Recently an alarming number of Twitter users have been suspended for doing nothing wrong. This originally started in April as reported by the conservative news site Human Events and has begun to recently spiral out of control beyond the realm of politics and simple account suspensions.
The original attack is quite simple - get enough Twitter users to report a user for spam...and the target user's account is suspended. According to Human Events this attack was originally being used by left wing liberals to silence right wing conservatives for expressing their views. While I will not get into the political issues of this and why this goes against freedom of speech...something I will mention is that a "defense network" is being built to help protect against these attacks.
Showing posts with label DoS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DoS. Show all posts
Sony BRAVIA TV Datagram Flooding Denial of Service
Here's an interesting vulnerability...
Who would have thought you'd need to worry about your TV being subject to an attack?
A vulnerability has been reported in Sony BRAVIA TV, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).
Source: Secunia Advisory SA48705
Who would have thought you'd need to worry about your TV being subject to an attack?
A vulnerability has been reported in Sony BRAVIA TV, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).
Source: Secunia Advisory SA48705
How to Mitigate Anonymous' Internet Shutdown March 31
In case you haven't heard, Anonymous plans to shutdown the internet March 31 to protest a multitude of issues which I'm not going to bother to get into right now.
The plan is to attack all 13 root DNS servers with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
By shutting down all 13 root DNS servers, a domino effect will be felt throughout the internet and eventually all DNS queries will begin to time out.
Their plan is pretty bold, and will require a tremendous number of computer systems attacking at once.
While it is unknown if Anonymous' plan can succeed, there are a few things you can do to mitigate this threat from affecting your organization.
1) Don't panic. This shutdown is on a Saturday, so the number of employees this affects will be minimal. If your organization isn't even open on Saturdays, then this won't affect your organization at all.
2) If you are open on Saturday, consider putting one of your local DNS servers in caching mode if it isn't already, and increase the DNS caching time to live (TTL) to 86400 seconds (24 hours). Any commonly used sites should remain cached throughout the attack. It's a good idea to revert to your original settings Monday morning.
3) Finally, if you absolutely must have access to certain websites with static IP addresses, such as business partners or suppliers, consider making available to your on-call support staff a hosts file with critical domain names and IP addresses pre-loaded, so that they can drop this file on any organizational systems which start to have DNS problems. Once again, revert to your original settings Monday morning.
These three simple tips should help keep your organization up and running, should Anonymous actually succeed in taking down one or more root DNS servers.
For home users, I would recommend checking your local weekend weather forecast Friday evening. If it's going to be nice out, be ready to go outside for a change, get some exercise and have some fun. If not, consider breaking out some board games for the kids, or find yourself a nice book to read. It's only one day, if it even happens, and it's not the end of the world.
The plan is to attack all 13 root DNS servers with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
By shutting down all 13 root DNS servers, a domino effect will be felt throughout the internet and eventually all DNS queries will begin to time out.
Their plan is pretty bold, and will require a tremendous number of computer systems attacking at once.
While it is unknown if Anonymous' plan can succeed, there are a few things you can do to mitigate this threat from affecting your organization.
1) Don't panic. This shutdown is on a Saturday, so the number of employees this affects will be minimal. If your organization isn't even open on Saturdays, then this won't affect your organization at all.
2) If you are open on Saturday, consider putting one of your local DNS servers in caching mode if it isn't already, and increase the DNS caching time to live (TTL) to 86400 seconds (24 hours). Any commonly used sites should remain cached throughout the attack. It's a good idea to revert to your original settings Monday morning.
3) Finally, if you absolutely must have access to certain websites with static IP addresses, such as business partners or suppliers, consider making available to your on-call support staff a hosts file with critical domain names and IP addresses pre-loaded, so that they can drop this file on any organizational systems which start to have DNS problems. Once again, revert to your original settings Monday morning.
These three simple tips should help keep your organization up and running, should Anonymous actually succeed in taking down one or more root DNS servers.
For home users, I would recommend checking your local weekend weather forecast Friday evening. If it's going to be nice out, be ready to go outside for a change, get some exercise and have some fun. If not, consider breaking out some board games for the kids, or find yourself a nice book to read. It's only one day, if it even happens, and it's not the end of the world.
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