Possible Vendetta Behind the East Coast Web Slowdown
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If we could somehow mandate that these devices were supported with firmware updates for the indefinite future, that would simply destroy the entire market. And you can't do that, because even the devices created by an entity that no longer exists and didn't sell its IP to anybody else will eventually be enough to do these DDoSes, if they aren't already.
The Internet wasn't envisioned with a single email provider, single DNS provider, single app container provider. (Ok, for most of these you have two, sometimes three choices, but still, that is too few). The centralization makes everything very vulnerable - imagine what would happen when Gmail is knocked out for a day.
There's no RFC that talks about methods for preventing or mitigating hundreds of thousands of machines all sending arbitrary traffic at you at the same time.
The only way to protect yourself from that sort of attack is to buy filtering from someone who has a bigger pipe than the largest DDoS available, and have them filter the packets so that you only get clean traffic. Unless you know of an alternative that nobody else has heard of yet.
So you wind up buying transit / scrubbing from one of a few big providers, because that's the only way to avoid being sniped by DDoSers.
The RFCs generally say that the problem is "you", i.e. the target. Of course those device makers could make their devices a little more secure, can't argue with that, it's another form of complacency. Still - the attackers are only able to do this because their targets are few.
If there were thousands of DNS providers such as Dyn each serving a small number of clients spread all over the world, it'd be impossible to attack them all.
To cause maximum damage you need to identify hosts that are common across many big companies. Someone did their homework and figured out that lots of companies are using Dyn for DNS, and for the East Coast of the US this is just a handful of servers. If the same DNS services were spread across 1000 servers, then the attackers would need proportionally more "power" to knock them out. DDos-ing 10 boxes is _so_ much easier than 1000 (approximately 100 times easier, to be precise).
Your average user says "Sure I can setup cameras" then sees "remote access" in the menu, sets it up, maybe it has some UPNP to the router and BOOM. Magic remote login without any type of mitigation.
The hardware was nice, cameras did a reliable 1080p full color, but the whole reason my mom wanted it was so she could check in while she and my dad were traveling (and also sneak a peek at her bird feeders while she was away; avid birder, that one).
So, I hooked that thing up to the network and did a port scan on it... First noticed - it's listening to port 22, auth is a googleable default password. It supports UPnP to punch a hole through the NAT and serve up video on another port. OS on the server box is some slightly customized version of linux with an _old_ kernel.
So I said, "Sure mom, I can set this up for you. We're going to need to get you a new firewall, it'll probably be easiest to put a *nix box in front of your wifi access point, then we can set up a tunnel between the isolated camera server and a locked down outside server that only you have access to so we can be sure that no one else is looking at those cameras. Should only take me a few hours, and we'll need to buy a box to run the firewall, and then a small monthly fee to keep the internet accessible server running"
Her response, "but it says on the box that it's easy to setup for outside access!". Mine: "It's easy to setup for everyone to access, much more involved if you want to make sure it's only you who has access".
Admittedly, it did have some authentication for accessing the video streams, but I didn't trust that thing as far as I could throw it; I'm glad she decided not to go through the trouble of getting it working (but mostly because I'm lazy and didn't want to have to setup and support that damn thing).
I can only imagine that the people who bought that device and didn't have a security paranoid person to help them set it up are all contributing to this most recent DDoS attack.
Her response, "but it says on the box that it's easy to
setup for outside access!". Mine: "It's easy to setup for
everyone to access, much more involved if you want to
make sure it's only you who has access"
So...you wanted to have authentication and it has authentication...I must be missing something.
So, yeah, it makes sense to block it - personally I block IOT devices from the Internet entirely (and don't let them initiate requests to my local network even) and use a VPN (IPSEC/IKEv2). That wouldn't work for devices that connect to cloud services, so I'd have to set up new firewall rules if I got one of them.
You missed that you could SSH into it with a default password that is easy to find on a web search.
The original engineering and architecture of the the internet (and the web) was not intended to create something you put all your eggs in. It was for sharing information, not building your mission critical business operations on.
Right now, if you dumped your business into a cloud service you're mostly dead in the water. But those who have local infrastructure can keep working. As people have been noting here, centralization is bad.
Many people have heard that the Internet began with some military computers in the Pentagon called Arpanet in 1969. The theory goes on to suggest that the network was designed to survive a nuclear attack. However, whichever definition of what the Internet is we use, neither the Pentagon nor 1969 hold up as the time and place the Internet was invented. A project which began in the Pentagon that year, called Arpanet, gave birth to the Internet protocols sometime later (during the 1970's), but 1969 was not the Internet's beginnings. Surviving a nuclear attack was not Arpanet's motivation, nor was building a global communications network.
Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or Arpanet) program, insists that the purpose was not military, but scientific. The nuclear attack theory was never part of the design. Nor was an Internet in the sense we know it part of the Pentagon's 1969 thinking. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Bob Taylor to build the Arpanet network, states that Arpanet was never intended to link people or be a communications and information facility.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...
[2] http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/beg...
Arpanet is distributed shared information for science. Nuclear technology is science. Surviving science is a war that requires nuclear insights. Therefore, the Arpanet was developed for surviving nuclear war.
Which means it falls under what he said.
The idea is that all your IOT stuff establishes a connection to this server, creating an encrypted network between them. You then add your control servers to that network and job done. You devices don't need any inbound access to talk to each other. All the connections are outbound, so no ports to open on your firewall and no risk.
You could do this by yourself, but we take that hassle out of your hands. Happy to help with custom deployments too outside our main service; it's a great way of learning our customers' needs.
It's hard though to have your exact setup as a service, it implies incoming VPN connections to the site where you deploy your IOT and a VPN server of sorts.
Our main focus was remote teams and devs having to use remote servers, however IOT might be a killer use here.
Very nice service by the way. I have used ngrok in the past and found it invaluable for a few odd applications. I'll give it a try in future.
Thank you for the feedback and the suggestion. It is a good idea actually. I'm considering new features in the roadmap, because at the moment I don't even offer Internet access through my system, it's just a private LAN (I'm not competing with the myriad of privacy-minded browsing VPNs out there). Adding a manageable Internet Gateway could be a nice option.
Developing and deploying a software+hardware piece would be very interesting too, so there's no need to deploy agents on the remote servers or IOT devices (on most of them you probably can't) and I take the hassle out of my customer's hands to setup a e.g. Linux gateway to route traffic through the tunnel.
It could suit your needs or we can help with custom deployments. In any case I'd like to learn more about your needs and your expectations. Can I drop you an email?
We need IPv6 and have devices either access the internet with their own IP address or not access it at all. This solution, then, would only impact bad actor devices, not your other (non-compromised) devices. Still, not easy.
Where these devices are being attacked inside, ostensibly, professional organizations (companies, schools, government buildings), I agree. But there you have, again ostensibly, an actual network administrator capable of dealing with the issue (and paid to do so).
We don't expect all homeowners to be, say, experts in electrical wiring, or gas supply, plumbing, drainage, or waste management. But all of these things—if they are poorly modified, managed, or maintained—can cause impacts on third parties. In the case of networked devices, the possible impact on third parties is even greater. We also enforce strong regulation on these systems – defining what may and may not be legally connected to public utility networks, for example.
We would probably expect a homeowner to hire a tradesperson to maintain these services, and in some cases it's legally mandated that only a qualified person may install or modify these systems. Is it then unreasonable to kick consumers off of the Internet when they install poorly-maintained devices, and require them to resolve the problem – perhaps by hiring the networking equivalent of a qualified plumber?
Probably a startup idea or two would come out of that sort of regulation. Now that, to install that Nanny Cam, I have to hire a certified network administrator.
Huh, weird, this whitelist seems to mostly consist of devices the ISP would be glad to rent out to you on a monthly basis...
The solutions available (and there are more, just enumerating some):
IPv6 so everything is directly on the internet or not hidden behind a common router like they are now. This allows direct blocking of bad actors.
Security certifications for all software and hardware that ever connects to the internet. Well, guess I won't be doing as much programming at home anymore. And good luck getting that open source project of yours certified without getting some Patreon supporters with deep pockets.
Arbitrarily, from the consumers perspective, block their access to the internet when they "did nothing wrong".
Hold the creators of the devices accountable for making shitty, exploitable systems. Sue them directly for the financial harm they've permitted (millions of dollars today alone). But good luck suing them, they're in a foreign and will cease to exist tomorrow (under that corporate entity).
In theory the user could be presented with a "here is why you've been blocked" explanation when they try to browse any site. They could then (probably) figure out what is the offending device, take it off the network, then click "please let me back on the internet, the bad device has been removed". (Somewhat similar to how the MX blacklists work at present).
that's true, but the vast majority of internet service subscribers aren't their own network administrators. If you're using an ISP-supplied modem/router combo, i'd say that your ISP is your network administrator. If my ISP wants that kind of access into my local network (and they don't give me any other option) then they should be doing some actual administration.
What is powerless is that many people today couldn't get twitter, github, reddit, spotify, box, etc. because many people don't care about securing their webcam.
Great, now I can throw in a load and get a notice on my phone when it's done. This is awesome! (3 hours later) Wait, why can't I get to the internet? I call my ISP, they tell me that my connection is fine (it's tech support, they aren't security experts). But, I tell them, Google doesn't work for me. They do some tests, everything should work. I bitch, moan, cry a little, rage quite my ISP and sign up with someone new. It works for a few days until my washing machine (having been offline for a bit) gets exploited again.
I still don't have a clue as to why I'm being blocked from Google and company. Maybe they kick back a message as a 4xx (what would be appropriate?) that says my network has been hacked. But I've seen those sorts of things all the time in ads, I know that's just someone trying to scam me, convince me to run something that'll install a virus on my computer.
Must be my computer! Damn Dell piece of shit. I can't afford a new one. Maybe that neighbor kid can come over again and help me out with this.
($200 and several trips for the neighbor kid later it's still not solved)
By exploiting a toaster, the attacker could shut off the domestic internet service entirely, rather than just disrupting Netflix.
My point is that there will be a cost, and that taking action against vendors won't be enough (sp. if they are in a different country, are no longer in business, etc.)
429 seems appropriate.
Or maybe even 451.
It is going to take quite a while in this scenario for the user to realize it is their IoT toaster that is causing the issue.
My prediction is that it'll get worse before it gets better and that these type of botnets will be around for at least 5 years. Look at what happened to unsecured-by-default routers, android phones, Windows PCs, cars...the way consumers will get more secure stuff is by manufacturers being publicly embarrassed / sued over problems until caring about security makes business sense, then they'll have it in their hands when their old insecure gadgets die.
My cynical side side thinks this will be a problem until all the old endpoints supporting these insecure things are shut down eventually in 5-10 years.
as you proved, fixing the situation by fixing the devices wouldn't be a feasible approach. The traffic from those devices is carried by ISPs and this is there this traffic should be stopped. To me the situation reminds about email spam. We didn't get rid of spammers, instead the email traffic is analyzed and dealt with accordingly. I'm sure that ISPs easily see the patterns of such massive DDoS attacks and could just drop (or throttle down into oblivion, like 100s times down) the participating traffic.
Nothing. If the economic system revolves around capital's valorization of itself, security is a distraction from that. I have to spend five seconds typing my password in every time I sit at my desk? I can't just easily e-mail this executable file to my co-worker and have them run it? My desktop is locked down by the desktop admins to prevent me being able to do this, and many other things? Every implementation of security costs money for the personnel to do it and possibly the product cost. Plus any lost productivity it might cause (15 seconds to type in a password each time one sits at their desk, compounded).
Donn Parker wrote one of the first books on computer security in 1976, Crime by Computer. The opening words are as apt for corporate security now as it was then. The #1 fear for the corporate manager are the employees of that company. They are the ones with the greatest control over the means of production, so to speak, even more than the managers themselves who are de jure in charge, but are de facto one step away from actual control. Look at how much access someone like Snowden had at Booz Allen.
Obviously, if all products have wide open holes, script kiddies will be able to get control. Some minimal security will always be done to stop this sort of thing. On the other hand, one (or better yet, several) dedicated people who want to get past some security arrangement can almost always get in. Even if the firewall is supposedly impenetrable, the wifi or the building security or the social engineering credulity of employees or something will be there. There will be some weak link in the chain. Especially for a company that needs to make a profit.
The real security is that semi-intelligent, persistent agents that seek to access and control systems without authorization are lacking. Things depend on the conditions that cause this to rise or diminish. Because once it rises, there is little that can be done. I forget who said that the czar's Russian Okhrana was one of the largest, most extensive security forces that existed. That meant little when Russia began collapsing in 1916 though - all it meant was that they were even more aware that virtually everyone in the country was becoming the czar's enemy.
Securitypocalypse events due result in business and government putting more focus on security for a while, but time moves on, and attention drifts back to the main focus. These things go in waves, and total security is never something of the highest priority.
And every time I read about the IoT botnet, my immediate response is to look around my apartment at my Internet-connected lights, and wonder if they're part of it.
How can I find this out?
Is anyone making a tool that a non-technical user can run to squint at their network and look for evidence of Mirai, or anything else trying to take advantage of this niche?
There are plenty of tools with a reasonably simple interface that will tell me if my laptop/desktop computer is infected with something. But what can I use to diagnose the health of all of the other computers proliferating around my house?
How can a non-technical user easily monitor the overall health of their connected household? Is this a project anyone is building? Because I think it's definitely something that needs to exist now.
And it's probably not gonna get any better any time soon, either. Because I'm not sure there's a money stream in making this something a non-programmer can do. And maybe there shouldn't even be a money stream in this - maybe there should just be huge-ass fines to motivate as many people as possible along the chain from "my Internet Thing" to "the Internet" to include a white/grey hat or three on their team very early in the design process of making their camera/light bulb/pacemaker/router/modem/whatever. Although if someone reading this can figure out a way to get a money stream out of making it a lot easier to see the health of your home's devices, and keep them safe, that might be a decent YC app for you.
How do we add an immune system to the Internet Of Things? Because we sure as hell need one.
Assuming the flirting displayed is sincere, that security researcher may prove much more scalable than you'd imagine.
* Inventory all IOT devices in your possession.
* Find the device manuals and make sure you've changed the default password(s). Note there may be devices where it appears you've updated, but that have secret credentials you can't modify.
* Make note of which of your devices do not have an obvious way to change the factory default password.
* Keep an eye out for lists of devices that are known problems, here is one such sample list: https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/09/iot-home-router-botnet-lever...
* Check each manufacturer to see if they have issued a firmware upgrade to address security issues. Apply update.
* Think about retiring devices that appear on the "bad" hardware lists or the devices with unchangeable factory defaults.
Hope this helps.
You can even hook up Dowse to your TV set and show a live animation of where on the your internet your devices connect to https://youtu.be/vquh3IXcduc?t=74
As for a non-technical solution, it will be difficult to implement. It requires some computer know how and time. Such a secure device could be created or better yet offered by the manufacturers of the modems/routers frequently deployed in homes.
It would be good to have an IDS with bare minimum settings, easy to turn on layer after layer, though I understand it's tricky.
Turn off the devices you don't want to check; leave only those up you want to investigate.
Visit your router on the web interface and see if there are any graphs are possible to check for things like requests/second or packets/second. If it's really high while you're not actively doing anything, that's a clue.
Visit the UPnP settings on the router. If there are ports listening for incoming internet connections, turn the UPnP off on the router.
If you can SSH to your router, log in and start collecting data with tcpdump[1]. This later can be analyzed with tools like wireshark[2], which can show you per protocol what is going in. Most of the botnets use telnet- or IRC-like interfaces which are, in most cases, plain text commands, so it's possible to spot them.
Apart from this: reset everything to factory and change all the passwords before letting anything on your network.
[1]: https://www.linux.com/blog/tcpdump-tutorial-beginners
[2]: https://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/ChapterIntr...
I think you unintentionally helped to cement GP's point. There is a huge opportunity for some kind of little box - vetted/certified or even insured - that non-technical users can plug in, click Next > Next > Finish, and be notified when any device on their home network starts acting suspicious.
End users would expect that such a thing should be simple. But of course it's not (would need to work with any device running any OS with any interface). First we would need some sort of standard protocol for it. But a standard protocol that lets an external agent determine what software is running on any device could potentially be dangerous...
You need a lot of data and a lot of current regularly updated information about websites being attacked or current known CnC servers. Also, there is a privacy aspect, so you can't send a lot of the data or even hashes of things to the cloud.
Such solutions might be more appropriate for workplaces in large companies and they already have things like SRX firewalls that have DDoS features.
Disclaimer: this is off the top of my head, there may be reasons it would fail.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/who-makes-the-iot-things...
Edit: I guess it's more accurate to say that a lot of poorly designed devices use UPnP IGD to work around NATs/firewalls and Mirai takes advantage of this to infect them.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/ddos-on-dyn-impacts-twit...
Personally I think his case is pretty convincing.
"Last month, a hacker by the name of Anna_Senpai released the source code for Mirai, a crime machine that enslaves IoT devices for use in large DDoS attacks. The 620 Gbps attack that hit my site last month was launched by a botnet built on Mirai, for example."
I repeatedly hear people refer to IoT devices that are notoriously difficult to update...yet this Mirai code is technically able to access millions of devices and bend them to its will.
So what I'm wondering is just, what prevents the good guys from using Mirai to slurp down every available device to patch the vulnerability that allowed Mirai to work in the first place?
It seems like if vulnerabilities in these devices can destabilize the entire internet that it should be perfectly viable as a response to actively look for those vulnerabilities, patch/minimize them and notify their creators of the issue.
Now, you might say "why doesn't a good samritan just login to all of those devices and change the password to something random?"
OK - ignoring the fact that THEY would be committing felonies in several countries... what happens when the device manufacturer wakes up and decides to patch these devices via that remote access? Suddenly the password doesn't work, and the end-user can't change it because... what's the procedure for changing the default ssh password on a light bulb?
Technically you could make the situation better by writing a worm that changes the passwords, but at this point even that is a lost cause since mirai has a command that will change the pw on all infected hosts.
You're plugging a leak and letting the owner know, hey this was leaking and I stopped it but you're going to need to address that.
And the article about BackConnect mentioned by Bloomberg: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...
I'm wondering what would be the negative consequences of this and if they outweigh the benefit of being more resilient to these types of attacks.
77.88.8.8
77.88.8.1
The reputation of the government - shutting down access to websites that hurt them is kind-a no-go for me.
I had disabled adblock at their insistence...
i re-enabled adblock and I could get the article. hmmmm. maybe something about the 50 unrelated js calls?? perhaps?
https://threatpost.com/mirai-bots-more-than-double-since-sou...
It absolutely is an area that governments should be mandating, because the problem is an externality. These attacks are a cost imposed on neither the producer nor the consumer of the device itself, and (apart from some highly speculative libertarian conjectures) the only things that can fix externalities are taxes, regulations, and lawsuits.
Lawsuits are infeasible in this case since we probably can't prove whose devices were involved in any given attack, so that leaves taxes and regulations - and the latter would be better so we don't have to go through the business of collecting taxes from manufacturers and then distributing them to the victims of attacks.
> That puts unnecessary strain on small companies
Clearly it isn't unnecessary, because I can't get to any friggin websites today. If small companies don't have the resources to update the devices, they shouldn't be building them in the first place.
Something similar could work for IT.
But this is incredibly hard, due to ease of manufacture and distribution, to regulate in the case of IoT devices and software.
- planned obsolescence cranked to 11, you must replace everything in your house every month
- monthly subscription fees for each lightbulb, refrigerator, and everything else
- all products must refuse to operate unless they can connect to a central update server (which is being DDOSed by competing products made in a country without that government mandate, that are still working, while no products made in your country work)
- company shuts down, goes out of business, and a new company with a different name (but all the same employees and products except for the logo) opens every month
- all software created must be maintained indefinitely into the infinite future for free by...magic elves?
From my experience in the aviation software world, we spend a great deal more on demonstrating reliability than in producing it. This forces a huge amount of overhead on our projects. This isn't a bad thing, mind you, but it is a thing to consider.
It is hard for a couple engineers to start a new company making these sorts of systems. The only practical way is to have a truly good and demonstrably better solution, or be inside a large corporation with already deep pockets.
The same is true in organic produce. I hear of a lot of farms that follow all the rules to raise organic goods but can't label them "certified USDA organic" because the certification process is too expensive.
> forced firmware updating is an area our governments should not be mandating
I think that if a company can't maintain a team to deliver regular security updates to their internet-connected products, then they shouldn't be producing internet-connected products in the first place.
I agree with you that government-mandated aviation-software levels of product certification would be destructive overkill.
Edit: forgot the /s
If no product with less then X thousand installs has to deal with the regulatory overhead of certification then experiments and early stage companies are less likely to be squashed. I would also exempt open source software from having forced audits or minimum standards for security. This would have the side effect of encouraging more companies to publish their firmware open source which would also not be a bad outcome.
To prevent companies manufacturing lots of almost identical product lines each individually under the limit for audits I think it would also be necessary to count all products that share more then half their code as one product.
In the case of ISPs providing cable modems and routers and DVRs and other boxes to their customers, they should be responsible for keeping those secure.
If people start getting fines or sued over what their internet-connected devices are doing, they might stop connecting them to the internet, or shop more carefully for devices or providers that are secure.
I don't think so.
You make a little gizmo with shitty security, you are liable. Full stop.
But to steal an idea from another comment, make the ISPs liable also for routing the malicious traffic onto the internet. They will then have incentive to monitor their networks and they can take homes offline until their customers fix or disconnect their hacked devices.
In my personal opinion, an ISP should be a dumb pipe. I'm providing you with the ability to send/receive "n" bits per second; I don't care whether you use it to participate in e-mail discussions with your church group or stream pornography and play online poker.
Are you certain you want ISPs to be responsible for monitoring all of your traffic and what you're doing online? Do you really want somebody else deciding -- at their own discretion -- what is "acceptable" for you to do online?
I'm very pro-privacy, pro-encryption, "pro-Internet freedom", etc., but the next guy may not be.
This is not like not doing maintenance on your car. This is like buying a car with faulty airbags. The manufacturer needs to issue a recall and fix the darn thing - or else face legal action.
Leaked news put the government in shame?
Copyrighted materail transmission?
Code to raise the temperature of some heater?
That's not the same thing at all. For a car to hurt somebody, the owner has to be actively using it, and doing so in a reckless or negligent manner; and furthermore, note that reckless operation of a car can hurt somebody even if the manufacturer built it perfectly. (if your car somehow did hurt somebody when nobody was using it, then the liability probably would belong to the manufacturer).
IoT devices are the exact opposite: they can cause harm when the owner has done nothing wrong, and they can only cause harm if the manufacturer screwed up and did not secure it propertly.
All the liability belongs to the producer.
Being a small company doesn't mean you should be able to ship a defective product that is guaranteed to eventually become part of a botnet.
The mistake in this case was relying on one vendor for DNS. Amazon Route 53 would be a good alternate vendor for DNS, for example.
If you have an iot device, by its nature it only needs to connect to a few services and hosts.
The manufacturer can provide this in their docs, and give an automatic config url that the router uses to load its egress rules.
The rules to load are displayed and the user checks they are legit by comparing to the printed version in the manual, then clicks ok. Or something like that.
Rate limits in terms of packets per second, total bandwidth both instantaneous and over time, are set also.
The app was down for me until I switched my WiFi network to use OpenDNS. It's possible your phone has the DNS record cached, or it's using a different DNS server. (Is it on cellular?)
Hardcoding IPs into a mobile app typically isn't done because it makes changing your infrastructure extremely painful.
Internet, in the beginning, was even more insecure. Including the computers and OSes. There were less abuse because few had resources and knowledge. Read some old software and you'll find all bad designs in it. Software didn't become worst, it's just targeted with more knowledge and intensity.
We need protocols and systems that are designed to be distributed from the outset.
So if a DNS provider starts banning public IPs (which are the only IPs it sees), you could end up with an entire college getting banned because of one hacked webcam in one student's dorm room.
Or someone in an apartment somewhere with (unknowingly) a hacked thermostat finds their internet no longer works (DNS provider has banned them), so they reboot their modem, which causes their ISP to provide them with a new IP address. Guess what happens to their old IP address? It goes back into the pool of available IPs that that ISP can assign to other customers, and more and more banned-from-DNS addresses keep getting passed along to innocent, un-hacked customers.
The source/destination MAC addresses in an Ethernet frame (layer 2) are rewritten at every router (layer 3) hop. The original IP source/destination addresses in the IP packet, however, do not change (exception: NAT, which does exactly that).
Another problem -- in many (most?) DDoS attacks where UDP traffic is involved -- is that the source IP addresses are "spoofed". That is, IP packet that the victim receives says that it's coming from Alice but it really came from Bob. There are also "amplification" attacks, where an "innocent third-party" is used, unknowingly, to "help" perform the attack.
e.g.s:
a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack
York said Dyn was “actively” dealing with a “third wave” of the attack.
Edit: sorry there, this worked for me but apparently it's not guaranteed.
They have other IPs as well, but that's what I'm using
But, just to be clear, it's not Google's fault: 8.8.8.8 are not the authoritative name servers for the sites that are down. Rather, Dyn, the provider of the NS is down, and I presume Google (8.8.8.8) is correctly not returning any IP address because the underlying authoritative name server is not.
Presumably Open DNS is working because it's not abiding by the TTL it's supposed to? It's caching the underlying authoritative name server longer than it was told?
It would take a lot longer than a couple of hours of twitter being down for that to have a useful effect. For something as major as the presidential election result, it would probably take minimum a week before people got bored and moved on to a different topic.
So this kind of attack that only takes something out for a few hours would have no useful effect for an actor that wants to prevent people from discussing a recent event.
IMHO, it would be hard in general to take out a service run by a serious IT organization (of which there are admittedly few, by my definition of serious) for more than a few days unless the attacker carried out non-trivial physical damage (eg, bombing multiple datacenters, murdering multiple system administrators, etc) or managed to somehow destroy enough backups (which in a serious IT shop, should be hard, as there should be some offline cold backups that require physical human activity to destroy)
... Perhaps if you try to argue that they did it in order to make sure everyone was on edge for the election... but even then it makes very little sense.