On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Petri Helenius wrote:
Gregory Taylor wrote:
Oh yes, lets not forget the fact that if enough sites have this 'firewall' and one of them gets attacked by other sites using this firewall it'll create a nuclear fission sized chain reaction of looping Denial of Service Attacks that would probably bring most major backbone providers to their knees.
Fortunately people with less clue usually have less bandwidth. Obviously there are exceptions. I would expect to see localized tragedies if something like this would get deployed but predicting death of the internet is clueless.
Don't be so sure that people with no clue don't have bandwidth, large companies with enourmouse resources sometimes end up with really clueless people at the top and similarly clueless network techs. But reality is it does not matter. Even five years ago, DoS attacks were already usually distributed coming mostly from comprimised servers. Now thanks to Microsoft's constantly buggy software and large deployment of broadband, its so easy for script-kiddies and alike to get hold of computers to be used for such purposes (but at least our unix servers don't get hacked as much...). And I really hate this kind of script-kiddie attitude that if you stike me, I'll strike you back even harder - revenge by the same means is not the answer (and in many cases its not the revenge but they just want to show themselve off as being more daring then the last guy). But then again since in US most people support death penalty and the government itself did not care how many innocent afghans died when they were doing their own revenge, then what are we expecting from the company execs - they might well buy this crap strike-back with a vengence firewall. I do hope, that if it were to happen, it'll quickly become clear that this is totally illegal and both Simbiot and those who bought it will end up in court and bankrupt and that will establish good precidence for the future. But as I mentioned in thread last week and as Sean Donelan mentioned today too - all this looks a like like a publicity hype in the making for a probably crappy product (but not crappy in the way that it'll actually force its users to break the law). We have about 20 days to wait before its released, so lets just wait and see how bad it really is. --- William Leibzon Elan Networks william@elan.net