[LINK] www.aph.gov.au NOT visible again

[Stilgherrian]

On 11/02/2010, at 9:48 PM, Michael Skeggs mike at bystander.net wrote:
> It is a bit troubling that Steve Conroy's Russian mafia botnets could
> presumably do the same, while we tend not to see them marching through the
> city.

Indeed. The DDoS in the previous attack on various government websites was pitifully small. An infosec expert described it to me as "about $15 worth of botnet". The Anonymous kiddies could have pooled their lunch money and bought more attack capability than was exhibited.

This new round of attacks seems to be a little larger and running for longer, but it's still amateur hour.

The thing about Anonymous is that while there are some serious people with real concerns about Scientology, and some real fears about reprisals by that organisation and hence the anonymity, the fact that they don the Guy Fawkes mask and wrap their public image in secrecy means that as a brand they become attractive to any teenager who feels the need to belong to... well, I'm sure you know what I mean.


> The reporting is heavily laced with fear of the new and poorly understood,
> but really it seems best described as storm in a teacup.

Agreed. Storm in teacup. But for a general reporter, who doesn't know that far bigger DDoS attacks are happening every day of the week, it all sounds a bit exciting. Particularly with a site like aph.gov.au going offline, 'cos it's one they've heard of.

In the last batch of attacks, one of the Attorney-General's Department media people expressed her frustration at the media reporting that the PM's website had been "hacked" when no breach had taken place.

My understanding is that when the attack kicked off at the appointed time, and the load increased to the pre-determined threshold, they simply flipped the server to a new IP address. The 10 minutes or so when the site was unreachable was the DNS propagation delay.

Stil


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