Zimbabweans Hit By Cyber Attacks During Election 63
judgecorp writes "During last week's Zimbabwean election, some huge denial of service attacks took down sites including several reporting on human rights issues and potential irregularities in the election. Those affected suspect government involvement. ... GreenNet is only just recovering today, with some customer websites still down, having reported the strike on Thursday morning, the day after Zimbabweans headed to the polls. It appeared to be a powerful attack – TechWeek understands it was at the 100Gbps level – aimed at GreenNet’s co-location data centre provider Level 3, which subsequently did not let GreenNet move workloads within that facility. ... The DDoS that hit GreenNet was not a crude attack using a botnet to fire traffic straight at a target port, but a DNS reflection attack using UDP packets, which can generate considerable power. DNS reflection sees the attacker spoof their IP address to pretend to be the target, send lines of attack code to a DNS server, which then sends back large amounts of traffic to the victim."
Re:wait (Score:4, Interesting)
You might be a little surprised if you visited Zimbabwe. The (one and only) thing Mugabe did right was push education, which means a lot of arbitrary schools in the middle of the rural areas have computer labs and things like that. There is a thriving business in old computers there, and it was almost enough for me to support myself.
DNS Reflection is a bitch (Score:4, Interesting)
Been on the business end of a DNS reflection attack. Not fun. Not only do you have to figure out how to deal with loads of DNS responses invading your network, the contact that's listed for the allocation that the spoofed IP falls under gets slammed with inquiries from angry operators wanting to know why their network is sending so many damned DNS queries to them. Very disruptive.