North American Network Operators Group
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Re: ONS - The few the proud ... the sleeping

  • From: Jason LeBlanc
  • Date: Thu Aug 16 14:09:01 2007

Maybe I shouldn't have made a blanket statement considering the audience, my bad. My point was more that for most attacks not specifically directed at the network gear itself, meaning packets traversing the network, can potentially be managed. Shutting down an interface if you can find where it enters your network, and maybe if there is a pattern that can be matched on and null routing that traffic, etc. Short of terrorism (disruption without any purpose other than disruption itself) most bot nets were designed to accomplish something, usually that something isn't taking out the highway that earns them income. Maybe a target on the highway that causes them problems earning said income being knocked offline.

Stephen Wilcox wrote:
So if someone had a moderately large botnet (100k hosts) and these had an average broadband speed of say 2Mbps .. you are saying that 200Gb of traffic can be handled?

Given that the fastest edge connections (outside of Peter Lothbergs bathroom) are 10Gb this traffic can easily be directed to take out multiple parts of a networks critical connectivity.

Steve

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 09:58:11AM -0400, Jason LeBlanc wrote:
If anyone is running a large enough network that they can't mitigate this it would suprise me, and they would deserve to be taken out. Unless all these bots are directly connected (direct customer) and concentrated on one portion of the network (not spread across the entire access layer) I can't imagine with the tools, features, products, etc that are available today (that can almost manage dDoS attacks for you) that it couldn't be mitigated. 5-6 years ago this would have been a lot tougher, but it was still doable.

It would be interesting to get into a really technical architectural discussion. I have my ideas as to how to manage it, I'm sure others do as well, and differently. And ASN701 as mentioned specifically has someone who was able to manage these things 5-6 years ago in Chris Morrow (assuming you're still there). He helped us quite a bit back in those days, and without all the toys that are out there today.

J. Oquendo wrote:
[email protected] wrote:

I doubt if anybody would notice a DDoS attack against MAE-East. ;)
Who was it that doubted anyone would need more then 1024k of memory?

1) You need a pretty big hose, or a *lot* of computers to do it.
I would hope some have been reading news reports where its alleged this
particular botnet is over 1.7 million machines deep.


2a) The ankle-biters don't hose down backbones because (1) they don't usually
even know what a backbone is, and (2) they're usually too busy pointing their
DDoS tools at some other ankle-biter or IRC admin that cheesed them off. Yes,
these guys have taken out a few mid-tiers, but it's accidental collateral
damage, not the intended target.
Come on now surely you don't believe this to be the only cases where
idiots us botnets. Have you not read the reports of morons hosing a
network for randsom.

2b) The pros don't hose down backbones, because if a backbone is down, they
can't make money from their now-disconnected botnet.
Re-read above statement

Yeah, a concerted effort probably *would* take out AS701 or similar. But we
don't see it happen often, because the people who have the ability to do it
also realize that while AS701 is out napping, their other business ventures
are taking a hit from the lost connectivity...
For years now I contemplated how long would it be before someone created
the ultimate botnet/backbone killer. I've always wondered "Hrmm... How
would I COUNTER this if x happened." I've rambled on about it for I
don't know 8 years now, starting with "Theories in DoS" before DDoS was
really even pimped out by Dave Dittrich... People thought (probably
still do think) I was (am) looney. My guess is, give or take a few years
and you will get that one pissed off person to lay the smack down on
peers worldwide.

When this happens (hopefully it won't), I'll sit back and ramble on some
more with "that's so yesterday... I predicted it a "real long time ago"
(www.infiltrated.net/chappelle.mp3) then go back to rambling on as I
always do.