Todd Underwood on BlueSecurity DDoS
Renesys Blog: The Bluesecurity
Fiasco
– in which Todd Underwood, CSO for Renesys Corporation, applies some
real-world knowledge of how the internet works to the “timeline of events”
press release, issued by
BlueSecurity
as part of their ongoing PR about the DDoS.
Judging by the
comments
at
Slashdot, this
really needs to be more widely read.
Here’s some highlights:
The timeline from BlueSecurity […] is frustratingly vague. It uses phrases
like ‘tampering with the Internet backbone using a technique called
“Blackhole Filtering”.’ As Thomas Pogge, a philosophy professor of mine, used
to say: that’s not even wrong yet. There is no “Internet backbone”, there is
no technique known as “Blackhole Filtering”, and blackhole routing is not
normally described as tampering. So the whole explanation is nonsense. […]
Let’s clear one thing up for the press and everyone else: this event just
wasn’t that interesting. The attack against bluesecurity was a
run-of-the-mill denial of service attack.
His conclusion:
I believe that the PR engine from BS is in overdrive spinning this event as
fast as they can. But the concrete facts being put out by them simply to not
add up. In the process they seem to be doing two things: 1) trying to imply
or state that someone at UUnet was bribed by a spammer. This is simply
ridiculous. I know many of the people who work for UUnet and they are honest,
hardworking and extraordinarily clever people. They would not be crooked, or
stupid, enough to do such a thing and if they were, they would have been
trivially caught by change-management procedures. Moreover, such a change at
UUnet (or BTN) wouldn’t have caused the event BS claims to have witnessed
anyway. Additionally, 2) BS is trying to deflect attention from the damage
that they caused at Six Apart. It would be much better if they could just
claim ignorance of the DOS, apologize and move on. I recognize that that
isn’t going to happen, but it sure would make this whole thing easier to
handle.
Well said.
Of course, this is pretty much immaterial — the people who are using Blue
Frog, and vocally supporting Blue Security, don’t really care what happened.
All they care about is that someone is taking some kind of direct action
against spammers, in some way or another, and if there’s a little “friendly
fire” and some bending of the truth, why, this is a war! What, do you support
the spammers?
It’s disappointing — the amount of disinformation being successfully pumped
out (and accepted!) on this story is massive.
Tags:anti spam blue frog bluesecurity ddos internet routing security
This post was written by Justin, source: Todd Underwood on BlueSecurity DDoS
