So, in addition to hackers shutting down the sites belonging to Visa, MasterCard, Assange's bank, the lawyers prosecuting Assange, WikiLeaks itself and nearly taking down PayPal, there have been plenty of other troubles that have oddly worked in WikiLeaks's favor, or at least been countered.
Let's take a look at WikiLeaks's host site, EveryDNS. EveryDNS opted to drop the wikileaks.org domain after it succumbed to the DDOS. Plenty of people will say the government intervened as well, but for now we'll act as if it was all decision by the site. After the main domain was removed, two more sprouted up; wikileaks.ch and wikileaks.nl, both supported by EasyDNS (not to be confused with EveryDNS). Following that, hundreds of mirror sites began popping up all over the web. When we say you can't kill something on the Internet, we mean it. Despite the main website being taken down, all of the mirrors and supporters continue to keep the site up and running as if nothing ever happened. The World Wide Web is a tricky place to fight.
One of the more notable effects here is the response of the US government. Interestingly enough, it's not what WikiLeaks is releasing that's embarrassing the US the most, but it's our government's response to the matter. For example, Peter King—a key Republican Congressman and soon-to-be chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee—wants WikiLeaks to be declared an international terrorist organization, and for Assange to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. The government has been bashing both Assange and his site from the start, as well as helping to convince a number of corporations to stop supporting WikiLeaks to begin with. Nevermind the cables; the government essentially wants to shut down Assange's site and silence him forever. Is that not a bigger embarrassment, and the whole point of WikiLeaks to begin with?
There is also an official name for the mass DDOS war taking place. An appropriate title in my opinion, it's been dubbed Operation: Payback.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
DDOS
Let's begin with an explanation of what happened to WikiLeaks last week. The site came under a mass distributed denial of service attack. From who, we know not. But it managed to shut down the site for quite a while.
A DDOS attack is simple. The basic goal is to overload a server until it crashes. You see, in order to connect to a server, your system sends a packet of data to the server, called a SYN. The server responds with its own packet, called an ACK. When you receive the ACK, it is sent right back to the server, and thus you are connected. Now, if the ACK is not sent back, then the server sends up to four more to try and get a response from you. This is what DDOS uses to its advantage.
When a metric crapton of random computers all send a ridiculous amount of SYNs to a server, the server has to reply with an equal amount of ACKs. In a DDOS attack, the computers do not respond, thus causing the server to send four ACKs instead of just one. When as many computers do this as fast as possible, it effectively quadruples the bandwidth usage of the server. If enough people do it, it can't handle the traffic and shuts down. WikiLeaks had this issue.
Now, in light of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and other companies refusing support to WikiLeaks, sites like 4chan are coordinating the same attacks on them. In the past 24 hours, MasterCard's and Visa's sites were both temporarily shut down. PayPal was pretty much brought to its knees. A number of transactions made during this time have not gone through or screwed up because of it; these sites—especially PayPal—rely on the Internet.
What I'm trying to say is, a War of the Internet has begun. On one side is WikiLeaks and its supporters; on the other, the US government and every corporation it can get to fall in line with it.
A DDOS attack is simple. The basic goal is to overload a server until it crashes. You see, in order to connect to a server, your system sends a packet of data to the server, called a SYN. The server responds with its own packet, called an ACK. When you receive the ACK, it is sent right back to the server, and thus you are connected. Now, if the ACK is not sent back, then the server sends up to four more to try and get a response from you. This is what DDOS uses to its advantage.
When a metric crapton of random computers all send a ridiculous amount of SYNs to a server, the server has to reply with an equal amount of ACKs. In a DDOS attack, the computers do not respond, thus causing the server to send four ACKs instead of just one. When as many computers do this as fast as possible, it effectively quadruples the bandwidth usage of the server. If enough people do it, it can't handle the traffic and shuts down. WikiLeaks had this issue.
Now, in light of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and other companies refusing support to WikiLeaks, sites like 4chan are coordinating the same attacks on them. In the past 24 hours, MasterCard's and Visa's sites were both temporarily shut down. PayPal was pretty much brought to its knees. A number of transactions made during this time have not gone through or screwed up because of it; these sites—especially PayPal—rely on the Internet.
What I'm trying to say is, a War of the Internet has begun. On one side is WikiLeaks and its supporters; on the other, the US government and every corporation it can get to fall in line with it.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks...
So, Julian Assange has been arrested, much to my dismay. Whether or not he will be extradited to Sweden, I don't know. But I do know WikiLeaks has a pretty bleak future at the moment.
Details for all the WikiLeaks news to be posted over the next few days in segments. This'll be a looooong topic.
Details for all the WikiLeaks news to be posted over the next few days in segments. This'll be a looooong topic.
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- The world could experience the nuclear apocalypse as I sleep, and I wouldn't even wake up to experience it all.