
Wikileaks has been under DDoS attack for the last five days - Empro
http://www.zdnet.com/wikileaks-has-been-under-ddos-attack-for-the-last-five-days-7000002213/
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biot
Presumably changing the IP address that Wikileaks uses doesn't help because
the bots doing the DDoS grab the IP address from DNS. Assuming Wikileaks
doesn't mind the downtime (they're going to be down anyways) why not set the
wikileaks web-related DNS entries to point to an IP address that fbi.gov or
whitehouse.gov uses for, say, their email server?

Perhaps law enforcement might then have a vested interest in discovering the
source of those attacks if their ability to receive email gets shot to hell.

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redslazer
While that may be a good idea in theory it would also send all legitement
visitors to those links cause a couple of things to happen:

1\. I cant go to wikileaks and leak a document because my ip address will be
recorded on a governement website (weird questions ensue)

2\. The sites that are currently mirroring wikileaks wont have a source. So
they will become out of date pretty soon.

3\. People will think that wikileaks has been taken down and will forget about
it.

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apawloski
>Apparently they're from the U.S., believe Julian Assange is a terrorist, and
plan to keep attacking WikiLeaks for as long as possible.

This is silly. Judgements of Assange aside, isn't Wikileaks just a portal for
a collection of torrents? If that's the case, what an utter waste of time and
bandwidth.

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derefr
Yes, because of course, this bandwidth could be much more effectively used in
staging a Sybil attack[1] against those torrents. ;)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack>

~~~
Groxx
How would this work against torrents? I'm not aware of them using trust-based
systems. Certainly you can pollute the swarm and slow things down a bit, but
anyone who eventually finds someone legitimate is barely even effected.

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chimi
The comments from "DietPepsi" do not sound like American English. I don't
think whoever wrote it is American.

    
    
      > his attempt at aslyum in Ecuador. [sic]
    

Americans would say, "... to gain asylum..."

    
    
      > as a protest against his attempt
    

Americans would say, "... to protest his attempt ..."

They are not "apparently" American to me and Ms. Protalinski should refrain
from accepting their quotes at face value.

~~~
sp332
It's awkward, but it sounds like some borderline-illiterate high school
students I used to know.

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lifeguard
This could be related to the Syria data dump. Russia and maybe China could
have assets exposed in these emails.

And we all know the Ruskies have bot bandwidth to burn!

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shloimtothee
Is it really that difficult to fend off a DDoS?

~~~
redthrowaway
Depends on the bandwidth. You can use services like CloudFlare for DDoS
mitigation, and some hosts provide DDoS protection as well, but all of those
services are expensive and WL is broke. Besides, the website itself is just a
static collection of links, at the moment. Given that, the value of defending
the website against temporary takedown probably doesn't justify the cost of
doing so.

