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MORB,

"They do have a point, though. All those companies that got hacked had crappy security yet are always demanding personal information from their customers to use their products."


In so far as the data breaches expose a vulnerability which the company then fixes, then yes the company's security could benefit in the long term. There's nothing like an attack to raise awareness. However in context of the piece quoted, the vendor specifically mentions that DDoS encourage better data security, which is idiotic.

There's no connection between bandwidth limitations and data security. If you can't keep up with the attacker/botnet, then your dead. It doesn't indicate anything about bad security practices.

Except these recent DDoS attacks haven't been just about raw fragmented packets hitting the server with more bandwidth then the server can handle.

If you look at the LOIC that the anonymous group use, they target a website to request pages that take up vast amounts of resources, be it memory, server side scripting or database load.

An example would be searching in the help section of a website and searching for a common word, or even letter such as 'a' and the search results taking several seconds per request due to high CPU time or Database load on the servers. In this instance, just a few people (sometimes even 1 person) can take down a website simply because of bad code.

sagum,

"If you look at the LOIC that the anonymous group use, they target a website to request pages that take up vast amounts of resources, be it memory, server side scripting or database load."

"In this instance, just a few people (sometimes even 1 person) can take down a website simply because of bad code."

Believe me when I say that I'm a huge advocate of running efficient code. However you have to admit that depleting the server of resources by running useless (yet valid+legal) queries is not nearly the same thing as taking over the server through a security vulnerability.

It's certainly not the same, but if there's a way to take a server down with a small amount of organization/friends, due to the way the software running on this server works, it's another form of security vulnerability.

Neolander,

"It's certainly not the same, but if there's a way to take a server down with a small amount of organization/friends, due to the way the software running on this server works, it's another form of security vulnerability."

This speaks to unscalable designs and systems, however a company can find itself in a situation where systems can handle the legitimate load of X customers, but not X + Y attackers. I'm uncomfortable with the conclusion that a company out to design the infrastructure to handle X customers + Y attacks.


Edit: Although, what choice is there?

Edited 2011-06-29 12:53 UTC

Availability != security.
The fact that a site wasn't designed to withstand a DDoS does not mean it suffers from a security problem and neither is inefficient code a security problem.
It's usually not feasible to start out with a site and infrastructure designed to handle the volume of YouTube or Facebook or a DDoS.
Deploy now, get customers and worry about scalability when the need arises. Even a DDoS once or twice is not a cause for concern unless it has a major impact on your bottom line and/or is caused by a security problem.
Some wise guy said something about premature optimization a long time ago and it's still true.

Soulbender,

"Some wise guy said something about premature optimization a long time ago and it's still true."

I agreed with you up until this point. Too many people in CS use the quote above to justify designs with very poor scalability. Never forget that the quote was from the 1970s when the inefficiency typical of computing today was not yet conceivable. I'm afraid if modern day CS developers were sent back in time to work with Knuth, the quote you'd be reading would be quite different.

Yeah, it's indeed much overused but it does apply in this situation. It's most often not wise to spend time and money designing for immense scalability before you launch. Try to make good engineering decisions that won't hamper you later on but don't sweat it until your userbase and traffic start to really increase.

I'd suggest that DDoS vulnerability is indeed a security issue. Security is not just concerned with protecting the information in that one box. It is also concerned with protecting the system resources for legitimate use. A denial of service removes resources from legitimate users.

If your network gets flooded out by packets, you have a security mechanism failing to filter packets properly.

If your software gets crashed into a denial of service condition, you have an exploitable vulnerability in the code that needs to be addressed.

If your website takes down your webserver due to resource exhaustion through a designed website function, you have site code that needs to be addressed.

The information systems are a business resource that need to be protected in addition to the information those systems house. Denial of service demonstrates an exploitable flaw in the security of those systems.

jabbotts,

"I'd suggest that DDoS vulnerability is indeed a security issue. Security is not just concerned with protecting the information in that one box. It is also concerned with protecting the system resources for legitimate use. A denial of service removes resources from legitimate users."

This is all true, however you've overlooked a crucial element: in a well designed large scale DDoS attack, the victim doesn't know the attackers from legitimate customers.


"If your network gets flooded out by packets, you have a security mechanism failing to filter packets properly."

Two problems:
1. A filter is useless when the attacker's botnet has more bandwidth than you. Even an OC3 (which was considered large enough for my whole university) is easily saturated by a few hundred broadband users.

2. What kind of filter do you use? If you detect excessive bandwidth on an IP you can block it, but it may or may not be legitimate. Consider a bunch of mobile users being a proxy/nat router, you're filter could inadvertently block all of them.

"If your software gets crashed into a denial of service condition, you have an exploitable vulnerability in the code that needs to be addressed."

Well granted, the software should never crash. In the worse case, a busy server should start returning something like error 500 in http-speak.


"If your website takes down your webserver due to resource exhaustion through a designed website function, you have site code that needs to be addressed."

You're totally oversimplifying the issue to imply that code is at fault. Assuming you actually have enough bandwidth in the first place (which isn't likely for most small/medium businesses), then there are other local bottlenecks which will require infrastructure upgrades to eliminate. Databases quickly become saturated. Even ordinary web servers can start thrashing if the attackers deliberately request pieces of material which are unlikely to be cached. This causes random disks seeks well in excess of normal load. A typical disk seek is 5ms, if the attacker successfully requests an uncached file each time, then both normal users and attackers will reach a limit of 200 requests/sec.


"The information systems are a business resource that need to be protected in addition to the information those systems house. Denial of service demonstrates an exploitable flaw in the security of those systems."

Hopefully I've gotten my point across that being vulnerable to DDoS doesn't imply a security vulnerability. As Soulbender stated already "Availability != security."

I'd gladly discuss any usable ideas you have, but DDoS isn't as easy to solve as you make it out.

Yeah, well, have you looked at the products SecureEnvoy peddles? Their "securemail' solution uses SMS (which we all know is awesomely secure and super encrypted) to deliver "secure" email.
There's a word for it and the word is snakeoil so it isn't exactly surprising he wouldn't have a clue.

I'll agree with you that a DDoS attack does not demonstrate a lack of security... and this "security" company should know better than to call the attacks from LulzSec DDoS attacks. They clearly infiltrated "secure" systems, extracted data illegally, and released it publicly. That's far from being a DDoS attack.

I would agree that the LulzSec attacks did shine more sunlight on the pitiful security practices that corporations and governments put in place to make things seem secure - but this SecurEnvoy CTO is clearly making idiotic statements.

More creepiness = more money for security companies. Their whole business is based on fear and distrust, after all...

...

Kind of like nuclear weapon engineering, in fact.

Edited 2011-06-28 17:52 UTC

makes you wonder who might have really been behind lulz, doesn't it.

Even if it wasn't the case to start with, it is to be expected that the LulzSec members will soon be offered golden job opportunities...

And people say crime doesn't pay.

The very existence of hit men is a proof of the contrary.

Edited 2011-06-28 18:39 UTC

Soulbender,

"And people say crime doesn't pay."

If that were true, we wouldn't have crime.

True. In this case crime is outright encouraged though which is different from robbing the local 7/11 or selling smack at school.

I'd say Lulzsec's crimes are being esploited more than encouraged. People are taking the opertunity presented by the last month and a half's events and applying it to all sorts of agenda's. Some honorable, some benign, some profiteering.

I don't think honorable infosec folks makeing the best of the opertunity is the same as openly encouraging such behavior. Granted, those who are encouraging further criminal acts and irresponsible disclosures are equally as irresponsible.

Responsible disclosure could equally motivate big business to take it's customer's data more seriously if one is really in it to improve security.