Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

Prediction: A massive, sustained attack will occur on key US Internet infra on election night in an attempt to debase the US election results.

View on HN

That was exactly my thought. This may be unrelated, or it may be a test run. But a large scale attack on Election Day that crippled communications would stir up unrest for a variety of reasons. Although I think that's highly unlikely to change the outcome, unrest after such a contentious election is not good.

If this is a test run, this is an amazing early warning for Twitter and the like to immediately start working on contingency plans for election day.

What can they do? It's not Twitter themselves being DDOS'd, it's a DNS provider. This propagates up the chain to impact both a Tier 1 network and cloud providers, which hits tons of stuff on top of that.

Have a failover DNS provider. Amazon uses Dyn, but also has UltraDNS as a backup, and it's obviously still up. Twitter vs Amazon:

host -t ns twitter.com: ns3.p34.dynect.net, ns4.p34.dynect.net, ns1.p34.dynect.net, ns2.p34.dynect.net.

host -t ns amazon.com: ns3.p31.dynect.net, ns4.p31.dynect.net, ns2.p31.dynect.net, pdns6.ultradns.co.uk, pdns1.ultradns.net, ns1.p31.dynect.net.

Thank you so much for mentioning this. This was my first thought when I heard about all the major enterprise sites affected by the DDoS:

"How do all these major players have singly-homed DNS"?

if you utilize geoip routing features of one provider, it can be difficult to impossible to then ensure repeatable/deterministic behavior on a second provider.

They could distribute instructions for users to follow, E.g. using some permanent working IPs or alternate DNS servers.

Gives them time to test the countermeasures before 11/8

Assuming you're referring specifically to targeting media companies reporting on the results and not the electric grid like someone else mentioned, wouldn't they have to DDoS Google itself for that to work? I don't really see a DDoS of Google being effective.

Probably not a great idea. If the internet went down at my work, none of us would be able to do anything, so we'd probably all head out to the polls just because we have nothing better to do. Unintentionally increased turnout.

This is terrifying. Thankfully I don't think much actual voting infra is network reliant. But it could probably delay the results from being finalized for days, and allow Trump to spew further allegations of rigging.

Though if they targeted electric grid, water, and public transport, starting early in the day and choosing the regions by their populations political leaning, it could easily have an effect on the result itself.

Hahahaha. For sure it's not supposed to be network reliant. But from my experience working on critical infra, even things like power grids and rail systems, this is almost never the case.

You don't need to target voting infrastructure. You target media infrastructure (DNS, streaming, web media) in order to either reduce or shift voter turnout. A candidate ahead in a battleground state? You stomp on media reporting to ensure their opponent's voters aren't dissuaded from heading to the polls.

Control the message, and through that the actual votes cast.

I dont even think you need to necessarily shift voter turn out. I think you need to sow enough confusion in order to cast the results into doubt.

Yeah it just needs to be "The internet was broken so your votes were lost" and then some made up post-hoc explanations that 90% of people don't understand so they can't dispute

Given various fuckups over the years, media won't call a state until the polls are completely closed. Silencing them doesn't change this strategy.

This is not congruent with their behavior during the primaries.

That is a terrifying thought. Sounds like the plot of a potential Neal Stephenson novel.

I think you're right, not much of the voting infra is network reliant, but the more I think about it the more it seems that the "fear" factor of such outages could influence the election. Or, perhaps a curated working set of information sources, thanks to selective DDoS. Regardless, terrifying to be sure.

I'm working at the polls in CA, and can verify this; all critical information is moved by sneakernet with a two-person rule on its handling.

Of course, I have no information on the security model of the pre-election preparations and post-election tabulation, but luckily results for each polling place are also posted for the public to inspect - media outlets and campaigns can verify the tabulation themselves with a slight delay.

Is it really important who wins it there are only two candidates that share common view on many problems? And you don't need Internet to count votes anyway.

It's okay. James Comey, the FBI chief, said the US electoral system is such a mess, it would be too hard for an attacker to hack it or damage its integrity in any way. It's all good.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160912/16553435504/fbi-d...

Of course, he said nothing about internal rigging:

https://twitter.com/TweetBrettMac/status/789372518436052992

Please keep the unfounded conspiracy theories off Hacker News. Thank you.

You have complex situation and you can't understand it, conspiracy theory offers simple answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com