If 6 were a 9

[96.9]

Ok , I heard about a recent hack online .

Something like 9 out of the 13 major world wide web networks were hacked the other week . It was the most massive tampering of the internet in the webs recent history .

How did this effect OS X , does anyone know and what is beeing done about this ?

I am a intermediate unix guy myself , I use linux/bsd for my studies but I am having fun playing around with OS X .

Since OS X server is running networks now , I was wondering how OS X was effected by this recent attept to deny service to online users .

 

[Krevinek]

Well, any network is only as secure as the Idiot Techs running it (it is a pun, only a pun). I have managed to reduce all my potential security problems to 3 ports: 22 for ssh, 80 for http, and 5000 for hotline. I do some work on the hotline server, so if security issues pop up there, I will get it fixed myself. OpenSSH and Apache run the other two ports and are relatively secure and hard to find vulnerabilities for. (Granted, not many people look at Apache, they look at IIS)

I would bet that roughly 9 of the 9 networks used poorly setup systems. Remember how after MONTHS of Code Red variants, the majority of the vulnerable servers were STILL vulnerable because not many admins patched with the MULTIPLE MONTH OLD PATCH? As long as any system is setup properly and looked after, you won't exactly be as vulnerable as these guys.

Although in my experience, the general out-of-the-box security levels are a tad higher than FreeBSD. MacOS X doesn't turn on all the daemons right away, and has you activate the ones you need. This prevents unattended servers from running.

Still doesn't do any good if you turn on SSH, but forget that your admin account's password is still 'admin' or some other simple construct.

 

[r4bid]

The servers taken down were the major dns servers if I remember correctly. They were taken down using denail of service attacks so having any sort of protection would not have really helped.
No real impact was made on the ability of people to surf the internet as the system was made to be redundant and should operate fine untill almost all of them are taken out of commision.
You would still be able to reach an internet site by ip address but using a domain name would be useless as the translator systems would nolonger be operational.

 

[rharder]

As for your assertion that these nine computers were run by idiots, I venture to guess that these operators have more computer skill in their pinky than you do in your whole forearm.

These aren't some rinky-dink web site operators. These 13 computers are the Illuminati of the Internet and are, more likely than not, run by competent individuals, if anyone beside yourself you could consider competent.

Hotline...sheesh.

-Rob

 

[96.9]

Ok , its was a DOS attack on the DNS servers .

I have no idea what these 13 networks are , all I heard is there was the most successful hack ever preformed a few weeks ago .

There is much more advanced hacks such as a plague , thats what I assumed happened and I was just wondering if OS X server was effected .

OS X does come disabled , you have to spend some time figuring out your BSD if you want to get it up and running and security is a major importance .

Thanks

 

[Krevinek]

Okay, excuse my ignorance in the attack... especially since I didn't know it was a DoS-style attack. Those things are nasty, because with enough computers working in a DDoS attack, they can take any machine 'off' the internet for as long as they can keep up the attack... period.

Sure you can have a larger-piped upstream host filter, but if the attackers are blasting enough packets, even the host can get kicked 'off' the internet. So then the target can be accessed, but only by other computers behind this host taking the heat for the target.

To put it bluntly... there is no real way to secure yourself from an attack like this. All you can really do is get information on the source of the attack and try to track down the people that did it. And that rarely works with a DDoS attack due to the hundreds of sources, and the ability to fake IPs on *nix and WinXP. If you have an internet connection, you CAN be affected by this.