Re: Recent Attacks

[Iván Arce <core.lists.firewall-wizards () core-sdi com>]

"Starkey, Kyle" wrote:
> I don't believe that this was the total objective.  I believe (and this is
> only conjecture) that their point was the actual vulnerability itself.  The
> DoS and the newly created DDos attacks are VERY simple to use and widely
> available.  I think the point was "Hey, check out this great piece of code
> that is really easy to use and the MAJOR players on the internet are still
> vulnerable."  I am hopeing it was more of a wake up call than it was
> malicious, but who knows.

Hmm, its not that MAJOR players on the internet are 'still' vulnerable,
there's
really not many things you can do to protect yourself from being a
target.

At least, there's not many things to do just by yourself.
For me, if this is a wake up call as you say, its only to make people on
the
internet realize that they have responsibilities towards other users. 
And one of them is to make all possible efforts to guarantee that their
systems are not going to be used as weapons to scale attacks against
others.

None of this would happened if every ISP blocked outbound spoofed
packets,
if every MTA is configured properly to avoid spamming and relaying, if
egress filtering is in place, etc.

And lets say it, all this attacks have been known for years and have
been detected for at least months. It just pisses me off that only
after a simultaneous attack to several highly media-exposed targets
everyone suddenly realizes that the net is not and will not be a safe
place
if one doesn't care about safety.


-ivan

-- 
"Understanding. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know
 a house from a horse by the roof on the house,
 It's nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke,
 who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse." - Ambrose Bierce


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