zomgpwn!

Anonymous - 488 | Scientology - 716,949,386,024

We didn't wanna dip out toes in this (cess)pool until we got some reliable statistics on the DDoS ruckus laid down by Xenu and friends.  We finally have it, so let's get this party started.

If you don't know the background, shame on you.  Go read this.

Here's the part we're most interested in though.

Exhibit A:

• Number of attacks measured on scientology.org: 488 in the past week
• Attacks by date: 488 on January 19, 2008
• Maximum PPS rates seen: nearly 20000 pps (packets per second), with an average attack size of 15,000 pps
• Maximum bandwidth seen per attack: 220 Mbps, with an average attack size of 168 Mbps. This is on the high side of an attack, but significantly smaller than the largest ones we commonly see nowadays
• Maximum duration of a single attack: 1.8 hours, which is on the long end of common, but the average attack lasted just under half an hour

Exhibit B:

• Site                      http://www.scientology.org
• Last reboot          28 days ago
• Domain                scientology.org
• IP address           72.52.6.28
• Netblock owner   Prolexic Technologies, Inc.  <====!!!

Well then.  Nicely played, LRH.

Translation?  Anonymous actually DID hit Scientology's Apache Linux box pretty hard a week ago.  Then the organization (we're treading lightly here) did probably the smartest thing it could have.  It signed up Prolexic to substitute one of their servers and filter down the flood to a trickle.

Now of COURSE we realize that this wasn't the ONLY denial of service dropped on Scientramopolay.  (look in your heart, hackinatorz... look in your heart!) We just wonder if it was the biggest, or what else is coming.  It's fun to see Digg gamed the right way for a change and even though we've watched and re-watched the original Anonymous YT vid enough that we now don motorcycle helmets in our meetings and only communicate with each other via text to speech tools, it has us all a twitter with what could pownceably be next from our new favorite bunch of waxxorz haxxorz.   Even lolcats are in on this one.

Our vote is that Anonymous should start their own church and possibly even take over TMZ's slot on your local Fox affiliate.  They are sooo much more entertaining than Harvey Levin, and Harvey is no slouch.  Well.. OK he's a slouch.  We still think he's pretty awesome.

Also we'd just like to point out that we value the notion of free expression in the good old U. S. of A.  People should always worship who they want to worship, or not.  Not only is the line between legality vs. illegality ONLINE a slightly blurry one, it must be taken into account that Chanologists are OPENLY declaring war.  You know what they say about that and Lllllllllove.  (puke)  While the m$m and a lot of smaller 'news' outlets are chuckling to themselves about what the 'kids' are doing on the intertubes, remember... you have been warned.

We can't endorse either side, mainly due to our lack of a solid legal team.  However we DID see an episode of Matlock in a bar last night. The sound was turned down but we're pretty sure we got the gist of it.

We're all in ur networkz, throttling ur packetz, lolz

Did your p2p recently slow down considerably on a university network?  Taking forever to DL stuff that used to zip onto your drive faster than Bill Clinton dozes off during an MLK speech?

Those evil network managers aren't BLOCKING your Torrent so what gives?

Looks like they finally figured out that blockage only results in a workaround.  Ruh-roh, Rorge.

Seems that there are some spiffy new network optimization software packages out there, like Packeteer and Exinda that are taking a sneaky new approach to defeating the wave of p2p traffic on many college nets.  Instead of blocking a protocol, they just knock the priority way, way down and throttle the hell out of your packets, effectively capping your bandwidth.  For music tracks not as big of a deal.  But if you were planning on pulling off  27 Dresses for your honey to keep her distracted while you rampage through a co-op session of COD with your XBL friends list, think again pipe hog.  You'll be waiting days instead of minutes, making it an impractical proposition for most.

That's exactly what the network managers want.  Not only do they avoid getting into a VPN cat and mouse game with your silly ass, they also don't have to worry about being served with Copyright Infringement notices every other week.  Wait.. what else do network managers DO, anyway? 

They can still rightfully claim that they don't stop you from doing whatever you want on their network.  It just takes fifty times longer to do 'whatever you want' now.  Evil?  No doubt.  Are we impressed? Oh for sure.

We're also 100% sure that some clever haxxor will figure out hot to defeat this.  Here's a tip for that person.  VoIP and HTTP are given high priority, while stuff like SQL and Samba get totally blocked off.  You can knock on the back door, but nobody's gonna answer.