Posted on 09/14/2016 9:55:02 AM PDT by amorphous
The pillars that provide the basic infrastructure of the internet are being probed by an unknown entity that is probing for that point where the foundation cracks and the internet breaks.
The internet’s critical and underlying basic infrastructure is being probed by an unknown attacker who is – patiently – looking for vulnerabilities, revealed cybersecurity expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier.
A board member at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor project, Schneier is also the chief technology officer at Resilient, a cybersecurity firm recently acquired by IBM.
In a blog post, Schneier states that some of the companies that run “critical pieces of the internet” are being probed by an unknown quantity, with “precisely calibrated attacks.”,
Much like raptors did fences on Isla Nublar, these attacks are systematic and well-planned, seeking to understand the defenses employed by these vitally-important companies.
“These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down,” Schneier wrote.
He wrote:
One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.
In speculating, it’s possible that the companies Schneier is referring to include registrars (the companies that provide domains like .com etc.) and DNS providers.
Schneier’s findings are in line with a DDoS trends report [PDF] by Verisign, the registrar for domains such as .com and .net. If Verisign is taken down, your favorite websites and even your emails are likely to stop working.
Furthermore, one of the companies even revealed that – in addition to DDoS attacks – intrusions that attempted to modify and manipulate internet addresses and tunnels, were also discovered. Again, to test the company or its security defense’s response times.
Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services.
No Mischief Here
Schneier looks beyond activists and cybercriminals as the instigators of these systematic and calibrated attacks, pointing instead to the forces of cyberespionage. Such capabilities are, as history shows, possessed by the likes of China, Russia, North Korea and the United States, among others.
He wrote:
It feels like a nation’s military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US’s Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.
If the assertion does come true someday, the world could see an unparalleled blackout that could disrupt the way we live in the present day, to the very core.
And what can we do about it?
“Nothing, really,” Schneier added.
Nothing until we are aware and talking about it and do some probing of our own to look for that unknown intruder.
Taking down the internet can mean two things:
(1) Literally shutting down the internet itself which sends and receives messages between IP addresses (dd.dd.dd.dd). The internet is spread over thousands of routers and there are numerous paths for getting from point a to point b, and the routers are capable of automatically detecting failed links and rerouting to operative ones. It would be practically impossible to shut this thing down.
(2) Shut down the directories (called Name Servers or DNS) that convert such things as yahoo.com to its IP address. There are also lots of Name Servers but it would be easier to cripple this system. The DNS system is a user of the internet, not the internet itself (depending on your own definition of “internet”. It would be easier to cripple the DNS system.
Maybe we should be saving a few IP addresses so we could get to our favorite places even if the DNS system went down. Actually this wouldn’t work will for the complex websites because they call upon the DNS system to fetch supplemental pages that make up what you see.
I’m done for now.
Yup, Obama.
I own a Manufacturer's rep firm. We deal in higher technology for industries. I would say 90% of my business is now through emails.
Maybe we should start stockpiling tin cans and string.
And pigeons.
I stopped watching once they had the graphic gay sex scenes...are they still pushing that agenda?
So, handing over control of the internet is far more than just a potential censorship issue, it’s handing over control of a large portion of the US economy. Is that a fair statement?
Well...life as we knew it before, say, 1988 (when I first started hearing about it) was really kind of OK.
Is it that entrenched, that losing it would cause so much havoc?
For me it's at best a convenience, at worst one more time-wasting piece of entertainment. I'd probably be better off without it, though I won't give it up willingly.
Don't beat yourself up. Even among those of us who are skilled with computers, no one can know it all. No one can know TWO PERCENT of it all. These are teams of hundreds of experts, all expert in their small area.
So, handing over control of the internet is far more than just a potential censorship issue, it’s handing over control of a large portion of the US economy. Is that a fair statement?
So ... you’re saying this could really be a crisis?
For me it is a way of gathering not only useful information, but in this AGE OF DECEPTION, TRUTHFUL INFORMATION...
For example, if we did not have the internet,we would not even know that NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS altered Bill’s interview about Hillary fainting spells, etc. We would not even know that Hillary is even sick!
Hard to say. But I did do some research, and it happens a lot whenever one streaming service is working through another streaming service. In our case, we were using Netflix through Amazon. Basically doubling the choke points.
Good thing Russia, China and NK are taking the internet over next month.
I think if Trump becomes President, he should push for worldwide adoption of IPv6 to replace IPv4. IPv6 not only tremendously expands Internet capacity, but potentially could reduce the vulnerability of a attack that could take down the entire Internet.
Just like the virus creators then sell anti-virus software, those who bring the net down will collect their ransom.
More than fair. Not only do I communicate with engineers, buyers, and technicians but I receive my orders, factory shipments, and a lot of times payment all via the internet. Have you noticed banks tellers are cut down as people and business is using the internet instead?
More dangerous would be attacks on physical infrastructure like the fiber lines going into MAE-East and MAE-West. A backhoe, and a judiciously planted quarter-pound of C-4 could really hose things up. Primarily because so much traffic is routed through a limited number of points (at the demand of our feral government to aid their surveillance state). If someone just cuts a bunch of fiber, it can take hours to fix. If you make an attempt to destroy the cable with explosives or whatnot, you could be looking at a bit more time to recover. Fortunately, much infrastructure can be routed around, but by design, some of it is more difficult to deal with.
Even in that case though, I don't see the damage not being fixed after a week. However, even if we recover in a relatively quick time frame, you have to keep in mind that with just-in-time inventory management, some cities would be virtually out of food in less than a week. That's not a good thing when you have large portions of our largest cities that are effectively barely civilized.
There are other ways to attack infrastructure as well, that many people don't think about. A dedicated adversary could screw things up really badly. Let's say you hit big internet infrastructure both physically and logically. This generates a bit of chaos, to further feed that chaos, they might also hit a bunch of the really large transformers across the country. Most people don't know that in many cases, those transformers are custom jobs largely imported from asia (japan). In some cases, there really isn't a hot spare available, especially if someone takes a site out in a determined manner. Dropping a bunch of legs of the grid like that will likely cause most of the rest of the grid to fail as well. How long to replace 50 large multi-million dollar custom built transformers? Months? Years?
Our civilization skates along on a thinner edge than most people are comfortable with thinking about.
White Rose, the transvestite leader of the Dark Army, turned out to be head of the Chicom cyber-security department. The head FBI cyber-security agent is at least bisexual, if not just an insomniac lesbo. Everyone is waiting for Elliot to release Phase II, but he is getting even more and more schizo, so it’s not clear that even he knows what’s going on.
Does that help any? I thought it would.
They’ve gone from about 3.2 million viewers to about 650,000, so there’s a good chance this will be the last season even if Elliot manages to get his stuff together enough to set off Phase II.
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