Wikileaks has been under DDoS attack for the last five days | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks has been under DDoS attack for the last five days

zdnet.com

71 pointsEmpro16 comments

Presumably changing the IP address that Wikileaks uses doesn't help because the bots doing the DDoS grab the IP address from DNS. Assuming Wikileaks doesn't mind the downtime (they're going to be down anyways) why not set the wikileaks web-related DNS entries to point to an IP address that fbi.gov or whitehouse.gov uses for, say, their email server?

Perhaps law enforcement might then have a vested interest in discovering the source of those attacks if their ability to receive email gets shot to hell.

While that may be a good idea in theory it would also send all legitement visitors to those links cause a couple of things to happen:

1. I cant go to wikileaks and leak a document because my ip address will be recorded on a governement website (weird questions ensue)

2. The sites that are currently mirroring wikileaks wont have a source. So they will become out of date pretty soon.

3. People will think that wikileaks has been taken down and will forget about it.

>Apparently they're from the U.S., believe Julian Assange is a terrorist, and plan to keep attacking WikiLeaks for as long as possible.

This is silly. Judgements of Assange aside, isn't Wikileaks just a portal for a collection of torrents? If that's the case, what an utter waste of time and bandwidth.

Yes, because of course, this bandwidth could be much more effectively used in staging a Sybil attack[1] against those torrents. ;)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

How would this work against torrents? I'm not aware of them using trust-based systems. Certainly you can pollute the swarm and slow things down a bit, but anyone who eventually finds someone legitimate is barely even effected.

The comments from "DietPepsi" do not sound like American English. I don't think whoever wrote it is American.

  > his attempt at aslyum in Ecuador. [sic]

Americans would say, "... to gain asylum..."

  > as a protest against his attempt

Americans would say, "... to protest his attempt ..."

They are not "apparently" American to me and Ms. Protalinski should refrain from accepting their quotes at face value.

It's awkward, but it sounds like some borderline-illiterate high school students I used to know.

Also, stressing how american you are and then calling yourself DietPepsi, just seems like trying a bit too hard.

Because if it were true this would be the issue that sullies America's reputation internationally.

Honestly, why would it matter whether it was or wasn't americans?

I found "…to escape justice into Ecuador. This would be a catalyst for many more like him to rise up in his place." more awkward. I also thought the lack of contractions was unusual as well given the general lack of formality otherwise.

But I think the writing sample size is too small to be very confident. Not that it matters too much, unless someone's trying to catch them.

From the article: > When I say "apparently" I mean I have no idea if they really are American (actually, I doubt they are).

Also, Emil Protalinski is a he.

It sounds like ísl-enska, a term used when someone translates directly from Icelandic (íslenska) to English.

In Icelandic you would say ".. tilraunum hans um hæli í Ecuador" or literally ".. attempt of his at asylum in Ecuador

and

"sem mótmæli gegn tilraunum hans" -> "as a protest against his attempt"

Given that a handful of Icelanders are working for Wikileaks (Kristinn Hrafnsson as an example) it could very well have been written by one.

This could be related to the Syria data dump. Russia and maybe China could have assets exposed in these emails.

And we all know the Ruskies have bot bandwidth to burn!

Is it really that difficult to fend off a DDoS?

Depends on the bandwidth. You can use services like CloudFlare for DDoS mitigation, and some hosts provide DDoS protection as well, but all of those services are expensive and WL is broke. Besides, the website itself is just a static collection of links, at the moment. Given that, the value of defending the website against temporary takedown probably doesn't justify the cost of doing so.

Some ISPs/hosts have DDoS protection, where they drop the traffic on their end (where the bandwidth is high) versus trying to drop it on your end (where the bandwidth is relatively low). Trying to break a DDoS on your end almost always results in your network dying when you're dealing with a dedicated, high bandwidth DoS.

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