DDoS Attacks of February 2018

The previously reported (Second Life DDoS Attack) DDoS is mostly over… for now. Oddly, I am having to search for news of the attack(s). It is there, but the media does not seem interested. On the net, you can find information. Like:

I suspect the reason for the lack of coverage is this type of information is too techy for most newscasters and writers to handle… maybe even understand.

Warriors... come out to play

Warriors… come out to play

From Internet searches, we can see a lot of people knew this type of attack was coming way before it happened. But, those that failed to protect their servers from misuse apparently didn’t. This failure of people to prepare for a known possibility is rampant in society.

Those of us that want solid Internet connections can take some steps to mitigate the impact such attacks have. The attacks often target the DNS servers, the units that translate secondlife.com into something the computer can use, IPv6 = 2001:578:3f::30 or IPv4 = 216.82.8.56. The bad actors get the most impact for their clicks by taking down DNS servers as without them your computer can’t find the machine addresses and cannot connect. Fail.

However, if you knew the IP address you could circumvent the use of a DNS server. Windows has a HOSTS file that lets you do that. But, manually maintaining it in this ever-changing world where the Internet changes by the millisecond is an onerous task. So, we use DNS servers.

The best we can do is extend our computer’s list of DNS servers to use. I rely on my ISP’s gateway/modem/router first, Google, and last my ISP’s general area DNS server. That last one is cover hiccups in my router. So, basically two. I went down yesterday evening (PT/SLT) as I depend on two big DNS services. If I had added a couple of smaller DNS services, I might have stayed up.

As I cut my cord, dropped may cable/satellite service, the interruption took out my TV too. Adding more DNS servers to my computer would not have helped the TV. I need to be able to add more DNS choices to my gateway/modem/router, a bit trickier. But, possible.

More and more we are seeing government and businesses we rely on failing to do their jobs well, if at all. So, who you gonna call?

One thought on “DDoS Attacks of February 2018

  1. I found an interesting timeline visual of the mass amount of traffic using the following link.
    http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&list=0&time=17584&view=map

    It’s a link with a time set to Feb 22. If you click the play button to watch the timelapse, you will notice how the map overloads with all that traffic. It’s so much in fact, it made my Chrome browser crawl to a molasses haha.

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