Cyberattack: Open Resolvers and 300 Billion bits per second

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The difference is that if you think of a computer as a digital weapon, then an open resolver is a machine gun. Attackers can use open resolvers to amplify the strength of a cyberattack by a factor of 100.

In this week’s attack on Spamhaus and the company hired to fight it, CloudFlare, attackers made use of more than 100,000 open resolvers to inflict an attack that reached 300 billion bits per second, the largest such attack ever reported. When they could not take down those targets, they aimed and fired open resolvers at the world’s major Internet exchanges, first London, then Amsterdam, Frankfurt and then Hong Kong. end quote from:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/technology/devices-like-cable-boxes-figured-in-internet-attack.html?partner=yahoofinance

If you know anything at all about the infrastructure of the free world's Internet, when you read this you realize the only way to prevent something like this or worse happening almost all the time is a complete restructuring of all technology associated with the Internet, Servers, and even TV Cable Boxes worldwide. However, this kind of change likely would take 10 to 20 years to accomplish because we are talking about likely billions of dollars of technology that would have to be replaced.

So, in the meantime expect nations likely to institute firewalls around nations or other types of stop gap measures or even possibly shutting the Internet down before power and water stations go down multiple places in  more national cyber attacks. Unfortunately, the Internet can now bring down nations(at least for a few days at a time). So, the two biggest weaknesses that could harm people nationally and internationally would be banking and utility cyber attacks. Nations out of pure survival are going to have to find ways to protect their banking and utility sectors to survive this ongoing.

A less expensive approach to a solution likely would be modifying the programming in servers and other devices to make them less vulnerable to these kinds of attacks until technology can be replaced over the years with new stuff less vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. However, this kind of problem likely will always be there. As soon as people plug up the dike someone else makes a new hole. So, how do you keep anyone from letting loose the whole Internet upon mankind in multiple ways. I'm not sure that can be done. This is why I think at some point the Internet ( at least as we now know it) will be shut down either temporarily or permanently for the mutual survival of mankind.

Later: To make sure you and I aren't adding to the problem we should ask (whenever we get a TV Cable Box) whether or not it is an "Open Resolver" or not. By insisting upon non-open resolver technology we become a part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Later Still: I was trying to think exactly how TV Cable Boxes are directly connected to the Internet. It took me a moment to think about this but I realized this is how customer service turns on our cable boxes while we are on the phone with them. So, literally every cable box is connected to the Internet even if there is no Internet service in that house.