[T]he attacks, which escalated over the past week, meant the Internet’s very infrastructure was overwhelmed with data – reaching 300 billion bits per second…
[T]he attacks, which escalated over the past week, meant the Internet’s very infrastructure was overwhelmed with data – reaching 300 billion bits per second…
Nothing is going to change until govts start getting serious about cyber crime. They don”t seem to have any problem throwing bank robbers in jail for lenghty terms yet cyber crime that cost many times more money gets suspended sentences.
I’m not impressed in the least.
Anyone who places anything of importance in an unrestricted environment is begging to have it vandalized or stolen.
I am in favor of legal action appropriate to the cost, but as often as not the architects of thes DDoS attacks are nothing but pennyless twerps in dorm rooms, low rent appartments or mommies basement.
Although the presence of organized criminal organizations can’t be discounted, it would seem that the big fish are going after tangible targets not creating displays of public disruption.
BTW — Captcha is a forkin POS application
That may be, OMMAG but it’s the only thing sustaining your commenting privileges at the moment. No captcha, no comments. The spam flood begins the instant it’s down.
Some fun facts and playing with relative sizes in orders of magnitude. (check my math please … I may be wrong… BUT)
“300 Billion Bits Per Second” is as meaningless a number as you could confabulate.
Converted to actual data volumes used to measure information transfer in bytes:
This is = 37.5 billion or 37.5 X 10**9 bytes which is the same thing as 37.5 gigabytes per second.
The effective present global network capacity is over 80,000 peta bytes (PB).
1 PB is = 1 million gigabytes (1 X 10**15) which by my calculation is 4.68**-11 %.
So … according to the article, the data volume that almost “broke the internet” was in the neighborhood of 0.05 of a billionth of a percent of the global network volume.
From Wikipedia (with apologies):
Internet: Google processed about 24 petabytes of data per day in 2009.[4] The BBC’s iPlayer is reported to use 7 petabytes of bandwidth each month.[5] Imgur transfers about 4 petabytes of data per month.[6] Yahoo stores 2 petabytes of data on behavior.[7] Netflix uses 1 petabyte to store the videos for streaming.[citation needed]
Telecoms: AT&T transfers about 30 petabytes of data through its networks each day.[8]
What happened to that captcha alternative that was advertising on SDA?
Anybody that can knock Spamhaus off the net gets my vote. They’re a major pain in the ass. They’re forever trapping my IP through my ISP and blocking my private domain outbound emails.
Good analysis of the numbers, OMMAG. I figured that the bit about “breaking the Internet” was a bit of the sort of hyperbole that journalists love.
Aimed at the right Internet exchange rounters, however, it’s enough data to cause plenty of congestion.
Moreover, it looks like the journalists didn’t read the Cloudflare blog too deeply. They say the intensity of the attack varied between 30 and 90 GBps, and peaked at 120 GBps. That’s enough data to overwhelm almost any router out there, if you target the right node in the routing path.
The Cloudflare blog story is actually quite interesting and well argued.
I didn’t know anything about “DNS recursors” until I read the story… sounds like something invented by the writers of “Reboot”.
It also looks like the Internet didn’t actually get all that broken – just slowed down in a couple of regions.
The CAPTCHA alternative that was advertising on SDA was me – and it’s going strong,though not making me any money. It’s called “VouchSafe”.
I offered it to the folks here, but first we have to write a plugin for MoveableType, since it’s a little much to ask the folks at SDA to integrate it themselves with the PHP API.
I currently offer APIs for PHP and .NET, and easy-install plugins for Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and PHPBB.
We’ll be working on the MoveableType plugin just as soon as we finish with a couple of end-of-fiscal-yer projects, and an integration kit for Microsoft Exchange OWA. Hopefully, Kate, and the other contributors to SDA will be interested in trying it.
I hate these damn CAPTCHAs.
The real fix for this is just never going to happen — prosecuting Microsoft for putting junk out there that is open to having the system taken over and used to generate these attacks.
If M$ execs faced prison Windows would become bullet proof overnight.
Agreed. If Bill Gates’ redeigned condom is as leaky as his software, you’d do better with a sandwich bsg.