How Lizard Squad’s attack was a good thing

Anthony Accinelli of StrengthGamer writes, "While I do believe the recent Lizard Squad DDoS attack against the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live will end up doing more good than bad, the timing could not have been worse.

There is however a silver lining here. A light at the end of the tunnel. A beacon of hope that might not have been discovered had this attack never happened."

[thorstein]

You did a good job of actually explaining a DDoS, you just didn't state why they will come back stronger.

More servers will prevent a DDoS? Then it just becomes a pissing match.

They can't maintain a DDoS for several reasons. One is that it can be shut down. Two is that it is easier to determine the origin when it is happening, so you're on a time limit regardless.

[PeaSFor]

hurting the players is a good thing now? really?

[AvidGamerrrr]

I take it you didn't read the article?

[Baka-akaB]

Then again can he be truly blame with that kind of title ?

And it's not as if you said anything pertinent in the article beyond "hey it's a good thing , at least they could be back stronger" .

It's rather vague dont you think ? Stronger for what ? To endure hard to prevent and stop further DDoSing , when the ante will mostly be upped constantly ? And when they were already beefing up their migitations services regularly ? Short of owning a structure as big as Amazon as a whole , which is currently impossible for a "tiny gaming service" , nothing major is going to change .

Stronger and faster servers for gaming ? Cause they aint exactly in correlation with what happened this holiday .

This time it's not even as if some services giving "free" games an an apology of sort is being created .

So i fail to see the silverlining there

[il-JumperMT]

Sorry nothing can stop DDOS. There is nothing you can do to prevent it.

[nucky64]

well, if the losers who are responsible for the attacks are hunted down and put in prison for several years - maybe, in the future, people WILL think before they act.

[Gore-Content]

Shut the f up you idiot. NO ONE profitted from that attack besides those aholes.

[Muzikguy]

There's no silver lining, sorry. Nothing good comes from DDoS attacks. Unless we are talking about me finally playing the single player portion of BF4 that I've had for a year already. Played it and didn't like it. Maybe the next attack I should do the same with KSF?!

[CorndogBurglar]

I played Dragon Age Inquisition :)

[PsBoxGamer]

The only good thing I can see out of these attacks is this! SONY and MICROSOFT will think twice maybe even 3 times about ever going online only with there consoles.Besides the fact that not everyone can get crazy high speed internet there's things like this that can happen essentially marking your online only systems nothing more then a door stopper.

[CorndogBurglar]

Is anyone else confused by this article?

I mean, the author explained what DDoS is, so he clearly knows how it works. He also stated plain as day that DDoS cannot be stopped.

All of that is true. But then he turns around and says that this could make Sony and MS purchase more servers and security to help combat DDoS? He just got done saying that DDoS couldn't be stopped. So where is the good in this? So confused.

[GameSpawn]

It can't be stopped; this is undeniable. However, you can distribute your services and servers across the globe (much like Google and Amazon have done for their services) and mitigate (this is the key word) DDoS attacks against your services. Your service WILL still go down, but not completely nor world-wide (unless a very organized DDoS attack is performed on EVERY distributed server at the same time - very very hard to do the more distributed the servers).

Now in the end, XBL and PSN services are nowhere NEAR the scale that Amazon's and Google's services have become and do not warrant that level of investment in distribution of servers and services. Think about the shear number of customers Amazon services (either via the storefront or Prime Instant-view) world wide and the amount of people who utilize not only Google's search engine, but also their cloud services such as Google Docs. These two companies NEED to have a distributed service in order to have near 100% up-time even if they're directly attacked or just have a sudden rush of legitimate users. 20-50 million users (XBL's and PSN's case) doesn't hold a candle to potentially BILLIONS in Google's and Amazon's case.

Also, Google and Amazon built up their distributed infrastructure over the course of DECADES. Sony and, believe it or not, Microsoft cannot just build the same thing to match overnight. Even with Microsoft's "infinite money pockets" that Microsoft supporters believe they have, Microsoft is not going to drop everything for a third rate service compared to their true money makers Windows and Office (both of which would get this sort of treatment long before XBL).

[Roccetarius]

Taking down services shows what'll happen to all your purchased digital games. That's pretty much the only good side to this, just so consumers can wake up a bit more.

[Talgrath]

Okay, let's clear up a little bit of confusion here. Regardless of what "your buddy" told you, or what Lizard Squad said, without significant revision of how the internet works, preventing a DDoS attack is literally impossible. There are two, very large issues with preventing a DDoS attack, the first is the basics of how it gets the machine power necessary to run the attack. The most common way is to create a "zombie" network of infected computers, such as your home desktop or laptop; these "zombie" computers regularly communicate with a server, but the user's will almost never notice the activity because it's such a small drain on resources, usually a simple message to show the computer is ready for instructions. When somebody wants to launch an attack, they send the command with the target information to the server, which then broadcasts it out to the infected PCs.

The second main issue is more or a set of issues. Due to the way the internet is setup, every connection is considered valid until it is proven otherwise on the majority of systems. Since the machines all seem to be sending valid traffic, at first at least, it's hard to block it. However, there are even more clever and insidious methods, DNS reflection and NTP time protocol attacks both work by the same idea, each "zombie" machine "spoofs", that is, fakes the address of a request to a server, asking for public information, instead of using the machine's IP you use the attack target's address; the result is that a server is flooded with massive amounts of seemingly valid data from public servers. An attack using DNS reflection or NTP time protocol, or both, can potentially deliver terabytes of data to a target. It doesn't matter how big your bandwidth is or how powerful your servers are if you're getting multiple sets of data larger than the Library of Congress sent to you every minute. This article is dumb and the author is dumb.

[CyrusNightshade]

I just don't understand how this can be seen as a good thing in anyway. Its like if I shot someone and said "They should have worn a vest and they would have been fine. I was doing it FOR them, to show them they had low security." There was no reason for this attack, So stupid...

[urwifeminder]

Was great many laughs.

[PaleMoonDeath]

Good thing? if it weren't Christmas then this would be somewhat arguable, but no it wasn't a good thing, millions of people across the planet were pretty pissed that they couldn't play with their friends on the new games or consoles they got.

[IGiveHugs2NakedWomen]

Another article written by a person who has no idea how this type of cyber attack works. There's nothing to secure. It's an attack that conceals itself as a service request and there is no way to determine if a particular request (PACKET) is part of DDoS attack or if it is indeed a legitimate request. The only indicator of an incoming DDoS attack is unusual levels of service requests, in this case those who may be monitoring server traffic can either divert the traffic to a set of "stand-by" servers or take the portion of the affected network offline. Think of it like this: Let's say at your home you have one landline telephone. On a normal day, you get an average of 3 calls every 4 to 6 hours. Then for some unexplained reason, you begin receiving 60 calls per hour. You answer the first few calls, but they don't stop and keep coming in. Finally, you're forced to either disconnect your phone or leave it off the hook. No incoming calls, no outgoing calls, nothing but a busy signal. If 1 million strangers have your phone number, there's no way to block any calls they might make because you have no idea who's calling you. Now just imagine this same scenario happening between PSN/Xbox Live servers and the millions of people connected to their network. Some people seem to think that stopping a DDoS attack is as simple as flipping a switch, it doesn't work that way. If you don't like the service disruptions, don't pay for the service, because they will happen again no matter how much anyone complains about it. It's just one of the realities of being connected to internet. Anyone paying for PSN/Xbox Live should be directing any anger and frustration they are having towards the small minded people who disrupt these services, not at the companies who are the victims.