The New Face of War: A Picture of the Opening Salvo of a Potential New World War

originally posted by: roadgravel

originally posted by: Hefficide
a reply to: roadgravel

I began computing as an elective in my sophmore year of High School - 1982.

I just thought it odd that you didn't understand the Y2K situation. Maybe you are not a software person and were not involved much in the changes.

2038 can't come soon enough.

Maybe that's what is needed to get a dose of reality. Getting back in touch with nature. I lived my life without internet and I'm sure it will not be the end of the world. Infrastructure can be rebuilt to work without it. A few stealth bombers and subs can still work without it and that's what would happen when it's all said and done.

The internet isn't my god. It's fun at times but it's not what is important to me. We'll see who has what it takes. Learn from your elders and quit calling them dinosaurs, they may teach you how to grow your own food and can it. I'll survive.

Instead of speculating about it, we've had a long to to implement a contingency plan. If I can figure it out, you can bet they have. I mean we do spend 600 billion a year on the military. DARPA created it. I won't let a hacker spoil my time on this earth because theirs would be short lived in an event such as you've described. Either way I'll adapt and improvise.

a reply to: Hefficide

The problem here is that sites go down all the time, for various reasons, an anecdotal mention of seeing several sites go down over a certain period of time means nothing. If you want to claim that something dramatic is happening then we need to see the evidence for it, some kind of concrete proof. The screen grabs are not proof of this as you can go there any day of the week and see attacks going on. I have seen far more dramatic attacks live on that site than the one you show in the grab, and that didn't result in lots of sites going down or some dramatic start of a new technological war.

I agree with your general sentiment, that this is a new front in global warfare, and that we're likely to see more of it, but I dare say that the vast majority of people are not seeing anything. It's going to take a lot more than what we've seen to start "slowing down the internet".

It's going to be interesting to see what happens as a result of the NK attack on Sony (and lets be honest, all the evidence and common sense tells us it was indeed NK, and probably with assistance from other unfriendly nations). If the US does respond in a similar way it could result in something extremely interesting. That's not likely to happen though, the most plausible outcome is the US imposing sanctions on NK to make some kind of weak public statement.

Ok I haven't got the time right now to set up a new post as I'm at work, but if someone can sort this go for it.

BBC just announced Ukraine's Rada has voted to rid itself of its binding non alignment policy. Wow, that's big news. That means it's possibly gonna go NATO soon and Russia is really really reallynot going to like this. Personally expecting pro Russians now to go all out and push for more of Ukraine.

Someone needs to post

Realizing that this aspect of the story is a bit old and has been unfolding in other threads, it bears mentioning that North Korea now has Internet again after a lenghty period of having NONE.

This a real time, real world, right now example of the premise offered in the OP.

a reply to: Hefficide

"Testing, Testing.....1...2....3....."






Jane

And away we go again...

A little late, but I have a question for y'all. Can networks be programmed to only respond to pings/queries/knocks on the door from only certain origins? For example, can an organization create a network that will only respond to computers from that organization and intentionally not respond to anything from anywhere else- essentially eliminating the effectiveness of these DDoS attacks?

a reply to: justwanttofly

Yes and no. Firewalls can be set up to ignore certain ports, or to even limit the number of connection attempts by an individual IP. Under normal circumstances - and even in heavy traffic this holds up.

The problem with DDoS attacks of magnitude is that they completely overwhelm the mitigation software and hardware used to Firewall. Imagine you are alone in a call center filled with phones... One, two, even three ringing at once and you might be able to juggle it. But ten thousand ringing at once and you are powerless to do anything. You shut down.

Same with the protection protocols. They shut down. In the case of computers, shutting down means literally shutting down. All ports closed - all traffic blocked. The site is technically there - but nobody can access it.

In extreme attacks the hardware itself can get hit so hard and so fast that it actually ends up being physically damaged - overloaded in an attempt to make sense of the influx of instant packets.

a reply to: Hefficide

Is it possible to build up a defense mechanism to these types of attacks then? Is it just a matter of making the network bigger and bigger (getting as many people in there to answer phones as possible) so that the attacker's system crashes before yours does?

a reply to: justwanttofly

That's a tough one to respond to because, in theory the idea works. It's damned near impossible to take down a site like Google or Amazon - because they have so many locations, and such infrastructure that they can reroute traffic through the cloud and distribute the attack over a very large surface area ( essentially speaking )... using my last example they can take the thousand ringing phones and reroute 997 of those calls elsewhere, leaving you able to answer the three you could handle.

The expense for this is mind-numbing. Google is on par with the NSA in their resources and algorhythms - in fact the two structures are frighteningly similar according to many tech experts.

The real issue is that people, such as yourself, are asking questions about how to mitigate these attacks - and that is actually the point of the attacks IMO. An agenda to create a need, where one doesn't essentially exist, in order to offer a solution that ultimately exploits the consumer.

a reply to: Hefficide

Gotcha, thanks. Your thought on the purpose of the attacks is thought provoking. I've never heard that perspective before.

WW1 people said the war would be over by Christmas ,World War II, was about world domination of Hitler, but because the world as changed so much since then you see the war right in front of you 24/7 with twitter YouTube TVs Iphone internet ,if a tank rolled into your county you lean out of the window film it on your phone and the whole world knows about it in Seconds so if you wanted to start a war in the 21st century first you have to take out all of the above ie twitter first but first you need the peoples army to test if you have the right team and then hack companies here and there once your successful you then know you have the right team then you move on to infrastructures so the biggest clue you will get (World War III ) is happing is the internet is out phones are down and TV stations are offline all at the same time then you know the world will be charged for ever ,so just now everyone is testing the water dipping toes in before World War III