreds if not thousands of state of the art PCs and were some sort of genius-savant with PCs on top of that. I can only think of one person I've actually met that was good enough with computers to figure out some loophole that would work well enough to take down the entire internet, and he was a teacher at my school who made his own personal programming language, and built an operating system for his computers from scratch. And yes, he was VERY insane, like, clinically, if you tried to sit down and have a real talk with him. They just kept him around as a head of the netsec department to answer questions from exceedingly precocious students, and he taught one or two of the highest end classes for it as well.

Well...there are a few reasons someone wouldn't have done already...

1) This is going to need a pineappleton of manpower. Getting this kind of recruitment is vastly different from having a few friends helping you. You'd have to go very public to get enough people or not even bother.

2) So you took down a DNS server. What then? This op is a protest, anything else would just be for lulz, nothing to be gained.

3) Maybe the IPs of the DNS servers weren't very well known aside from those who had an interest in hacking or networking, so only those determined enough would be able to figure them out.

What I really meant was "If Anonymous can do it, then you'd think someone would've done it already. I accidently left that assumed in my post, I guess.

[Viaje]

Well, this is a relatively small MS fansite. He's the go to person for information of this sort around here, though, so we take advantage of that whenever possible!

That just amplifies my point. 0.o

Dear Terrorists,

We're going to attack you on Thursday. Attached is our outline for how our attack forces will look. Also attached are the blueprints of all of our tanks, vehicles, and troop movements to get into position for that day.

We are very deadly. Expect us. We mean business.

~USA

PS. We've included some sketches of our relatively simplistic idea of how we believe your defenses are configured.

(Side note: If Anonymous' mantra were a person, I'd punch it in the face for being so stupid.)

[Eos]

3) Maybe the IPs of the DNS servers weren't very well known aside from those who had an interest in hacking or networking, so only those determined enough would be able to figure them out.

They're public info. That's sort of how they um, work.

Oh, this is convenient;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distrib...ot_nameservers

[Fiel]

The only way I could come up with Anonymous being smart here is if they were actually gray hat hackers. Pose an attack at a specific day at a specific time and reveal a vulnerability in UDP to get it patched. Then never do the attack.

[Arrg]

They're public info. That's sort of how they um, work.

I know nothing about networking, aside from the basic stuff you have to know in-home. I only just assumed that ISPs would keep the DNS IPs as semi-private information.

[Sarah]

(Side note: If Anonymous' mantra were a person, I'd punch it in the face for being so stupid.)

Ah, but it is a person. It is every 11 - 16 year old boy in the world right now.

I wish you the best of luck in your face-punching journey. I will be supporting you from Canada with snowballs.