<nettime> Cringely: Why DDoS May be Even Worse Than You Think
From
"nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>
Date
Fri, 25 Feb 2000 12:33:02 -0100
[: hacktivism :]
<www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000224.html>
The Cat is Out of the Bag
the pulpit
Why DDoS May be Even Worse Than You Think. A LOT Worse
Editor's Note: The following contains mostly unedited e-mails from
readers, so don't waste your time sending e-mails about grammatical
errors to Bob. Thanks.
By Robert X. Cringely
I have the best, the smartest, and the most cynical readers anywhere,
and they came through big time when I asked for more details on
Distributed Denial of Service. This is the last column I will devote
to this subject, which the rest of the journalistic world has already
abandoned. And abandoned too soon you'll see as you read some of the
comments below. There is one important correction I need to make to
last week's work. I blamed Solaris for the problem, primarily because
I was hearing from folks at Sun that their software was the source of
difficulty. This week, I have had it proved to my satisfaction that as
much trouble was posed by systems running Windows NT, and that the
underlying operating system makes little difference in how these
attacks are instigated.
Thanks to the dozens of people who sent information. Below, I have
tried to include most of the ideas presented to me by a number of
people. There was substantial duplication of ideas. If I didn't
include your work here, it is because I don't want to make the column
so long that people won't read all the way to the end. PLEASE read all
the way to the end, especially the quite long final section. Get ready
to be scared.
Eric Rachner wrote:
"Securing the bulk of Internet end systems is not a realistic
solution. However, there is a realistic solution to the DDoS problem
and it has been available from the IETF in RFC 2267 for about two
years now. From a civic point of view there are a lot of safe
practices which ISPs need to abide by in order to maintain the overall
health of the net infrastructure. Effective spam prevention is a
well-known example, and one that ISPs have ample incentive to
implement. If tech journalism was more tech and less journalism, RFC
2267-style filtering would be undergoing an awareness groundswell
right about now. While cynics may argue that lax ISPs will always be
numerous enough to sustain attacks like these, I expect proposals
forthcoming from Federal committees to be even less realistic and
probably more expensive."
Elizabeth Olson wrote:
"I could be wrong, but I think part of why the method of attack wasn't
officially revealed by the FBI was the same classic security mistake
that companies make over and over again - attempting security through
obscurity. 'If everyone knew how to do it, everyone would do it!' is
often the tagline to this sentiment, despite the fact that anyone who
knows anything at all about security knows that the only way to get
problems fixed is to expose them. Lists such as Bugtraq exist just for
this purpose. In fact, I read through recent posts to Bugtraq to see
what they had to say about the attacks. There was a great synopsis of
some of the tools used to generate the attacks as well as methods for
stopping them posted February 10.
"While most people outside security circles (i.e. anyone who doesn't
read Bugtraq) wouldn't have read this, the media usually doesn't pick
up on the technical aspects of such things. When a refinery blows up
we hear it's because a valve failed and little more. The same goes
here and the engineers who are responsible for fixing it are well
informed as to the causes and fixes for the problem. I don't see any
conspiracy, just a lack of interest by the common guy. This was the
same problem that was had when smurf attacks abounded and it took a
very, very long time to get even large ISPs to fix their networks such
that they couldn't be used as relays. System administrators are slowly
wising up and the community at large is starting to realize that in
fact no man is an island and a greater mechanism for cooperation in
such matters is required.
"The fact remains, the FBI didn't say how it was done for the same
dumb reasons they probably wouldn't say anything about anything else -
silence gives them a feeling of security they can't attain otherwise,
because they are basically powerless against this. It is totally in
the hands of people who operate networks to fix it. There will always
be vandals on the Internet and the FBI catching one of them won't do a
damned thing. In this case it's the unfortunate fact that the victims
are responsible for preventing the actions of the perpetrator, and
that's just life."
Jay Kangel wrote:
"At some point one of these hacking events is going to cost someone
who can hire lots of lawyers with real money. At that point the
victim, or the victim's insurance company, will want to sue for
damages. The actual hacker will likely have little or no money. Even
if the victim wins such a suit the damages cannot be recovered. The
deep pockets are the owners of the zombie machines. Is it negligence
if a machine owner does not promptly install security patches and, as
a result, hackers take over the machine? I don't know..."
Bob Lewis wrote:
"Maybe the government, itslef, is launching the attacks? Nah. Well
it's probably a couple of ---holes with an attitude about e-commerce
or possibly people who were trying to short-sell tech stocks, but if
you are in the mood for a conspiracy theory I would advance the
following. It wasn't the government per se, as in an order from
Clinton, but consider that the FBI has been trying to get telecom and
ISPs to install the equipment and pipes to peel off all backbone
traffic and send it to them for surveillance for about two years and
all these pesky privacy advocates (as well as the ISPs that would have
to PAY for this equipment) have been railing against it. The FBI is
only trying to do what the FSB, successor to the KGB, is doing in
Russia. So post-cold war, the FBI=KGB. Now consider if you're a real
patriotic gung-ho FBI guy and your team stands to gain considerable
money and clout from this kind of disruption. It's not too tough to
set this up so it freaks everyone out, yet doesn't leave any real
fingerprints.... You didn't do any real damage and any that was done
could be considered acceptable losses given your righteous mission. A
couple of days later you have a couple hundred million in your budget,
mandate to set up ten regional response centers, etc., etc. With your
real objective accomplished, you let the boys chase ghosts and maybe
eventually find someone along the line who spit on the sidewalk so you
get some kind of conviction. Disclaimer: I DO have the site
compsitacy-central.com, but you heard it here first. J"
Finally, Charlie Demerjian wrote, and wrote, and wrote: "....A
part-time employee (soon to be full time) of mine was the first person
to characterize and post the info on these attacks. The institution he
works for was shut down for almost two weeks last August while they
were figuring out what was going on and how to stop it. While I am
sure this was not the first DdoS attack, I cannot find a published
report of anything sooner. Basically he was, and still is, on the
front line. Needless to say he spent much of the last week talking to
the FBI for a number of reasons. I have spent a LONG time talking to
him about what happened, how it happened, and what the future holds,
so here are my answers to your questions....
"First a bit of history on DdoS attacks. The attacks that happened
last August were simply a new usage of the DdoS tools. The first time
I saw them was back in '93 or so. I was working nights at a hospital
at a major midwestern university with nothing to do all night. While
sleep was an option I live at night so I stayed up and played on the
Net. I almost always had an IRC window up no matter what else I was
doing at the time. If you are familiar with IRC, you know there are
bots on most established channels to keep the peace, provide rules to
newbies and other boring housekeeping tasks. Occasionally you need to
remove or ban a person from a channel due to unsocial behavior,
personal hygiene, or other things. Attack scripts developed and
defense scripts soon followed and the cat and mouse game began. Not
too long after that a reasonable stalemate was achieved and new ways
of removing people were needed. The solution that no one found a way
around was ping flooding.
"What ping flooding amounted to was pinging someone so often that the
ping/useful data ration on his line would be so low that his machine
would time out and drop off the net. Because most computers at that
time were on a dialup connection, a bot on a dedicated UNIX box at a
large university could easily remove someone from the net. A simple
IRC command of /flood was an almost universal way to remove anyone.
This was fine for 99.9% of users, but those on high speed lines posed
a harder problem. The solution came with the rise of linked bots.
"The linked bots basically started as a way to keep control of a
channel. If you have three bots talking to each other, if one is
attacked the other two immediately go after the hapless attacker. This
soon led to "bot net." Bot net was formed by 15-20 channels of
like-minded people (*cough* pirates *cough*). Any bot linked in this
fashion would pass a /kill command to the other 100-200 bots on the
net and they would all flood the target. It could be called by anyone
"authorized" on any of the participating channels and was rarely
abused because any of a thousand people could call it. If you screwed
around with it, you would almost certainly taste it soon. It was a
nuclear deterrent situation. It was also remarkably effective. I
cannot remember a single person who withstood it. I know I had three
or so bot on a T-3 line back then and that alone was almost enough to
remove anyone by itself.
"That was the last I heard of the technique until last August when my
friend was attacked. He told me about the 'new' attack that hit his
place of work and I chuckled and that was about it. I forgot about it
until Yahoo got hit. When it became obvious that this was the next
thing in hacking, it started a lively discussion in the little circle
of geeks I travel in.... Here is what I know.
"1) How are these attacks made? Basically they are incredibly easy to
pull off. There are attack programs readily downloadable from most
'security' sites. All you need to do is get the programs and find a
bunch of host machines to use it on. The hosts can be almost anything
and if you don't know how to compromise a computer look at those s ame
security sites. They have pre-rolled root kits for almost ANY OS.
"While the DDoS tools have many variants, they almost all follow the
same general outline. It goes something like this:
"A) A 'master' box is hacked. While they have been generally reported
to be fast machines, they really don't have to be. They don't do much
other than signal a start and stop.
"B) You hack a bunch of 'slave' machines. The more the merrier, and
the faster the line they are on, the better. The speed of the machine
is not all that important - almost any modern P-II machine can
saturate a 100 Base-T line - so filling a T-3 or an OC-12 is no
problem. Line speed is key here. Also there is a brisk trade for
compromised machines. If you can find ten of them yourself (not hard)
you can easily trade that for 100 more. If you spend a week preparing,
it is easy to get as many slaves as you want.
"C) You give the master a list of slaves, a target, and a time. If you
have half a brain you cover your tracks and set the thing to remove
itself.
"D) At the set time, the master signals all the slaves and they start
ending data to the target. While the target may not consume a single
CPU cycle looking at these packets, the lines leading to the servers
will almost certainly become so clogged that nothing useful gets
through. There are variants that will go after the server targeted,
but they are not necessary, clogging the lines is enough.
"E) The target sits and waits because it can't get any data in. It may
be able to send data out at full rate, but without anyone being able
to request that data, not much happens. To the outside world it looks
like the site is down. Please note that NO amount of patches or fixes
can do a damn thing about this. It's not the OS that's attacked, but
the pipes leading up to it. A Ferrari doesn't do you much good after a
four foot snowstorm, especially if the streets are not plowed.
"F) The people running the servers under attack now have to trace back
1000 machines pinging them and notify the owners that their boxes are
causing problems. This is compounded by the fact that most people
don't know that their computers are participating in the attack. To
give you an idea of the task that stopping this requires, try the
following exercise. Pick any four 8-bit numbers. Now try to contact
the owner of that IP address. Remember time is limited and, oh yeah,
your main Internet connection is down. Have fun. Repeat 999 times.
Unplugging your line does not stop the attack and still leave you
down. As soon as you plug back in you pick up where you left off.
Basically you just sit there until the attacker gets bored and stops.
"The end result is that almost any antisocial 14 year-old with a fifth
grade reading level and a not-too-short attantion span can take Yahoo,
or anyone else, down....
"What particular vulnerabilities were exploited? Basically none. I
know of several types of boxes that can be used as masters or slaves.
You mentioned Solaris, and my friend turned a Redhat 6.0 box over to
the FBI Wednesday. Almost any UNIX will do, and I am sure the software
has been compiled for everything under the sun (no pun intended).
There are three major variants of the DdoS tools and countless others
that have been modified to use a different port, different packets for
signals, etc.
"These attacks do not exploit any particular property but can be made
to use ANY existing vulnerability. I am sure that as each new hole
pops up in an OS, it will be added to the easily downloadable scripts.
Just think, when the first Win2000 hole is found, in the week it takes
MS to patch it you can use the 17 million Win2K boxes for the next
wave. Sigh.
"What can be done to avoid future attacks? In my opinion, nothing. The
cat is out of the bag......"
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