Sending Out A DDoS

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Silicon Republic reports:

Serious questions are being asked of the security of Ireland’s websites following a week of regular distributed denial of service attacks against Government websites, the lotto and Boards.ie.

What exactly is going on? In the space of a week, Irish websites have found themselves inundated with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that once again, as of today (22 January), a number of Irish Governmental websites are down with confirmation from those attacked.

Once the vestige of pranksters, DDoS attacks which flood a website’s servers with fake traffic from multiple points to shut down the website are now cosndered criminal behaviour with those found to be perpetrating such crimes usually facing harsh punishments.

Hmmmm.

Anyone?

Irish Govt and private sites being inundated with DDoS attacks (Colm Gorey, Silicon Republic)

Lotto ticket terminals brought down by cyber attack (Irish Times, Wednesday)

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22 thoughts on “Sending Out A DDoS

  1. DubLoony

    If this is a distraction, need to see what is actually being hacked / broken into. Ans who is doing it.

  2. beardedrambler

    Seems a shade Random, when you throw Boards in to the mix, Could be a red herring while they work on gaining entry else where…

    I’m sure we’ll find out in about 9 months when the intrusion is detected ..

  3. Alan

    Have they thought of perhaps paying for a website firewall … they don’t exactly cost the earth and mitigate the effects of a DDOS attack .. some very good companies out there that don’t charge an arm and a leg …

    1. curmudgeon

      This is by far the most uninformed and just plain stupid comment I’ve seen in a while. A “website firewall”, Jesus wept.

  4. MajorThrill

    “Serious questions are being asked of the security of Ireland’s websites following a week of regular distributed denial of service attacks against Government websites, the lotto and Boards.ie.”
    Any by now the answer should be well known – they’re almost impossible to defend against without spending huge amounts of time and money and even then you’re only reducing the odds of your site being taken down, in certain territories, not preventing it.

    1. ollie

      There are companies who can take and filter your traffic. very effective but expensive, only used for sites that are revenue generating

          1. Alan

            No this is a firewall that filters out the DDOS attack traffic so it never hits the website server …

          2. MajorThrill

            They’ll work to keep your servers from melting and being used as an ingress point for something more sinister but you’ve just signed up to a service that’ll prevent legitimate users from accessing the site when under load. Any half hearted DDOS is built to simulate the real thing and based on the ones I’ve seen they’re near indistinguishable unless you’re committing massive resources to parsing them all properly.
            Not impossible but I’d be sceptical. Also I’m curious now.

      1. MajorThrill

        That’s true but they’re not great for high performance services in my experience (Which I’ll grant you no government website could ever be described as).

        1. Alan

          I disagree with you there, the cloudflare option starts at $20 and the one I use as well starts at $20 Sucuri Security and well able to handle hight traffic websites (1 Million plus Visitors a day)

          1. MajorThrill

            I won’t disagree as such but I’ve found (and had them described as) blunt instruments with less than sophisticated methods for filtering out the bad stuff. However it’s been a year since I last looked so maybe they’ve come on significantly since then.

  5. Gav D

    Likely to be ransom based attacks. I’ve personally encountered about a dozen corporate companies who were victimised by this towards the end of last year (they’ve just arrested the alleged perpetrators, the DD4BC attack group last week). Many of whom paid up to make the attackers go way as it was cheaper than the cost of the anti-DDOS prevention solutions on the market. The cloudflare approach suggested by Alan above wouldnt cur it for the sustained volume of these sort of attacks.

    This is someone else stepping in to
    – fill the void left behind by DD4BC
    – continue the work being done by them.
    – spreading their targets a bit wider as the corporate end of things have already been tapped.

    1. realPolithicks

      I won’t pay them a brass farthing. They can go ahead and publish dem photos of my youthful indiscretions. Publish and be damned I say!

  6. meadowlark

    Sorry but *considered*, not consersedfxjfo or whatever it is up there in the article.

    I’m ok now.

  7. Truth in the News

    One wonders about this gang in control of the country, Government Web
    in lock down due to DDoS, ammo case found close to Kennys speech
    podium, and Burton nearly drowned in a couple inches of water
    And these people cry give us five more years for stability….the Gods are not
    smiling on them of late.

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