Anonymous Seeks to Legalize DDoS Attacks
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
DDoS attacks are more then just blocking access to a site.
There's two basic kinds of DDoS attacks, one is a flood of network traffic, the other abuses slow heavy resources on the website itself.
If you have a page that is demanding on server resources to generate (heavy SQL queries without caching/etc), then you can send many requests to the page to overwhelm whatever slow backend service it is using - lagging or crashing anything else that relies on that service (locking up the database). This is typically what happens when a site is overwhelmed from "normal" traffic. It can be mitigated with pro-active filtering and caching on the application side.
The much more common form of DDoS is a pure network flood of half open TCP connections or page requests as fast as possible. These types of floods do not wait or care about a server response, and typically will even change their reply route so the source computer doesn't receive the response traffic (Sometimes the source was another target similar to email "Joe Jobbing"/backscatter)
Basically a series of incoming requests that say "HI GIMME THE WEB PAGE" or "HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET" and start asking for the page again before they even get the first response. This behavior is NOTHING like mashing F5 on a website, it's much more damaging. There's various techniques to detect false source addresses and either ignore or "tarpit" the sender so they get stuck on the first request without opening a second.
When the latter form of DDoS attack is used, it has the potential to not just take down the target website, but every computer on its network segment as your upstream gateway router's connection tracking buckets get overwhelmed and it starts dropping any packet routing though. Modern gateways and firewalls are much more robust about handling this (most DDoS attacks these days are fairly hard to maintain beyond a few hours for this reason - Firewall heuristics have come a long way in the last 6 years or so).
ANY DDoS attack at all wastes the time of people at data centers and people running the servers (NOT the same people putting the content on the sites that you hate) as they lock things down and do forensics.
Also, for those proud "hackers", it's pretty much the least skilled way to attack a site unless you wrote the software behind the botnet yourself. Almost all of them re-purpose some existing bot and spam links on IRC/etc until they get enough drones to do a fancier version of the Windows 95 ping of death. The client impact is similar to spamming long lines of text in your online game of choice so people can't use the chat until the GM comes and bans you. Devastating.
If you want to have fun dealing with kiddie attacks, check out IRC networks sometime. Being the places where bored teenage computer nerds hang out and play with their bot control channels, they attract more such attacks then the majority of "large" websites do. The tiny IRC network [/chat] that I run a server on would deal with several random DDoS attacks a month for several years. This is before the Escapist even existed, 3 months or so of having an IRC network with a few large channels (anime fansubbers and browser game communities in our case) engendered more DDoS attempts then the entire lifetime of our sites. Such behavior was so prevalent that the majority of data centers offering dedicated server hosting would outright ban any servers participating in an IRC network due to the amount of attacks they drew. As mentioned above though, firewalls are better at detecting bad traffic these days, so it's not nearly as common.
In conclusion. [http://underhanded.org/lookatme.gif]
There's two basic kinds of DDoS attacks, one is a flood of network traffic, the other abuses slow heavy resources on the website itself.
If you have a page that is demanding on server resources to generate (heavy SQL queries without caching/etc), then you can send many requests to the page to overwhelm whatever slow backend service it is using - lagging or crashing anything else that relies on that service (locking up the database). This is typically what happens when a site is overwhelmed from "normal" traffic. It can be mitigated with pro-active filtering and caching on the application side.
The much more common form of DDoS is a pure network flood of half open TCP connections or page requests as fast as possible. These types of floods do not wait or care about a server response, and typically will even change their reply route so the source computer doesn't receive the response traffic (Sometimes the source was another target similar to email "Joe Jobbing"/backscatter)
Basically a series of incoming requests that say "HI GIMME THE WEB PAGE" or "HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET" and start asking for the page again before they even get the first response. This behavior is NOTHING like mashing F5 on a website, it's much more damaging. There's various techniques to detect false source addresses and either ignore or "tarpit" the sender so they get stuck on the first request without opening a second.
When the latter form of DDoS attack is used, it has the potential to not just take down the target website, but every computer on its network segment as your upstream gateway router's connection tracking buckets get overwhelmed and it starts dropping any packet routing though. Modern gateways and firewalls are much more robust about handling this (most DDoS attacks these days are fairly hard to maintain beyond a few hours for this reason - Firewall heuristics have come a long way in the last 6 years or so).
ANY DDoS attack at all wastes the time of people at data centers and people running the servers (NOT the same people putting the content on the sites that you hate) as they lock things down and do forensics.
Also, for those proud "hackers", it's pretty much the least skilled way to attack a site unless you wrote the software behind the botnet yourself. Almost all of them re-purpose some existing bot and spam links on IRC/etc until they get enough drones to do a fancier version of the Windows 95 ping of death. The client impact is similar to spamming long lines of text in your online game of choice so people can't use the chat until the GM comes and bans you. Devastating.
If you want to have fun dealing with kiddie attacks, check out IRC networks sometime. Being the places where bored teenage computer nerds hang out and play with their bot control channels, they attract more such attacks then the majority of "large" websites do. The tiny IRC network [/chat] that I run a server on would deal with several random DDoS attacks a month for several years. This is before the Escapist even existed, 3 months or so of having an IRC network with a few large channels (anime fansubbers and browser game communities in our case) engendered more DDoS attempts then the entire lifetime of our sites. Such behavior was so prevalent that the majority of data centers offering dedicated server hosting would outright ban any servers participating in an IRC network due to the amount of attacks they drew. As mentioned above though, firewalls are better at detecting bad traffic these days, so it's not nearly as common.
In conclusion. [http://underhanded.org/lookatme.gif]
Looking at how many sigs it has now (just over 1000) and how many it needs by Feb. (over 2500) it's not looking like this is going to fail.
You would think that anons would be in a frenzy signing it. I suspect that they don't really want it to be legal because then DDos attacks would be "just another boring way of protesting" and so it would completely remove the anarchistic, wild, revolutionary edge that anonymous enjoys.
You would think that anons would be in a frenzy signing it. I suspect that they don't really want it to be legal because then DDos attacks would be "just another boring way of protesting" and so it would completely remove the anarchistic, wild, revolutionary edge that anonymous enjoys.
Signed it then looked through the other petitions on the site and facepalmed. There's one petition that is simply titled "RESIGN!" Also funny:
"Replace anti-gay Pastor Louie Giglio for the benediction at the inauguration with a pro-LGBT member of the clergy."
Replace someone who disagrees with me with someone who does is the message I get from this
"authorize the production of a recurring television program featuring Vice President Joe Biden"
Reminds me of the show "That's my Bush" because George Bush was funny enough to have an animated show made about him.
"Direct the United States Mint to make a single platinum trillion dollar coin!"
We already laughed at this in R&P. Imagine if you dropped that while crossing the street and it rolled into a sewer.
Alright this one I need to mock in full
"Is the right to own a gun more important than the right for a child to live?
We want tighter gun control laws to be enforced immediately.
A complete ban on assault weapons and multiple bullet containing weapons."
Multiple bullet containing weapons? Well guess it's back to flintlocks for home defense.
"Replace anti-gay Pastor Louie Giglio for the benediction at the inauguration with a pro-LGBT member of the clergy."
Replace someone who disagrees with me with someone who does is the message I get from this
"authorize the production of a recurring television program featuring Vice President Joe Biden"
Reminds me of the show "That's my Bush" because George Bush was funny enough to have an animated show made about him.
"Direct the United States Mint to make a single platinum trillion dollar coin!"
We already laughed at this in R&P. Imagine if you dropped that while crossing the street and it rolled into a sewer.
Alright this one I need to mock in full
"Is the right to own a gun more important than the right for a child to live?
We want tighter gun control laws to be enforced immediately.
A complete ban on assault weapons and multiple bullet containing weapons."
Multiple bullet containing weapons? Well guess it's back to flintlocks for home defense.
The trillion-dollar coin thing is a way to circumvent the U.S. Debt ceiling. Its stupid but it would work.Xan Krieger said:
Shotguns and bolt-action rifles can be loaded a bullet at a time, and some don't even come equipped with magazines. a single-shot bolt-action rifle is more than enough for hunting. Personally, I think a shotgun with a trigger lock is a more intimidating form of home defense than a small-caliber handgun. Restricting guns so that the police and the military are the only entities that can legally carry anything larger than a six-or-seven round magazine would definately help curb prolonged standoffs or gun battles. I think the idea is actually sound, it just needs to be reqritten so it doesn't SOUND so stupid.
lastly, strikes and lockouts are a protected form of protest between workers and their employers. Ironically, the employees of Amazon.com or Google might have a legal argument for a DDoS attack during a LEGAL strike but I don't see that actually happening. Right now in Canada, the "Idle No More" protests are occasionally blocking train tracks, highways and other major transport routes for hours at a time. - a form of protest going back decades, if not longer in Canada.
Frankly, organizing people to continually hit F5 is probably the legal move whereas any DDoS application is not.
This wins the thread. Seriously the irony is really quite exquisite.slash2x said:
There are a few folks who have been saying that the German courts have deemed DDoS attacks a legal form of protest. Courts make stupid rulings all the time. Just because the courts in one country make this act of vandalism legal does not make it valid. Let them DDoS German sites all they want. That's the problem of the people who host sites in Germany and that is their fight to win or lose. Maybe in the eventual appeal they will get some judges who are actually intelligent enough to see what is wrong here but what Germany did is not relevant to what the US or other countries are doing.
Last I checked union thugs were not allowed to block access to their work sites. Only delay it. An argument could be made that DDoS is the same thing except Anonymous is not working at these places and others have mentioned that the underlying server damage is more troubling than is commonly recognized. So yeah, not legit. Especially since botnets are still involved.
I think the Anons raise an important point. While there may be crucial differences between a sit-in and a DDos attack, the idea of a virtual form of protest is a compelling one. Some dissenters mentioned that "if it's worth protesting, then it's worth protesting in person" [sic] but if turning up in person means being brutalized, tear gassed and/or shot at; perhaps it's not quite as worth it to some people.
Add to that fact that Anon have turned their attentions to global situations and... Well, when Anonymous helped Egypt back onto the internet, giving Government dissenters a renewed voice and facilitating the free flow of information; would they have been better off buying plane tickets to a slaughterhouse?
To get back on track, I believe that the denizens of this world grow increasingly connected and globally aware. It would be absurd to think that the most efficacious form of protest for a global community would be a physically manifest one. I willingly concede that a DDos attack cannot, in all probability, constitute a legitimate form of protest, but what if an analogue of it could?
If I were to organize a large number of people to all sit in front of their computers and manually request data from a website, then those people would be effectively "manually DDos-ing" that site. Nothing illegal would be taking place and no damage (other than the temporary loss of service) would be taking place. I'd argue that such action would be a legitimate "electronic sit-in" and the fact that it would only work by virtue of sheer numbers might add credence to the point in question.
That however raises another important notion. What if I feel strongly about something I perceive as a strong political injustice - and what if only say a hundred people actually give a fuck about it. Legality and morality aside, would it be more efficacious to spend years attempting to raise awareness - or would it be more prudent to wheel out something akin to LOIC and make headline news the following day?
As an aside, I'd like to point out the hypocrisy in breaking up peaceful protests with batons and tear gas; and also the American Government's usage of DDos to cripple websites that it has a problem with.
I guess that last thought was born of the idea that groups like Anon would be fighting a very lopsided battle if they always stayed within the bounds of legality. The Governments and corporations do not play fair - why should the resistance?
Add to that fact that Anon have turned their attentions to global situations and... Well, when Anonymous helped Egypt back onto the internet, giving Government dissenters a renewed voice and facilitating the free flow of information; would they have been better off buying plane tickets to a slaughterhouse?
To get back on track, I believe that the denizens of this world grow increasingly connected and globally aware. It would be absurd to think that the most efficacious form of protest for a global community would be a physically manifest one. I willingly concede that a DDos attack cannot, in all probability, constitute a legitimate form of protest, but what if an analogue of it could?
If I were to organize a large number of people to all sit in front of their computers and manually request data from a website, then those people would be effectively "manually DDos-ing" that site. Nothing illegal would be taking place and no damage (other than the temporary loss of service) would be taking place. I'd argue that such action would be a legitimate "electronic sit-in" and the fact that it would only work by virtue of sheer numbers might add credence to the point in question.
That however raises another important notion. What if I feel strongly about something I perceive as a strong political injustice - and what if only say a hundred people actually give a fuck about it. Legality and morality aside, would it be more efficacious to spend years attempting to raise awareness - or would it be more prudent to wheel out something akin to LOIC and make headline news the following day?
As an aside, I'd like to point out the hypocrisy in breaking up peaceful protests with batons and tear gas; and also the American Government's usage of DDos to cripple websites that it has a problem with.
I guess that last thought was born of the idea that groups like Anon would be fighting a very lopsided battle if they always stayed within the bounds of legality. The Governments and corporations do not play fair - why should the resistance?