Global Network Attacks Were Up Over 98% this morning | Hacker News Reader

Global Network Attacks Were Up Over 98% this morning

akamai.com

52 pointskbambz31 comments

What this one-off look does not tell me - are the attacks higher on new areas not used to attacks, or are the highlighted areas used to a significant level of attacks and might therefore have defences?

And 98% of what?

At a glance and with no real history or numbers this would seem meaningless.

There's a lot of chatter over on Reddit about it [0]. There was a pretty widespread outage around 4 hours ago. Likely an accumulation of attacks in commemoration of the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death, as have been going on the last few days.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1v3fb2/internets...

Is this a rare occurrence? 198% of "very little" is still very little.

I would've thought the figure often fluctuates by much more than this.

Oops, all I get at that site on my iPad is a message ordering me to install Flash. Hello, Akmai? Anyone noticed the declining support for that old technology ?

Flash may be declining, but it's still one of the best remote administration technologies available.

The chaps that keep the CloudFlare global network running do seem a bit busy than usual today. I asked if there were "more attacks than usual" and they replied "Yes" and rushed off to do something.

Very low amount of news in this article, doesn't mention the attack being used. I feel I needed to assume its a DDoS. But then several types of DDoS don't require large amounts of network traffic (and traffic volumes would be the easiest way to see DDoS from the outside looking in) some DDoS's can keep a server down with 10-100 packets per second.

Basically I learned nothing, and I want this article to have a "Want to know more?" button.

Software on my deciated server already blocked attacks from IP's belonging to:

- China

- Mongolia

- Netherlands

- Turkey

- Iran

- Moldova

- Romania

- Kazakhstan

- France

- Taiwan

- UK

Pretty diversified attack in progress.

That's normal though right? Are you comparing this to historical data? Also, what kind of attacks are you seeing?

What software are you using ? was it a large scale attack ?

I use http://www.configserver.com/.

I love it as it blocks any crap that tries to hack in automatically at iptables level.

Judging by logs I see about 2x-3x more break-in attempts to misc system services.

Are you using something like fail2ban? I'm seeing slightly higher activities on all my servers, but I doubt it's actually statistically significant (i.e. not different from random)

A glance at the logs and it looks like our dedicated servers are fail2banning IPs at pretty much the normal background level—i.e. a fairly steady stream of mostly Chinese addresses all day long.

I would like to take this opportunity to air my grievances regarding fail2ban.

I'm not a security researcher, but fail2ban appears to be a log prettifier instead of an actual security apparatus, as it doesn't actually prevent anyone from logging into your box. Unless you've configured fail2ban to ban IPs after 1 failed attempt, if you don't have a secure password or any other such basic security measures, you are still at risk of getting pwned.

Instead of taking the time with fail2ban, I personally just make sure everyone uses passphrased ssh keys, or use a strong password in conjunction with a yubikey or 2 factor authentication and call it a day.

Blocking ips from countries is not an exact science as network blocks are traded frequently and networks do not conform to lines on maps.

My read was that the software was blocking specific CIDR blocks, and those blocks were within the allocations of the listed countries.

Not that he was doing country-wide blocks. Though I could see doing that in some cases (e.g., you do no legitimate business with country Z, but get some high percentage of attack traffic from it). Metcalfe's law fails to account for the fact that many nodes in fact contribute negative value to the network.

I prefer CIDR-level blocks myself, if single-IP blocks prove too whack-a-mole-ish.

Lately i noticed a number of cloudfare outages in popular websites, does this relate or is it just because the cloudfare network had some technical glitches?

Which sites?

what.cd was one I noticed this morning.

I heard from a friend that what.cd and similar torrent sites like that have been under heavy ddos attacks for a while now.

what, ptp and tvt all seem to be down and cloudflare customers, they've been mostly down for over a week now (tvt was fine until recently).

there seems to be a trend where media torrent sites are targeted and i'm wondering how it's been able to go on for so long.

what.cd doesn't use CloudFlare, but yeah they've been under attack

If you go to what.cd in your browser right now, you get a CloudFlare page stating that what.cd is not responding.

what.cd started using CloudFlare for the site, as was stated in the blog post regarding the DDoS attacks.

[liliff@ichigo ~]$ dig ns what.cd +short

walt.ns.cloudflare.com.

leah.ns.cloudflare.com.

geenstijl.nl, cex.io and a number of others i forgot - i just noticed it the past 3 months.. perhaps a lot of new sites switched to cloudfare during that time?

Although there were a bunch of outages, I'm pretty sure Cloudflare stated the problem wasn't on their end.

Is it typical that Texas would be such a large percentage of global attacks? It's at 24.83% at the moment.

Maybe the War On Christmas, Religious Bigotry, Racism, Homophobia and Misogyny, Gun Fanatics, Big Oil Companies, Global Warming Denial and Government Deregulation got started a little late.

Texas isn't even that bad. Of course the redneck mentality thrives in rural areas, but the metropolises are fairly progressive.

That said, they do hold disturbing power over certain things, such as education.

But still not as bad as Mississippi. Now that is a truly awful state. The absolute worst in nearly all demographics besides violent crime (where it is second, likely due to having the highest incarceration rate). Also the most religious.

As long as Texas has a troglodyte in the governors mansion, it deserves the terrible reputation it has earned for itself.

Visited Texas last year (I'm from New England) and stayed with an Obama hating, gun toting, get-off-my-lawn Texan. We got along great, saw eye to eye on many things and generally were quite compatible. Proving the point that a person unlike people can be likable and reasonable on a one-to-one basis despite their different upbringing, background or political positions.

Dangerous to lump all Texans or all of any type into a category simple based on how the state tends to vote, or the media/'s perception of a state.

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