The Internet has been groaning under the weight of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Domain Name Service, apparently aimed at anti-spam vigilantes Spamhaus, in retaliation for their blacklisting of Dutch free speech hosting provider Cyberbunker. At 300 mbps, the DDoS is the worst in public Internet history. “These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.” The so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks have reached previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second. “It is a real number,” Mr. Gilmore said. “It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.” Spamhaus, one of the most prominent groups tracking spammers on the Internet, uses volunteers to identify spammers and has been described as an online vigilante group. In the past, blacklisted sites have retaliated against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they flood Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until its servers become unreachable. But in recent weeks, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet’s core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or DNS. As bad as this is, it could be a lot worse. An anonymous paper called Internet Census 2012: Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices reports on a researcher’s project to scan every IPv4 address for publicly available machines that will accept a telnet connection and yield up a root login to a default password. The researcher reports that 1.2 million such devices are available online (s/he compromised many of these machines in order to run the census). These machines are things like printers and routers with badly secured firmware, visible on the public net. They are often running an old version of GNU/Linux and can be hijacked to form part of a staggeringly large botnet that would be virtually unkillable, since the owners of these devices are vanishingly unlikely to notice that they are silently running attackware, and the devices themselves are completely unregarded. Firm Is Accused of Sending Spam, and Fight Jams Internet [NYT/John Markoff & Nicole Perlroth] ( via Hacker News )
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DDoS storm breaks records at 300 Gbps
Lucas123 writes “It may be a movie about a stone age family, but DreamWorks said its latest 3D animated movie The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they’ve made. The movie required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks’ last record holder, The Rise of the Guardians. The production studio said between 300 and 400 animators worked on The Croods over the past three years. The images they created, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity. When the movie industry moved from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously. For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
