'Million-strong' zombie army devours Raspberry Pi's crunchy base The charity behind the tiny Brit computer Raspberry Pi apparently came under fire from a million-strong botnet army last night. Zombie machines were instructed by unknown assailants to launch a massive denial-of-service attack on the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website. The organisation warned the world that its online home was …
Hah, probably RM, who do anything they can to take down anyone supplying tech to education while comitting the unforgivable crime of not being them and their shoddy, overpriced wares. Usually they just run crying to goverment to prop up their anti-competitive ways, or carry out dodgy business deals, but maybe botnets are cheaper than w(h)ining and dining government aides :D
(OK, realistically, probably just something really boring like blackmail from some butthurt teen who is pissed that he didn't get free kit on demand, but the above is probably a more exciting theory)
I remember playing with the school 380z a very long time ago. It was one the only computer the school had until the BBC Model B and a 48K Spectrum turned up.
Those were the days. I remember giving the physics teacher (who had responsibility for the computers dumped on him) tutorials on it. I had to teach him how to use CP/M and code in BASIC and Pascal (which I'd been learning for O level computer science at an FE college 'cos my school couldn't teach it) .
...would be placated by hitting technology-education charities. Nor what an extortionist could hope to achieve. It just sounds like random, mindless vandalism to me.
Perhaps Anonymous might like to try to winnow out who was responsible, and give them the Good News instead. It's the sort of thing the Anons are good at...and it would certainly fit /their/ ideology to do that.
It's not impossible, but I don't think your average distro fundamentalist is going to be the type of person who sets up or rents a million host botnet.
It's hard to think of any reason behind this, most likely because there is no sane reason for it. Most attacks of this type aren't done for "fun" anymore, they're done to extort money out of the target to get you to stop, or to crash a competitor (I understand this is a common pattern for attacks on porn, spam, and gambling sites).
Since the folks at pi have no cash to speak of, and wouldn't be considered to be in competition by anyone with two brain cells to rub together, I think it's most likely a case of collateral damage from attacking a different target.
Maybe my age is showing but I can recall numerous cases where MS "supported" something in a way that made the supported product appear to perform worse than MS's half-assed knock off or not function at all. The Linux tools are probably a combination of Microsoft's "innovation" culture (as in "he steals, you copy, I innovate") and "Embrace and Extend" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish). The only reason MS supports Linux right now is that no halfway competent IT dept on anything less than an unlimited budget is going to let go of their Linux backends and appliances so their inability to play nice was not-so-slowly squeezing them out of the NOC.
Most hosts have some kind of DDOS hardening now, it's not always a thing you need dedicated infrastructure for anymore. It may be that the attacks had an easily-filterable pattern, or maybe the asshats realized they were targeting the wrong people and went back to attacking a "pharmacy" somewhere.
We'll probably never know the details - I don't think attacking the raspberry pi foundation gets you credibility in the black hat world - even thieves can think other thieves are dicks.
Just what kind of feckless twazzock launches a DDOS on a registered charity? Especially a tech charity, unless the botty lord (presumably that's what you call the controller) is scared of future kids out scripting them.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Dear feckless twazzocks,
There are a multitude of web ne'er-do-wells that deserve a jolly good spanking with a DDOS, but the pi foundation isn't one of them. Can I suggest that you take heed that bigger boys won't think you are big or clever.
Now feck off the interwebs!
UKgnome and friends!
Wrote :- "Just what kind of feckless twazzock launches a DDOS on a registered charity? ... There are a multitude of web ne'er-do-wells that deserve a jolly good spanking with a DDOS "
I think you are making the assumption that people who make DDOS attacks are (or should be) some kind of hero, like internet Robin Hoods. I expect they attacked Pi simply because Pi is in the tech news a lot lately.
I don't have that assumption, but not many people amass a million strong zombie hoard just to piss off a charity. It's a soft target and there is nothing to gain.
I forget the rates, but isn't a 100 computers something like $10 so for a million it would be $10000 although you would probably get a discount. Even if it was $1 it would still be an expensive waste of time. The only way this makes sense is if this was a demonstration of power. And even then, that only makes sense if you are a feckless twazzock botty lord!
This post has been deleted by its author
I always wonder why DDoS are carried out. They can only last for a short while, and so all you do is wait it out and back comes your website. Yes, some organizations like banks might lose some custom during that period and their customers will be a bit upset, but they are few in number. There are very few organizations that only use the internet for interaction and will lose lots of money from even the shortest period of DDoS.
I'm quite surprised that no one's mentioned this, but often DDOS attacks are launched as a distraction, to allow someone to infiltrate the network whilst the admins are looking the other way. A major example of this recently was, unless I'm mistaking, the huge Sony/PSN hack.
"The explosion of inexpensive and readily-accessible attack tools is enabling almost anybody to carry out DDoS attacks."
Erm, No. You could have all the tools in the world, but if people actually had secure a OS and anti-malware running on their machines you'd have to find 999,999 like-minded idiots with a common agreed enemy to mount an attack like this. No chance of that happening!
Crap internet security on the average PC is what is enabling almost anybody to carry out DDoS attacks.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
