Unprecedented DDoS Attack At Swedish Government, Media Outlets (www.dn.se) 125
Flu writes: Yesterday, at 19:30 CET, an unprecedented DDOS attack shut down both Swedish government sites and all major news outlets, including www.aftonbladet.se, www.expressen.se, www.svd.se, www.dn.se, www.di.se and others. The attack was announced in advanced in a tweet stating 'The following days attacks against the Swedish government and media spreading false propaganda will be targeted'. A large amount of traffic was detected from Russia. Tension between Russia and Sweden has slowly but steadily intensified during the latest years, causing Swedish relocation of military forces to strategic location and increased cooperation with NATO.
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Note to Facebook administration: we really badly need a moderation score of "Irony". It's used a lot, and I feel all too often unrecognised by some.
Re: Fair is Fair (Score:2)
Facebook bought Slashdot?
How to cope with DDoS? (Score:4, Interesting)
These sites are the largest in Sweden and still they are vulnerable to DDOS. So: ask Slashdot: how do you cope with DDoS? What are the best tools to protect yourself and what to do when the attack is on?
Re:How to cope with DDoS? (Score:5, Funny)
how do you cope with DDoS?
Send all packets back where they came from. They are raping our servers. They flood our network routers. They bring in DOS. Some of them, I suppose, are nice packets.
I love network packets, I have thousands and thousands sent to me every day. But these packets were sent by nasty, nasty criminals. You know what we did in the old days with these criminals. They are drowning our servers in packets.
What are the best tools to protect yourself
Build a firewall, and let the hackers pay for it.
and what to do when the attack is on?
Vote for Donald J. Trump.
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Send all packets back where they came from.
Actually that could be an amusing solution. Perhaps temporarily changing the ARP records for Russian so that the DDOS'ing machines start sending traffic back at some internal target would get the problem cleaned up quickly....
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You appear not to know how TCP/IP works.
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It's not TCP/IP so much as BGP, which is often already used in DDOS protection. Normally it would be used to filter traffic through a DDOS (protection) provider but perhaps instead they could push a route change to the Russian side and send all the "fun" traffic back at some networks in the homeland.
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You said ARP, not BGP. If you'd said BGP I wouldn't have commented, as it would nearly make sense.
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Oh, I misunderstood. I assumed what you meant largest sites over all in Sweden. Not largest "old media" sites.
KIA only lists traditional media. Forums like Flashback or Xhamster are not listed there.
As for the particular DDoS it is probably hard to target only one of them. They all have their offices in the same part of Stockholm and probably share the same servers anyway. Mainstream journalism in Sweden is a monoculture of people that seldom travel outside the same half of Stockholm.
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Whenever a DDoS appears just shut down for a while and wait until the shitstorm passes. Nobody can run an attack forever.
Another way to cope with attacks like this is to run servers on multiple IPs but have different IPs serving domestically compared to foreign traffic. Not a perfect solution but would at least make a DDoS attack a bit harder to execute. Even having transparent proxies may make a DDoS attack harder. Traffic shaping slowing down requests from high frequency sources is also possible.
Information warfare (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a bit scary how easy it is to knock peoples main source of information offline. This time I don't think there was anything more to it, but in case a real attack is happening, cutting people off from what's happening is one of the first things that you do.
Could we use p2p in some form here, making sure that information can be distributed as long as there are people connected?
Re: Information warfare (Score:1)
Ham radio.
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AMPRNET [ampr.org] - Internet network 44.
This might be part of the reason... (Score:1, Informative)
Here is an article describing what is happening in Sweden with security services and press and might help to explain partly why this attack might be happening.
http://theindicter.com/paid-ag... [theindicter.com]
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Assange likely has very little to do with this, although the Russians will probably be delighted if people think so. If it is the case that the attacks originated from Russia, then this is likely to be just the latest addition in the information warfare campaign that Russia is waging across Europe. It's very much within Russia's interest at the moment to play as much with the migrant crisis and the media as they possibly can to sow political distrust. They've been running their own 'news' channels (Sputnik)
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I just think it's sad that a nation that aspired so high has fallen so low.
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
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Um, having sex with a woman while she sleeps because she said no the night before is rape in most countries.
Please down vote this thread. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you have any accusations of the government doing any sort of propaganda then post them, insinuations have never helped against propaganda. Those links are not informative in any way, I would say that the second link is propaganda of the worst kind, and the first is made into propaganda from you by a strange context.
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Provide evidence or prepare to look indistinguishable from propaganda peddlers. Do you not see the irony in railing against baseless assertions by making baseless assertions? I guess not...
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Here are couple more articles. The level of government sponsored propaganda in Sweden is reaching pretty unprecedented levels ...
How on earth can this be tagged as informative?
The first article discusses possible responses to real growing tensions with Russia. The second is a neo-nazi website, which either tells something about the poster or that he just blindingly googled some crap.
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Yeah, the second URL was not supposed to be there, obviously, I had a different link, but I only noticed I pasted a wrong URL when I already posted the comment.
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I modded so posted as AC!
From right-wing so it must be wrong!?
I consider myself left-wing, but fact is the fact, your argument just like German media, "you should not be convinced by right-wing populist propaganda, believe me!".
OK, if the links aarlin posted above is from neo-nazi, how about this:
It’s not only Germany that covers up mass sex attacks by migrant men... Sweden’s record is shameful [spectator.co.uk]
Now Swedish officials face claims of covering up migrant sex attacks [independent.ie]
For the first link, it's so FUNNY
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Considering the current political climate in Sweden right now it is way more likely that the DDoS was made by some neo-nazi that "doesn't have ties with a particular right wing party other than being friends with some dude high up."
An attack form Russian computers doesn't mean that the Russian government is involved. It's not like you can't buy time on botnets.
OTOH a lot of neo-nazi movements in Europe have gotten Russian support lately, so you can't really rule that out either.
The nationalist movements lik
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And Putin leans back and smiles at all the confusion created.
He doesn't care about left or right, he just cares about creating diversions to take interest from more pressing matters.
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How!? Did you read those articles?
My point is they blame everything on Russia, just for convenience, now they blame the rightists are bribed by Russia.
The first article, Spiegel whines how good they are, but the people don't understand, and too easy to be lure by populists.
The second one, they show the fact that most of Germans don't believe in MSM. If one doesn't know why, read the previous article.
It's not Russia's fault or 'rightwing populist', their fault!
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Re:This might be part of the reason... (Score:5, Informative)
It's quite simple: Assange raped a Swedish woman, and sexually assaulted another one. And now he refuses to face the court. He's a refugee from justice.
In fact, Assange raped no one. He slept with two Swedish women, both of whom were so eager to do so that they bragged about it to their friends for days before and after. He raped neither of them, and in fact neither of them has ever said that he did. When the charges were first brought, Assange waited in Sweden - despite his busy schedule - until it was made entirely clear that the charges were dropped (because the women said he had done nothing wrong). He then travelled to Britain, at which point a wholly new prosecutor popped up (obviously politically motivated) and began saying Assange should be charged (again).
Here is the BBC's "timeline" of the charges against Assange: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl... [bbc.co.uk]
There are a couple of things missing from this timeline, however. They happened before the BBC's record of events begins.
"In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an AH-64 Apache helicopter, known as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
April 2010: WikiLeaks published gunsight footage of the murders in Baghdad.
July 2010: WikiLeaks releases "Afghan War Diary"
August 2010: Assange charged with rape (although he had never before been accused of any such behaviour)
The pattern is all too familiar to those of us who are familiar with the US government's methods in moving against anyone it wants to destroy.
Re:This might be part of the reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Interweb screamed "Oh Noes, War Crimes!" in it's collective ignorance of what a war crime actually is. But nobody (Nations) that actually matters or understands combat and the Laws of Land Warfare was upset. They understand what is actually a war crime and what is not.
Every single act of violence done (or provoked) by Americans and their allies in Iraq was a war crime, and that continues to be the case. The invasion was a perfect example of what the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the ultimate international crime" - an unprovoked war of aggression. The USA attacked and invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, killed more than a million of its people, and quite deliberately destroyed its infrastructure. Ask yourself what those Americans in that helicopter were doing even being inside Iraq. They had no business being in the country, let alone killing people for any reason at all. If Iraqis wish to carry guns in their country, that is their affair. (In any case, the objects were not guns - that is just what the bloodthirsty, highly imaginative US soldiers said).
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http://politics.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Unprovoked? What crack are you smoking. War crimes? Again, that must be some good shit. The UN said, in a resolution, the equivalent of if you don't let us inspect everything, we will attack you. Iraq didn't let the inspectors in, but we are horrible mass murders for following through with the UN's threat?
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From the Wikipedia page you cited:
'On 8 November 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous 15–0 vote; Russia, China, France, and Arab states such as Syria voted in favor, giving Resolution 1441 wider support than even the 1990 Gulf War resolution.
'While some politicians have argued that the resolution could authorize war under certain circumstances, the representatives in the meeting were clear that this was not the case. The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, John
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Pay zero regardless, no difference when posting as AC.
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The US have 10 states that have a larger population than Sweden (9,858,794 at January 31st 2016).
No goverment sites was attacked (Score:2)
It was just commersial newspapers. Public service companies was not targeted and their web sites was not down during the attack.
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Sweden has two government websites? (Score:1)
Such profligacy.
It is the Russians (Score:2, Troll)
There's a level of irony that the confirmation this is the Russian state is the sheer volume of astroturf posts on here.
Just check the Anonymous Coward posts. It's truly comical.
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Re: It is the Russians (Score:1)
Unilaterally redrawing European borders in Ukraine with military arms earns whatever demonization Russia gets.
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I give you that sure. Now when is US going to stop the annexation of Guantanamo Bay? And please, don't give me any of that crap you lawfully rent it from the Cubans against their will. :)
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Ha! That didn't take long, did it?
--
Strastviy, tovarishchi!
Can only mean one thing: (Score:1)
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Actually, both government and media sites were attacked. It's misleading to simply say that Assange was in the UK. He was, but at the Ecuadorian embassy. The diplomatic status of the embassy prevented the UK from arresting Assange while he was in the embassy. Your post is quite misleading and inaccurate. And yes, going to Sweden might mean extradition to the US, provided the US requests it and the extradition treaty would allow for it.
In Soviet Russia, pining for the fiords is YOU (Score:1)
guess what, the Russkies can't browbeat Sweden. so they try to isolate them. makes no difference whether it's state-sponsored or state-"oh, gee, we couldn't possibly have miscreants inside our borders" not-officially-sponsored. free interchange of ideas and Putinism don't mix well.
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Considering that there are people that have evaded the Vietnam War Drafts in Sweden that aren't extradited then it's not too likely he would be sent to the US.
Today Assange is a moot point anyway, he's actually not that important (he may think so himself, but that's another issue). Also realize that he was primarily wanted for a hearing. If that hearing hadn't yielded anything of value then he would most likely have been sent on his way. As it is now he basically imprisoned himself at the embassy. The time
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Re: Sweden gets what they deserve (Score:2)
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Yeah, because Greenwald is really living a life in a work camp because of publishing all of Snowden's stuff? Nope, he is living quite comfortably in Brazil.
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He didn't reveal the classified information to unauthorized persons (he is one).
Assange had need-to-know on the American classified data? That seems unlikely...
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And since he's not an US citizen he's the one outside the fence that did receive it. And if he did receive it outside US turf then he can at worst be prosecuted on that turf for something.
The only thing left for the US to do is to discredit him, kill him illegally or just stress him to do something stupid.
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Yeah, just like the US did to Glenn Greenwald for publishing all that stuff Snowden gave him. I hear he is dying from all the hard labor they put him to.
Re:Sweden gets what they deserve (Score:4, Informative)
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Come on Mats, you guys are still just smarting from the Battle of Poltava, when you got as far into Russia as (roughly) modern Novorossia, and then were sensationally obliterated in one of the great battles of history. Matter of interest, why did you feel the need to invade Russia? It's not smart and it's not funny, and everyone who does it regrets it.
Unfortunately, they often end up with a lingering, festering hatred of Russia. Which isn't really fair, because all the Russians did was defend themselves.
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Tell that to Genghis Khan.
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Historically Russians are a mix of Fenno-Ugric and Proto-Slavic people governed by "Swedish" kings, with later mix-in of Mongolian blood and governance.
In Finnish and Estonian we still call Sweden "Rossi" and the country east of us is "Veneja" (or Boat People) :)
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You fucking dumbshits still going on about battles that happened hundreds of years ago? Who gives a rats ass?
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You should hear some Americans talk about that skirmisch they call "civil war".
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Which isn't really fair, because all the Russians did was defend themselves.
The war started when the Russians invaded Poland. Also, Poltava isn't in Russia, it is in Ukraine. It is silly to say the Russians were only defending themselves when the war both started and ended outside their territory. And the Swedes only lost that day because Charles XII wasn't feeling well. There should be a re-match.
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Also, Poltava isn't in Russia, it is in Ukraine.
To be fair, he did say Nonorossia, which is Putin-speak for Ukraine.
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WTF are you talking about? As if the two events would be related in any way.
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So Sweden is the bad guy for trying to prosecute sexual predators?
Perhaps he should work with a more neutral country as Sweden is known for it stance on taking sides.
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Also Assange is not even accused of rape.
http://www.theatlantic.com/int... [theatlantic.com]
Considering the only charge left is rape, how do you get to that assertion?
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Modern DDOS are botnets. You don't need, and few have, a giant pipe from their computer sufficient to deny a company or government anymore, as they themselves have cheap large connections for daily business.