The attack that knocked The New York Times offline this week was an old-school hack: simple DNS blocking. The Syrian Electronic Army, which apparently mounted the attack, broke into domain-name servers run by Melbourne IT (and not into the NYT's own systems, which would have been a much bigger deal) and changed some numbers, redirecting the NYT's incoming traffic away from the site. As tech journalist Rob Pegaro points out at Sulia (which, fair warning, is a confusing, unnavigable mess of a website), this technique is pretty much what the backers of the anti-copyright-infringement laws SOPA and PIPA wanted written into the law. It "would have let copyright holders require Internet providers to use DNS redirection to block access to allegedly infringing sites," Pegaro notes. "That authority would inevitably have been abused in social-engineering exploits -- and we'd likely see a lot more outages like the NYT's." http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/08/30/how-the-anti-piracy-lobby-like-the-syrian-electronic-army/ Friday, September 6, 2013
How the anti-piracy lobby is like the Syrian Electronic Army
The attack that knocked The New York Times offline this week was an old-school hack: simple DNS blocking. The Syrian Electronic Army, which apparently mounted the attack, broke into domain-name servers run by Melbourne IT (and not into the NYT's own systems, which would have been a much bigger deal) and changed some numbers, redirecting the NYT's incoming traffic away from the site. As tech journalist Rob Pegaro points out at Sulia (which, fair warning, is a confusing, unnavigable mess of a website), this technique is pretty much what the backers of the anti-copyright-infringement laws SOPA and PIPA wanted written into the law. It "would have let copyright holders require Internet providers to use DNS redirection to block access to allegedly infringing sites," Pegaro notes. "That authority would inevitably have been abused in social-engineering exploits -- and we'd likely see a lot more outages like the NYT's." http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/08/30/how-the-anti-piracy-lobby-like-the-syrian-electronic-army/ 