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Hacking is nothing new, pretty much everyone has heard the term and is familiar with its consequences. Maybe not everyone know the difference between a hacker, a cracker, a phisher, etc., – and i won't get into the subject here – but it's widely known they aren't the best people to have as your enemies.
One of the most basic attacks is the Denial of Service (DoS) and i'm pretty sure most of you already know how it works. A huge ammount of requests are made to one particular server which will cause it to overload, bringing both him and his services down. This is what happens to pretty much every site posted on /., unless you use Coral Content Distribution Network, developed at NYU. tip: To use it, simply append nyud.net:8090 to the domain of an url. For instance, to access my website you would type http://andr3.net.nyud.net:8090.
Anyway, the new trend – actually, it's not that new – is to use farms of zombie pcs – ie, infected Windows XP machines – to unleashed a Distributed-DoS (DDoS). The infected computers have a process running that will join an IRC channel and then respond to their "Masters" orders. This is much more powerful, given the number of vulnerable PCs around the globe. Furthermore, the owners of those computers have no idea their little machines are playing a part in a criminal act. Your computer could be one of them.
There will always be hackers, that's true. The icky part of all this is that now hackers work with commerical and financial goals in mind. They take part in competitions between different firms to generate revenue through the ripple effect caused by those attacks.
For instance, recently, my hosting provider, powweb, has been targeted several times by these attacks. Now, who could possibly be behind these attacks? I have no idea, but it's very possible they're aiming at deteriorating their service so that their clients become unhappy and start considering changing hosts. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out who wins in this scenario.
Although, to all fairness, this could be just a side-effect of someone attacking one particular website which happens to be residing at my host. Perhaps someone made other someone angry? Perhaps. But option a) is still possible.
Civ2boss on thu, 29 sep 2005 17:45
andr3 on thu, 29 sep 2005 19:44
meechwings on fri, 30 sep 2005 09:17
Another trend is using compromised PCs to send out spam and/or phishing attacks. I've noticed this myself; the spam I sometimes get comes from ISP domains such as Comcast or RoadRunner (cable companies here in the US).
andr3 on fri, 30 sep 2005 15:20
But if they're trying to make their clients unhappy, it's working. I'm considering switching hosts just because of the latest incidents. I'm getting really low performance, are you guys experiencing anything unusual?
Of course i won't switch right now, since i have over a year of hosting payed already. But i would so switch to dreamhost if i could... *sighs*
Subhan on sat, 1 oct 2005 04:37
Steve Williams on sat, 1 oct 2005 06:13
I'd not heard about the 'Coral' service or their append option (if that's the right word?). I tried the link in your post and whilst it did work eventually it loaded really slowly, is this normal?
Is this something you'd recommend when posting or getting posted on a major site in order to protect your server? Thanks.
andr3 on sat, 1 oct 2005 14:11
Yeah, it's probably not their fault, but we're getting downtime on our sites on a regular basis and that just can't happen. Someone suggested me to move to dedicated hosting in their chat support room... I don't think i need to do that to get a good quality service. When my contracts with powweb finishes, i think i'll try dreamhost. Or maybe even before it ends... i don't know. Things are getting ridiculous...
@Steve:
First, thanks for the compliment. :) I really appreciate it, since it involved quite a big workload. hehe
Yes. The Coral Content Distribution Network works in a p2p fashion. It replicates the website in question (and all content - imgs, videos - linked on the page) throughout several servers... i don't think it's your typical p2p network, where you, the common user help spreading the content. But they have several servers worldwide which they use for this purpose. The more hits the page gets, the more efficient it gets as well.
This is something i would really recommend to both editors on slashdot and posters on digg. It will prevent from DDoS-ing other sites and keep the pages linked in their articles alive.
The reason for the slow loading is that the coral service probably didn't have my page cached, so it had to fetch it on powweb and their servers are not in the best shape at the moment, as Subhan also mentioned. And like i said, the more hits the website get, the more distributed the content gets throughout their network, which results in faster downloads.
Keep in mind that if you find a slashdotted (aka dead) website, it's very probable that a copy of it already exists on Coral. This is no big secret. Actually, i think i either found this on slashdot or on digg, so a hell of a lot more people know about this, which is kind of the essence of it all. ;)
Steve Williams on sun, 2 oct 2005 07:30
That's a useful tip too, thanks :)
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