

Country tries to censor YouTube, inadvertently launches a massive DDOS on itself. - mercurio
http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=548

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xirium
From the article: The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the
Internet for almost an hour. I suspect the second repercussion was that
Pakistan's Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were
handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world.

Law and technology is rarely good. However, it seems that religion, law and
routing tables is a particularly bad combination.

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TheTarquin
Nothing says "Epic Fail" quite like DDoSing one's whole nation into
submission. At least Pakistan got what it wanted: none of its citizens are
going to be seeing any blasphemous internet content . . .

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Xichekolas
If I read it correctly, they also successfully screwed YouTube over for an
hour... so a pyhrric victory at the least.

Lately Pakistan has been 'Epic Fail' in general...

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TheTarquin
Pyhrric victory indeed. To paraphrase Pyrrhus himself: "One more such victory
will undo Pakistan (at least on the internet)."

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mattmaroon
Can someone more knowledgeable about the internets than me please explain how
someone can just hijack YouTube's IP address?

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socmoth
i asked the same question of a network phd student. i got the simple text
version, and i have no idea if it is valid or not, but the guy i know is very
smart.

he says in all likelihood, a guy in charge setup a malicious route or "report"
saying they could access youtube faster than they really could. which means,
everyone trying to get to youtube, went through pakistan because it was the
fastest way to youtube. so all youtube traffic went to pakistan, which was the
ddos part.

why isn't this a huge problem? it kinda is. the system shouldn't be able to be
taken down. But, it isn't a huge problem because nobody actually does this.

Apparently, isps pay a lot for their access, and this kinda thing is a good
way of paying a lot more and loosing all your money and not having internet,
which is the opposite of the business they are in.

i've never ever heard of something like this happening, or about these
'reports.' so... maybe nobody should listen to me. but my friend is usually
right about this stuff.

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ntoshev
It is a problem if a hacker does this to an ISP in order to push his political
/ religious / whatever agenda.

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run4yourlives
Should Google look to litigate? After all, they could probably quantify how
much they lost during the downtime, and I'd imagine it's a pretty big number.

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dkokelley
What does Youtube actually make for Google? I thought I read somewhere that
it's not that much, considering what was paid for it. For 2006 it looks like
it was $12.9m. If that rate is the same for now (it's probably more), then 1
day of Youtube earns $35,000. I doubt they would go after a country for that
amount, though they would probably be upset about the outage and use whatever
political muscle they have to pressure Pakistan to rethink.

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mattmaroon
Ha, I'm pretty sure YouTube is highly unprofitable currently, in which case
Google should be paying Pakistan.

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dmoney
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and... fights back.

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Xichekolas
The Internet decided to change it's name... it'd now like to be known by it's
porn name... Skye Net.

