silentblue | Quantified

In the past few days, one of my favourite technews haunts, Neowin.net, was DDoS’ed to oblivion. By a 13-year old script kiddie with a grudge. Only on the Internet can mosquitoes carry rocket launchers.

There are ways to prevent DDoS attacks, although none of them are 100% effective and the seriously good gear cost a lot of money.

But yes, you can using a intrusion detection system (IDS) in front of a stateful firewall to minimize the impact. These kinds of hardware can scan incoming packets and find malicious traffic patterns (pingstorms, DDoS, spoofs) and then drop the packets.

The problem here is that stopping DDoS attacks is like trying to prevent a leaky ship from sinking – the bigger the flood, the bigger your pail has to be, and the faster you will have to bale.

While computer hardware is usually measured by million instructions per second, or MIPS, network hardware is measured in Kpps, or thousand packets per second. For example, a Cisco 3725 can process 70Kpps – considering an IP packet can be up to 1,518 bytes, that’s a respectable amount of packet processing power.

So with a big DDOS attack, you’ll need big packet buffers and fast CPUs on your IDS and firewall hardware. Some devices sport dual CPUs. The bigger the attack (i.e. more packets), the bigger and faster your hardware has to be, and the more expensive it gets.

So why doesn’t the FBI or police just swoop down and arrest all these punks? The answer is, too many idiots, not enough hours in a day. It’s like being the victim of a break-in. There are dozens of break-ins in a city in any given day, very few leads, and difficult to prosecute. Sadly, the same goes for DoS attacks.

I loved this comment:

Notice that the shape of the winning antenna is a pyramid? There are a lot of theories regarding electromagnetism and the pyramid shape, including a bunch on how the ancient egyptians figured out how to utilize these electromagnetic properties, which is (supposedly) why the pyramids were built that way.

If you want to get kooky, it can also point to the extra terrestrial origins of ancient egyptian civilization.

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That makes perfect sense! The aliens, feeling like outsiders in this new place, built gigantic 802.11 antennas to download porn and MP3s from their home planet.

If it wasn’t for the unacceptably long ping times, they would still be with us today.

From Newsscan, an excerpt on hiaku from author Joshua Cooper Ramo:

“In the middle of the fifteenth century in Japan, a time when the kingdom was both at its most isolated and, to Japanese eyes, most perfect, a strange tradition emerged: composing haiku as you died, at the very moment of death. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising. Japanese culture had become obsessed with the relationship between life and art. There was an increasing belief that the two should never be separated, that a well-lived life was a work of art. Was it surprising that some Japanese poets wanted to try to weave the two together, to make a little tatami of life and art? What better time than at the moment of death? After a lifetime of study, could you be beautiful in three lines? Could you be perfect? Could you reduce it, all of it, your life, down to seventeen syllables?

Farewell … I
pass as all things do
dew on the grass.

“So it all awaited you. Special inks were mixed. A brush of the rarest hair was prepared and left lying near your bed. The softest rice paper was fetched. All this lay waiting for your last moment. The Zen monks who collected the death poems looked for two virtues, two marks of beauty. The first was awa-re, a sense of the sadness of things passing, the way birds at dawn sing like mourners or cherry blossoms fall like tears in the spring. The second virtue was mi-yabi, an attempt to refine oneself. Everything about the poems — their sound, how they looked on the page — was meant to evoke this attempt at refinement, at compactness.”