Friday, October 21, 2016

Did Russia do this so the U.S. would be too scared to Attack Russia in a Cyber attack?

The news recently said that the U.S. was going to conduct a Cyber Attack on Russia. This never sounded like a good idea to me because telegraphing what you are going to do could result in what you see here. If you are going to do something you just do it like Russia does. Otherwise the whole thing is just a joke or something. Besides, our U.S. and European economy is much more dependent at this point on the Internet than Russia's is. So, an actual Cyber attack on Russia might cripple not only the U.S. economy but also Europe's as well just from the automatic retaliation.

So, maybe threatening a cyber attack is really counterproductive for the U.S. You either have to bite the bullet and actually do it or not. Anything else just becomes a bad joke in the end.

In order for the U.S. to have a Cyber War in reality the U.S. Internet would have to be shut down first to make any sense.

I'm not sure how that could work. But, we better figure out something before we lose our democracy to Russian Hackers completely.

Which would you rather lose our Democracy or our economy?

In order to conduct an actual cyber attack on Russia you have to give up one of these (at least temporarily) if you are thinking straight about it.

Otherwise it is just all a joke.

I'm thinking if it comes to it it is going to have to be to lose our economy for a month or two while the U.S. Internet is shut down completely. There really is no other way to have a cyber war with Russia or even a single large cyber battle with Russia. What do you think Russian Hackers have been doing for 20 years. They have been preparing to shut down all power stations all water supply stations, all sewage treatment systems that they can still through the Internet. We have never had an actual Big Cyber Battle yet because anything they could shut down they would. And the same is true of the U.S. with Russia or any other country they have a cyber battle with. So, it wouldn't be any hackers on either side that would suffer from it, it would be the common people in both nations from having water, power, sewage, rail lines shut down with likely thousands to millions of people dying in various ways because of this.

In an actual cyber war people die in in various ways through accidents. This is what most people don't seem to understand yet on ANY side.

Imagine just Amtrak Computers down with Train lights all messed up with Trains running into each other unless they just stopped wherever they were nationwide. Now multiply this by 100 or 1000 in various other computerized setups nationwide in all 50 states at once. How many people would die? How many would be injured? Likely not soldiers just citizens living their lives one day. And the worst times for this likely would be winter or summer depending upon where everyone was that got stuck without heat or air conditioning.

Cyberattack Knocks Out Access to Websites

Wall Street Journal

- ‎7 hours ago‎

Attackers controlling a vast collection of internet devices unleashed several massive attacks on Friday that left dozens of popular websites, including Twitter Inc. TWTR 7.04 % and Netflix Inc., NFLX 3.36 % unreachable for parts of the day.

East coast Internet service attack resolvedUSA TODAY

Cyber attacks cripple Twitter, Netflix, other websitesYahoo News

Featured:Hackers Wrecked the Internet Today Using DVRs and WebcamsPopular Mechanics

Trending:Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major WebsitesNew York Times

Opinion:Why Todays Attacks on the Internet Are Just the StartDaily Beast

Wikipedia:Dyn

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Cyberattack Knocks Out Access to Websites

Popular sites such as Twitter, Netflix and PayPal were unreachable for part of the day

Drew FitzGerald and

Robert McMillan

Updated Oct. 21, 2016 7:05 p.m. ET

105 COMMENTS

Attackers controlling a vast collection of internet devices unleashed several massive attacks on Friday that left dozens of popular websites, including Twitter Inc. and Netflix Inc., unreachable for parts of the day.
Web-technology provider Dynamic Network Services Inc., known as Dyn, said its domain-name-system services were subject to a massive denial-of-service attack starting at 7:10 a.m. EDT on Friday. After the first onslaught was resolved, Dyn reported another wave of attacks that caused disruptions through the day.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks can knock websites offline by flooding them with junk data, blocking the way for legitimate users. Dyn’s DNS services are a key part of the digital supply chain that allows web addresses—Twitter.com, for instance—to take users to their destinations.

How ‘Denial-of-Service’ Attacks Wreak Havoc on Websites

ENLARGE

Dyn Chief Strategy Officer Kyle York said the attack came from “tens of millions” of addresses on machines that had been infected with malicious software code. The code—known as Mirai—takes advantage of a weakness in internet-connected devices and forms them into a collection of attacking machines, called a “botnet.” Mr. York said the attacks focused on different computers in Dyn’s network through the day.
“It’s a very smart attack,” Mr. York said. “Literally, picture tens of millions of things attacking a single data center.”
The Mirai botnet that formed the backbone of this attack is thought to be made up of several hundred thousand devices, but criminals are able to make their attacks appear to come from an even larger number of devices, using a technique called “source spoofing,” security experts say.
A similar attack in September, harnessing hundreds of thousands of connected cameras and other “smart” devices against security researcher and blogger Brian Krebs, was the largest recorded attack, security experts said at the time.
Friday’s attack highlighted how the internet, which is designed to ensure its own stability by distributing control of the network across millions of computers, can still prove vulnerable to a targeted assault. Dyn, based in New Hampshire, is among a handful of companies operating DNS systems that help direct traffic across the internet.
Other sites temporarily disrupted by the attacks included PayPal Holdings Inc., Shopify, Airbnb, Kayak and GitHub, a service used by programmers and major technology firms to create software. Data-storage provider Box Inc. also was affected, and parts of the websites of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times also were down for periods on Friday morning.
Some of the sites affected were customers of Amazon.com Inc. ’s giant cloud-computing business, which uses Dyn as one of several providers of DNS services, though Amazon said it was able to quickly restore normal service.
Dyn is still “digging into the root cause” of the attacks, Dyn spokesman Adam Coughlin said.
Denial-of-service attacks have been around for decades, but the attack on Dyn was made particularly severe by an influx of new, poorly secured devices onto an increasingly complex and interdependent global internet, said Craig Labovitz, co-founder and chief executive of Deepfield Inc., a network-analytics company.
“The problem is still here,” Mr. Labovitz said. “And it may be worse than it was before.”
Hours after the first attack, outages flared up again in more regions. Users from California to Malaysia had problems accessing more than 1,200 web domains, according to network research firm ThousandEyes.
The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are aware of the attacks and “investigating all potential causes,” a DHS spokeswoman said on Friday.
Amazon said the problems affected East Coast cloud customers of its Amazon Web Services unit, which runs a broad array of websites, between 7:31 a.m. and 9:10 a.m. EDT. Amazon uses several DNS providers, including its own Route53.
When Dyn was attacked, Amazon’s service was briefly unavailable for some customers that use two of its massive data centers, one in northern Virginia and the other near Dublin, Ireland. So it shut down that DNS use, and rerouted it to alternative providers, restoring full service.
Cloud-services provider Heroku Inc. also said it saw “widespread” DNS issues related to a denial-of-service attacks against one of its DNS providers, but that it had resolved the issue.
Two other major cloud-computing providers, Microsoft Corp. ’s Azure and Alphabet Inc. ’s Google Cloud Platform, both of which are smaller than Amazon Web Services, said they didn’t experience any service disruptions on Friday.

—Jay Greene, Laura Stevens and Damian Paletta contributed to this article.

Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com and Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

However, it is also possible that Russia is going to shut down everything on Election day!

That would really be a mess and likely be considered an act of war upon the U.S. Unfortunately, this sounds a lot like Putin's KGB type of Macheavellian thinking in action.