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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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American Communications Companies Appear to Be Under DDoS Attack

As far as I know there isn't a lot of info available, but it seems to be primarily attacking telecoms...

Top comments (12)

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drbragg profile image
Drew Bragg

Knowing Ben I don't think he was "promoting" this BS but rather making a post about a current event to foster discussion. He didn't say "American Communications Companies ARE Under DDoS Attack" he said "American Communications Companies Appear to Be Under DDoS Attack" which given the information he had at the time seemed to be correct.

I think the best part of this community is its ability to foster discussion. Your response alone gave me more information on the topic than I had been able to previously get in my (admittedly limited) searching.

At the very least I'm happy this post got made so I could read your, Ari's, and
daoleno's response. I learned a lot from them.

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artis3n profile image
Ari Kalfus • Edited

@ben maybe the title can be modified with something along the lines of [Update: Debunked]. I agree the comments on this are informative and interesting. But I think the title suggests there was an actual cyber attack, which, especially from the founder of the platform, I think is inappropriate. At the very least misleadingly clickbaity.

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daoleno profile image
daoleno

β€œMassive DDoS attack” just T-Mobile error

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alijaffar profile image
Eli Von

Makes sense. Our economic battle v. China, Russia, and others seem to be adversely affecting our networks. Let's get quantum computers and really change the game. We also are regularly hacked by "allies" like the UK and Israel, so they're actually our adversaries.

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

Maybe stop hacking your allies, and they might stop hacking you πŸ€”
Pretty much every government hacks every other government. Just like every government spies on every other government. They need to spy on each other to know they can trust each other, or something.

A DDoS attack isn't really hacking though. In most cases disrupting a service does not give you a lot of benefits, just annoys people. (Disrupting services in case of stock market trades do give you a real edge.)

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sergix profile image
Peyton McGinnis • Edited

Oh boy... I was actually wondering why some of my calls weren't going through earlier at all. I'm on T-Mobile and The Verge has noted they're having an issue.

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artis3n profile image
Ari Kalfus

A really important point the average person should understand is that "pew pew maps" are a marketing gimmick and in no way reflect any facet of actual reality. The map being shared on social media is showing traffic headed to any U.S.-related IP. Guess where the majority of the internet lives.

As an aside, I'm a fan of Fireeye's pew pew map. Again, all of these maps are garbage marketing gimmicks. But it's pretty.

I'm glad someone brought up @MalwareTech in this discussion thread, he is an excellent follow for anyone interested in cyber security.

Here's the CEO of Cloudflare laying down some good information about why this is a T-Mobile misconfiguration (my money is on some edge case in their Sprint merge): twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1272....

And let's all appreciate #hugops in this trying time.

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

Dang that Fireeye map is pretty.. "Let's play global thermonuclear war!" :)

Other good follows (sane humans):
@Cybergibbons & @TheKenMunroShow from Pen Test Partners
@TinkerSec professional, mildly anonymous social engineer.
@troyhunt aussie infosec dude!
@thegrugq seasoned threat analysis (and bad jokes)
@swagitda_ Kelly Shortridge - behavioural economist turned infosec guru - really interesting take on stuff

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djsullenbarger profile image
David Sullenbarger • Edited

all of this conspiracy thinking is hard on your brain and makes you forget to KISS everything (keep it simple stupid). T-Mobile just bought Sprint and is currently integrating the two networks, which are based on completely different standards.

But, yeah, whatever, let's blame someone .. it's the new sport!!

Wait, you RUN this site and posted this? o.k. .... this is a thing for me to consider now

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

all of this conspiracy thinking is hard on your brain and makes you forget to KISS everything (keep it simple stupid). T-Mobile just bought _ Sprint and is currently _integrating the two networks, which are based on completely different standards.

Benefit of being "old": you have direct memory of the various "who broke the Internet" events of the 90s and early 2000s when a lot of integration and consolidation activities were going on. "Why's AOL offline?" or "why is everything going through MAE-East falling on the floor?" followed by "someone pushed a bad route-map while standing up a new datacenter or backhaul".

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djsullenbarger profile image
David Sullenbarger • Edited

That's one way of looking at it, though I'm pretty sure this would have been obvious to me (and my peers) if it happened 20 years ago. This is why I cringe when I hear the term 'front-end' (or 'back-end') developer.

imo, if you want to be useful you need to understand everything at least on a basic level (it's not hard .. just time consuming )and I consider this to be basic

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artis3n profile image
Ari Kalfus

Agreed