Massive Internet Attack Strikes America

[Reub]

What's happening here today? A massive denial of service attack has been taking place for most of the day. Most websites seem to be effected. Is it the Russians or Hillary?

"Hackers temporarily shut down access to websites for internet users along the U.S. East Coast Friday morning, in what experts say was a coordinated and curiously timed attack on one particular Domain Name Server provider.
Dyn Inc. reported a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack at around 7:10 a.m. New York time, which left millions of people without access to Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and The New York Times, among other sites. Dyn restored service at 9:20 a.m. but was offline again at around noon, as another attack appeared to be underway, also affecting the West Coast.

DDoS attacks on companies like Dyn, which facilitate the loading of web pages, have increased recently in both size and intensity. The latest comes the day after Doug Madory, director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, gave a presentation at an industry conference about research he had done on questionable practices at BackConnect Inc., a firm that offers web services, including helping clients manage DDoS attacks. According to Madory, BackConnect had regularly spoofed Internet addresses through a technique known as a BGP hijack, an aggressive tactic that pushes the bounds of industry.

Madory’s research was conducted with Brian Krebs, a well-known writer on computer-security issues. Krebs also published an article based on the research last month. Within hours, his website was hit by a “extremely large and unusual” DDoS attack, he wrote.

The barrage likely originated with a large amount of poorly secured devices like internet-connected cameras, routers, and digital video recorders, according to an analysis of the attack on Krebs’s site. These devices, collectively referred to as the “Internet of Things,” have been the source of an increasing number of attacks since early 2015, Flashpoint and Level 3 Threat Research Labs said in a report published last month."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... astern-u-s

[Reub]

If we are separated forever by this attack just please remember that I always liked you best!

[curlew]

Reminds me of the massive internet outage we had at work a few months before they laid me off. All the network folks were saying it was a Denial Of Service attack that we weren't properly prepared for. It turned out that somebody entered the wrong command to switch out a router.

[Reub]

This from Wikileaks:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/789574436219449345

Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point.

[curlew]

An interesting piece on the source of the attack....

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 ... riday.html

Do you have a refrigerator or DVD connected to to the internet?

[Pointedstick]

An interesting piece on the source of the attack....

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 ... riday.html

Do you have a refrigerator or DVD connected to to the internet?

If you do, GET RID OF IT! Nobody needs their shit to be internet-connected all the time, and these crappy, insecure devices are making it trivially easy for bad actors to amass huge botnets--not to mention giving hackers control over things inside your own house. Some things, like routers and set-top boxes, need to be connected to the internet. Fine. Toasters, washing machines, light bulbs, and thermostats don't. Replace them or disconnect them!

[MachineGhost]

What I don't understand is why there's no security? How are they getting through the router's firewall or NAT to get to these IoT devices? Are people really that fucking stupid? Wait, don't tell me....

[Kriegsspiel]

Pretty soon, you won't be able to trust anything electronic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/24/techn ... -news&_r=0

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password.

Except it’s not your mother. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her.

It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone.

Such a situation is still science fiction — but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

The software components necessary to make such masking technology widely accessible are advancing rapidly. Recently, for example, DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary known for a program that has bested some of the top human players in the board game Go, announced that it had designed a program that “mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing text-to-speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50 percent.”

... Social engineering, which refers to the practice of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging information, is widely seen as the weakest link in the computer security chain. Cybercriminals already exploit the best qualities in humans — trust and willingness to help others — to steal and spy. The ability to create artificial intelligence avatars that can fool people online will only make the problem worse.

Maybe in 50 years, synths will be so lifelike, we won't be able to trust "people" we know either. Techno-utopia, ya'll.

[MachineGhost]

[MachineGhost]

Here's a free IoT scanner: http://iotscanner.bullguard.com/search

[Reub]

I'm using the new Opera browser on my PC with VPN and it masks my IP address and shows my location as being in other countries and/or states. I like it and its free.

[bedraggled]

Reub,

Why is it important to mask my location?

Should we all use Opera- and what is VPN?

Thanks.

[Mountaineer]

I'm using the new Opera browser on my PC with VPN and it masks my IP address and shows my location as being in other countries and/or states. I like it and its free.

Private? You hope so.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/18/ope ... 0-million/

[Reub]

I'm using the new Opera browser on my PC with VPN and it masks my IP address and shows my location as being in other countries and/or states. I like it and its free.

Private? You hope so.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/18/ope ... 0-million/

China just bought them? Never mind!

[Reub]

I think that VPN would add security to your browsing experience by hiding your actual IP Address and masking your location. I actually got a message from my email provider recently asking whether I was really signing in from Canada. It really sucks that China is buying them!

[MachineGhost]

I think that VPN would add security to your browsing experience by hiding your actual IP Address and masking your location. I actually got a message from my email provider recently asking whether I was really signing in from Canada. It really sucks that China is buying them!

There's plenty of alternatives, none built into a browser that I'm aware of, though. Free ones are very slow too.

[l82start]

i have given a vpn called windscribe a test run, it is a browser based (Firefox add on)...they also have others browsers they are compatible with... they also offer router, phone, and computer based vpns

i have only tried the free browser based version and it didn't seem to make any speed difference...

[MachineGhost]

The browser isn't the VPN just an ad & tracker blocker and secure.link generator. There's better plugins to do the former (i.e. uBlock Origin and PrivacyBadger).

I like that it supports DD-WRT to put the VPN routing at the router level instead of on each PC, but it's only for paying members.

EDIT:

[MachineGhost]

Wow, they're giving away 10GB of VPN data per month to the free accounts for a limited time. I encourage everyone to jump onboard. Make sure you select the 10GB tab when signing up.

You can check you IP here: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

[Mountaineer]

I think that VPN would add security to your browsing experience by hiding your actual IP Address and masking your location. I actually got a message from my email provider recently asking whether I was really signing in from Canada. It really sucks that China is buying them!

There's plenty of alternatives, none built into a browser that I'm aware of, though. Free ones are very slow too.

Over the past couple of months I have tried the free Opera browser with (VPN activated) on my MacBook Pro, the free Opera VPN app on my iPhone, and the paid NORD VPN (gets reasonably high ratings on various VPN test sites) on my MacBook Pro. All slowed down my browsing to an unacceptable level. Oh well.

[MachineGhost]

I'm only seeing occasional 404 errors but downloads tend to fail more often than not when I forget to turn it off for that.

Alexa leans left? ? no wonder AI is scary...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MECcIJW67-M