10.05.09

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Microsoft Windows Zombies Take Down Free Software Services Hosted on Amazon

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Security, Windows at 1:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Summary: Bitbucket goes offline due to a distributed denial of service attack (botnets)

BACK IN August when Windows zombies took Twitter down repeatedly (and to an extent Facebook also) [1, 2], some journalists went as far as suggesting that Microsoft should be sued.

Now that Windows zombies paralyse the hosting service known as Bitbucket, which serves Free software projects, one must wonder where it ever ends. We too were a victim. Is a ban on compromised Windows the last option remaining?

A crippling DDoS attack over the weekend against open-source hosting service Bitbucket and Amazon’s EC2 service has questions being raised about the speed and effectiveness of Amazon’s response to the emergency, as well as the general reliability of cloud services.

The Microsoft-dominated DHS speaks about hiring an army of security people to address this issue, but Cringely explains why it’s unrealistic (to put it kindly).

“I’m not sure there are even a handful (of experts) with any sort of broad experience,” said expert number five, who is usually associated with security hardware. “There probably are pockets of them, with specialized narrow experience, e.g. in banking, virus or DOS attacks, military networks, etc.. And even if there were 1,000, what would they be doing on behalf of Uncle Sam?”

That’s a great question given that we as a nation can’t seem to hire and keep a national cybersecurity czar. So what are we doing hiring 1,000 experts given there is no boss?

[...]

The DHS is extremely unlikely to be able to find and train 1,000 cybersecurity experts in three years. Maybe they’ll come up with 100 (more likely 5-10), but the DHS environment will make it unlikely — very unlikely — that all of those 100 will stick around.

[...]

“Sure there are 1,000 (cybersecurity experts),” he said, ” but they are already employed… as hackers.”

Many Free software projects are being suspended by the rush of security flaws in non-Free software. The same can hardly be said about the opposite scenario; Google showed that even servers that deliver malware typically run Windows. █

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