Isn't this the point at which Cloudflare is supposed to gain a handful of PR points for putting him back online, pro bono, and then doing a write up on how effortlessly they handled the bandwidth with eBPF?
Keep in mind that most reverse proxies will do the same thing. The only difference with Cloudflare is that you don't know the destination IP.
Not even remotely. If the government steps in with a subpoena for the origin host IP or an injunction to stop protecting the site they'd stop. Someone on the internet asking them has no legal power to do so.
If they were any smaller, their IP ranges would just go into the rogue-isp-blocklist, and that would be the end of that. But because they're mixing in the criminals with their normal customers, that's not really possible.
And since I am unlikely to be in any jurisdiction that CloudFlare is in, nor do I have any chance of finding out who these criminals are because CloudFlare is protecting them, going to the police here wouldn't really achieve much.
It's also not in their best interest to take on the burden of deciding who the criminals are.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kaymYs...
If this is a CloudFlare Vs Akamai attack Krebs isn't saying, but I would put dollars to doughnuts it is.
Otherwise your post is merely an unsubstantiated personal attack against akamai.
Kind of like the police protects gangsters from getting shot by other gangsters, but you would really like them not to do that, so that the gangsters can just shoot each other.
In this case, Brian Krebs tried to convince Cloudflare to kick off the booter sites, so they are unprotected, and can DDoS each other. Cloudflare didn't put any effort into that idea, and now he's apparently angry that he didn't get through to them.
Cloudflare is not the police. They're a private organization that makes a profit from offering "protection" for people getting DDoS attacked. They enable the people doing the DDoS attacks by protecting their booter sites (https://www.google.com/search?q=ddos+booter). That's called a racketeering operation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(crime)), and that's illegal. There are laws against it. Just because our crappy government is too incompetent to file charges doesn't mean it isn't illegal.
If Cloudflare thinks they can foster criminal activity through their network because they're running a juiced up nginx proxy, they're wrong. The "slippery slope" argument is absolute nonsense. As Krebs himself pointed out, they already remove sites that are hosting phishing attacks and malware.
Cloudflare, it's time to do the right thing here and stop protecting DDoS booters. Your policies are helping to damage the internet and censor people, whether they're illegal (they are) or not.
It takes an intense contortion of the concept of freedom of speech to apply it to this malicious and illegal activity. I guess under that logic it's also okay for a personnel security company to host (or hide behind their nginx server) a hitman-for-hire marketplace too, as long as they're not the ones doing the actual killing?
DDoS attacks (and their store fronts) are not about freedom of speech. They are, always and everywhere, about the suppression and censoring of speech through violence. Protecting them means that you are protecting violence.
But if you're adamant on this being free speech, fine. Where's the free speech criticism for Cloudflare shutting down those phishing and malware distribution sites? Why are DDoS attack sites magically different and deserving of freedom of speech protection?
As an example, incitement to riot is a crime: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2102
Most people just panic and start paying Cloudflare for protection. Pretty much for the same reason that most people pay into protection rackets instead of reporting them to law enforcement, because they're afraid and their livelihood is at risk.
Cloudflare also has this wonderful policy of forwarding abuse reports (with information on who reported) to the booter site in question. You can imagine the consequences of that from what just happened to Krebs for doing reporting on them.
If you are being DDoSed. What do you do? Call the local police? Email abuse@fbi.gov?
If you get DDoS attacked, you panic and look for expensive DDoS mitigation, or you go out of business. Legally, enforcement for the specific attacker is almost impossible. Cloudflare both knows this and benefits from protecting it. They realize that customer connection is critical to the system functioning and yet continue to defend it.
With or without Cloudflare in the mix, how the heck would you go about making the connection between a flood of traffic from a large number of IPs, and any particular booter site? I don't understand how taking Cloudflare out of the mix helps you stop the DDoS.
As an aside, the FBI is indeed interested in investigating large DDoS attacks. Contact your local field office to see if yours qualifies! :-)
DDoS-for-sale sites are not "free speech sites", they are for-profit criminal organizations engaging in the violent censorship of people that are too poor to afford proper DDoS mitigation or that want to control the privacy of their users by managing the SSL certs.
The booters aren't usually as powerful as these 600Gbps+ monsters, but they're quite adequate to wreck almost any network for a long time (most IP transit hookups for racks are 10Gbps or less, these attacks can be well in excess of 100Gbps), requiring you to spend exorbitant amounts of money to protect your site against what are essentially bored high schoolers with a spare $20, your competitors, or whomever. That money is then dumped back into the system, allowing the attackers to build even more sophisticated and powerful infrastructure, leading to worse attacks like the ones we're now starting to see. Krebs was one of the people to document this trend, and now his site has been censored off the net by the same people he was writing about. Why is it so surprising to everyone that he's avoiding Cloudflare?
I recognize that it's impossible to eradicate the problem 100%, but by driving it underground, you can dramatically reduce the amount of it by making it harder for them to conduct their business. Cloudflare could do this in a day if they wanted to, instead they sit behind a "free speech" argument waiting for someone to force them to cut it out. Don't say I didn't warn you if the government comes in to change the liability laws to prevent this sort of behavior in the future. Nobody's going to defend DDoS spam packets from criminal botnets as "free speech" when they're preventing all speech from occurring.
Search Google? So should Google be delisting these sites?
They remove them all, except the one whose threat they benefit from (cloudflare has a direct interest in the ddos threat being as big as possible).
Claiming they are protecting their free speech is a load of bollocks.
What happens over CloudFlare's networks in the case of DDoS providers would essentially be the agreement of a business contract.
The attacks are paid for and managed by the customers through the web portals that run behind CloudFlare. How is that not enabling the attacks?
If only...
Let me quote [0]:
> CloudFlare will forward all abuse reports that appear to be legitimate to the > responsible hosting provider and to the website owner. In response to a legitimate > abuse report CloudFlare will provide the complainant with the contact information for > the responsible hosting provider so they can be contacted directly.
So, if I report a scammer CloudFlare will forward my information to that criminal, putting me at risk. Gee, thanks!
and
> Since CloudFlare is not a hosting provider we do not have > the capability to remove content from a website.
Or to put it in the words that they answer every abuse request with:
> Please be aware CloudFlare is a network provider offering a reverse proxy, > pass-through security service. We are not a hosting provider.
Which basically translates to "We don't care, we want to pretend that we are not responsible for our actions."
I would bet things would be a fair bit easier for them if they agreed to take things down which most people don't like, but from my position they are taking a very principaled stand for free speech. Are people on hn actually arguing we want more censorship on more places on the web?
> We are asking that they stop protecting for-profit DDoS attack sites that are destroying the internet and using violence to censor people's ability to speak.
A DoS is not a violent act. I am mostly ignorant of these things but I think attacks if this kind are a service that test our capabilities. My fear is that there might be calls for legislative actions against "DoS attacks" which would then apply to people sitting at home pressing F5.
How would such a law be different from the current laws? If you sit at home pressing f5 with malicious intent and succeed at bringing a site down, you're committing a crime.
What if you are just fed up of waiting for a site to reload and press F5 a number of times? And what about the (probably majority of) instances where the "attacker" is simply a person who unknowingly downloaded malware onto their computer to get free smileys or whatever?
What? Why is F5 a special case here and what on earth does any of this have to do with Aaron Swartz.
>What if you are just fed up of waiting for a site to reload and press F5 a number of times?
Did you intend to bring it down? Was it obvious that your activity would bring the site down? If answer to both is "No" then you're fine, this is how most laws work.
>And what about the (probably majority of) instances where the "attacker" is simply a person who unknowingly downloaded malware onto their computer to get free smileys or whatever?
Why are you even asking? If someone else commits a crime you're obviously not at fault...
Also, what was even supposedly wrong with the Swartz case? It was on solid ground both legally and morally, shame he never gave the courts a chance.[1]
[1]: Might as well expand on this a little so I don't get hidden by downvotes. I don't think Swartz deserved to go to prison, but given that he intentionally violated the law it's hard to argue that he shouldn't have been charged.
Now if someone is using tools specially built for DoS I don't have a a problem with them being prosecuted.
That is also a problematic definition. I recall similar arguments being made against "nmap"; should we ban nmap, or criminalize its use? I also remember when Dan Farmer was fired for simply writing a security scanner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo...), using the same reasoning.
But we aren't talking about protest with a reload macro here, these are for-profit criminal botnets. And one if them just took down the largest DDoS mitigation network in the world. Which means there aren't many sites on earth left they can't take down. Much smaller attacks have nuked Github for days. Who's next to get "freedom of speeched"?
But if two billion people decide to stay at home and continuously press F5, you should get freedom of speeched. I think that's the equivalent of a picket line. Not talking about automated tools other than "refresh page every second".
That's the the extremely unpopular speech that you're proposing to censor. The instant you say "oh but that's different" because of the contents of the speech, you're interjecting your own opinion about that speech.
Which, actually, is fine, but don't play that off as not being speech.
At the level where Cloudflare's network isn't actually being used to send the DDOS attack itself, it's also still speech.
Cloudflare will close accounts when asked, backed by court order. The problem is on today's Internet, that's nigh impossible, which realistically means it falls to Cloudflare to interject an opinion on what's good and bad, but so far they've avoided that as effectively as an ostrich burying it's head in the sand, and so are effectively supporting many bad actors.
It seems like another problem caused by the fact that code can be data and data can be code. By which I mean, both are information. 'Free speech' implies the intent to be communicated to people, and can be considered 'data'. However a DDoS is a bunch of information with the intent of affecting the behaviour of computer systems, and can be considered 'code'.
The problem lies in discriminating between the two, given that "bits don't have colour", as explained here: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
I'm not at all sure what the right answer is, here. I'm also not 100% convinced that Cloudflare has the right approach, but I'm leaning to "yes", considering the alternative.
(by the way, you'd probably be interested in watching the youtube clip jgrahamc posted elsewhere ITT, with someone from Cloudflare saying some words about their perspective on this dilemma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12564876)
"We don't take it down unless it's illegal" is a simple policy, but to be a good policy it needs judgment as well.
Your comment may have the best of intentions, but that's how you take net neutrality out the window.
You don't see insurance companies rushing in after a disaster, this is no different.
All that being said: the idea that only ingress traffic matters during a DDOS attack isn't quite right. If the connections are legitimate, you either need to be able to detect the attack attempts (requires expensive coordination and mitigation techniques, especially if the attack is much larger than what a single NIC can handle) or actually serve back the content (which will make your egress skyrocket).
I don't see why being pro bono would matter in an established company?
You've gotta get the bandwidth to your filtering servers before you can filter it. DDoS mitigation, as I understand it, is first and foremost a matter of having more capacity than the attacker.