Anonymous Sends Official Threat That It Will DDOS Root Internet Servers
The hacking group has recently announced that it will begin a new campaign of protests. According to at east one expert, the group’s plans aren’t going to work out as planned: the attack Anonymous directed against the “Internet’s core address lookup system is unlikely to cause much damage”.
The group allegedly posted a warning on Pastebin, saying last Thursday that an action will take place on the 31st of March, as part of their “Operation Global Blackout”; these actions are targeted at the root Domain Name System (DNS) servers.
In the post, the group declares that the attack has been planned as a protest against “our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun.”
The DNS, to put it simply, translates a Web site name (for example www.idg.com), into a numerical IP address (Internet Protocol Address), which computers use in order to find the Web site.
There are a total of 13 authoritative root servers which contain the master list of where other “nameservers” can look up an in a certain top-level domain (such as for example “.com”) an IP address.
Anonymous then went on declaring that it had built a “Reflective DNS Amplification DDOS” (distributed denial-of-service) tool, which is able of causing other DNS servers in order to overwhelm those root servers with lots of traffic.
But according to the CEO of Errata Security, Robert Graham (here), there are certain factors which the hacktivists didn’t take into consideration.
He wrote that: “They might affect a few of the root DNS servers, but it’s unlikely they could take all of them down, at least for any period of time”. As for the effects of these attacks and their impact on our day to day life: “On the day of their planned Global Blackout, it is doubtful many people would notice.”
He said that people shouldn’t be worried about this attack disrupting their daily routine, since: “Within minutes of something twitching, hundreds of Internet experts will converge to solve the problem,” he wrote.
The general opinion on the matter is that the message may even not be from the group, since we’ve noticed lately a wave of announcements which allegedly came from Anonymous but with which they didn’t follow through.
