A Matter of Perspective
So everyone went crazy over a denial-of-service attack against Estonia, essentially sites ending with .ee in a country of 1.3 million people and the same language group as Finnish and Hungarian. There were reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, BBC, The Guardian, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as the the tech press, ZD Net, CNet, Computerworld, Information Week, Network World, PC World, Slate, and Wired.
Now, I miss Shakesville and want it back as soon as possible, but get a grip people, Melissa probably gets as many page views as Estonia, but I don’t see the media wandering around asking about the impact of a few days of reduced snark and biting political commentary.
Understand that I know where Estonia is. I knew more about the Tallinn military district of the Soviet Union than the people who lived there. My family name is originally from just down the coast in what is the Kaliningrad district of Russia, but was once the original Prussia.
People need to get a grip.
7 comments
The cyber attack on Estonia was fascinating-reminds me of something out of a William Gibson novel.
There is a neat article in today’s “New York Times” in the Technology section called “Bit Wars: When Computers Attack.” I would have included the link, but it’s very lengthy.
Did you see The Dark Wraith’s most recent post about The Great Firewall of Chinea? Very interesting.
CG, most of this is easily done by anyone with a minimum of knowledge who is willing to visit the wrong sites, i.e. “script kiddies”. It is looking like the Estonia DOS was caused by a 19-year-old with too much time and not enough supervision.
You can stop these attacks, but it cost time and money to alter the infra-structure, and it slows things down. In the ancient times there were guys who dealt with these problems as a game, but much of what they did is now illegal, so the aggravation isn’t worth it.
I’ve been blocked by the “Great Firewall of China” for a while, although I’m not sure why, because I rarely wrote about China until they started to poison us all. The paranoid old duffers in charge are dying out, and when they are gone, change will come. I doubt they’ll embrace democracy, but things will change because they have been exposed to outside influences. They will probably move to some type of oligarchy.
Roger Ailes speculates as to who might be behind this DOS attack. Sounds reasonable to me as the group that shall remain nameless can be very nasty when they feel threatened.
CG, those people are just a few of the various whackos running around loose that no one bothers to investigate, while the Hedgemony keeps arresting losers and calling them “terrorists.”
As mental health professionals will tell you, you have to be careful when you challenge people’s core delusions.
I have my doubts about the validity of the Great Firewall of China site. It says my site is blocked or unblocked, more or less at random, across spans of a few minutes or a few days. I think something is wrong with one or more of their underlying assumptions. Or else the whole thing is just a ruse to collect domain names from people who might care whether their sites are blocked.
DOS attacks are a PITA, as you, Bryan, and I discovered a while back when someone attacked the host we share. But they may simply be part of the territory. I have no expertise on the matter, but I assume it’s very difficult to build a system that is intentionally wide-open from a use perspective that does not also suffer from a security perspective.
A problem with China is the constant expansion of their system. They have outages all the time that will look like blocking, and then there will be periods when new segments are added to the system that haven’t been filtered yet.
I know someone who can’t get here except at work, which is not behind the firewall. The individual is not Chinese and works for a Western company, so I have to assume I’m blocked, which is a waste of resources on the part of the Chinese, which is good – I’m costing them money.
There are solutions Steve, but they are a PITA in their own way, and not just the expense, they also waste resources – like IP addresses. There is a slow down in services that would affect a broadband operation.