Re: [cta@hcsin.net: Re: CNN: 'Explores Possibility that Power Outage is Related to Internet Worm']
As you probably know by now, there was no lightnight strike and the failure did not start at Nigara. As for our city's reptile of a Mayor he claimed power would be back on in queens by 11pm. It wasn't on until 6am Friday. On Friday night there were still areas that were down in lower Manhattan. Certainly, I'd expect whatever FUD explanation to be most profitable to the NeoCONS to be the eventual reason for the outage, so they can push USPATRIOT V3.0.1 - the one where they add brown alert to the color scheme. Of course CON-Ed would say "Blame Canada." I expect nothing less. Did anyone catch the Shrubbya interview? I think it was on CNNFN or MSNBC or one of those neonews channels... The one where he was busy sweating in the sun's heat in his blue Armani dress shirt while, his face browned from the sun, playing golf. The one where he regurgitated what he had been spoon fed by his PR guys? At one instant he shrugged his shoulders as he said it's an old grid, and it will need to be fixed, and then he went back to golfing. Showing how much he cares about the plight of the east coast. More than likely I suspect the truth is that the grid is indeed outdated and something simply couldn't handle the load. Whenever politicians, and bureaucrats are involved, the outcome is the same: Chief Executive Asshole: "Why should we spend $X million to fix it? It's still running?" Techie: "Because it's running at 95% capacity, and any small spike will cause a big problem." CEA: "But it's been fine for the last 20 years, I'd rather keep the cash and give myself a bonus, and then lay off extraneous employees. We can outsource them to India." Techie: "It's outdated, it will collapse." CEA: "So what? When it does, if it does, we'll hit Uncle Sam for more money, meanwhile I have another yacht to purchase. In any case, it won't likely collapse while I'm still here, and I'll retire soon enough, not my problem... and don't let the door hit your ass on your way out. I don't want ass prints on my brand new gold plated door." --Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--- + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of /|\ \|/ :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\ <--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech. \/|\/ /|\ :Found to date: 0. Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.\|/ + v + : The look on Sadam's face - priceless! [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, John Young wrote: > Are you suggesting the outage was caused by carbon filaments rocketed > across transmission lines? If that was done at several points in the grid it > would account for the various finger-pointing to incidents which are claimed > to have started the usual-suspect "cascade" of the usual-suspect "antiquated" > system that was "not supposed to fail but it did."
Re: Viral DNS Attack, DDos Idea
On Sunday, August 17, 2003, at 08:19 AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Evolved diseases don't kill their hosts. Google is too useful to redirect. On the other hand, you can redirect an entire TLD (eg .mil), albeit on one machine at a time. Try doing that to one of The DNS Roots (pbut). Many evolved diseases _DO_ kill their hosts. Look around. It is true that there are tradeoffs in lethality, time to death, and virulence, and that a disease which kills too quickly and too many won't spread adequately, but quite clearly all of the diseases of the past were evolved (until recently, none were created) and yet they often killed their hosts. --Tim May "In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." -- Mark Twain
Re: Viral DNS Attack, DDos Idea
At 05:46 PM 8/15/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>At 01:19 PM 08/15/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
>>Suppose malware appends a bogus entry to an infected machine's
>>/etc/hosts (or more likely, MSwindows' \windows\blahblah\hosts file).
>>(This constitutes a DNS attack on the appended domain name, exploiting
>>the local hosts' name-resolution prioritization.)
>>If the appended IP address points to the
>>same victim (66.66.66.66) on all the virus-infected machines,
>>and the appended (redirected) domain name is popular ("google.com"
>
>Cute, but sounds like a lot of work compared to other obvious attacks
>you could do if you're spreading a virus anyway.
Yes if you have virally owned a machine you can do much nastier.
But this attack has the advantage that its effects would not be
immediately recognized, nor could they be fixed in one spot
once detected.
Evolved diseases don't kill their hosts. Google is too useful
to redirect. On the other hand, you can redirect an entire
TLD (eg .mil), albeit on one machine at a time. Try doing that
to one of The DNS Roots (pbut).
>The more popular version of this attack is to try to hack DNS servers,
>or poison DNS requests, so that DNS requests for google report the
wrong thing.
Yes I've followed discussions about SecDNS etc before.
The cute part of the local hostsfile attack is that local machines
are *not* administered competently, whereas DNS servers
(and even ISP caches) are more likely tended better.
>One problem with hacking the hosts files is that
>different versions of Windows tend to put them in different places,
>though perhaps if you target XP and 2000 and ME and 98
>it's consistent enough to work.
OS detection is trivial once in.. as is file/path detection. I bet a
javascript
program could do it, if the client security settings (ACLs) were poor.
>The real question is whether the bad guys would redirect to a victim,
>or to a fake web server run by them, so they could hand out
>bogus responses, such as redirects to various places around the web,
>potentially along with some advertising banners.
That's the virus author's choice, of course. In fact, I first thought
of
the attack as a DNS-redirect on domain names ---intending on random
(or even localhost) misdirection. Upon thinking about it, the
utility of all those 9AM Monday clicks became apparent.
Diagnosing the situation would be a bushel of fun in the first hours
either way.
>If it's a virtual server machine, though, you can't do that
>without disrupting all the clients on it, which is too bad;
Hadn't thought of virtual servers... "all your eggs in one basket" :-)
>If it's a router, that's a more interesting problem,
You're right, routers merely drop port 80 incoming,
any router DoS depends on sheer bandwidth --say
routing the NYTimes.com clicks to Podunk-BackwaterTimes.com
>because many routers have wimpy CPUs and do the routine work in ASICs -
ASICs are great except for exception handling, which is a vulnerability.
I was working on Intel's network processors earlier
this year. Amazing chips--they have hardware support for everything you
do in an IP stack, buttloads of memory controllers, I/O up the kazoo,
and a dozen hardware-supported
thread contexts (hyperthreading) on each of a dozen high-clockrate RISC
engines.
But they all defer exception packet processing to the onboard ARM, which
might
alert the host system or at least log the exception by incrementing a
counter. But the ARM is not as fast as the threads
and could perhaps be overwhelmed. Perhaps the subject of a future
Gedanken Design Idea.
-
"When the rotary telephone first came out, people
said, 'You mean I have to dial seven numbers?' "
Re: paradoxes of randomness
On Sunday, August 17, 2003, at 03:19 AM, Sarad AV wrote: hi, Okay- I need 5 bits to represent 32 coins.I count as coin 0,coin 1,... coin 31. If it is a perfectly random fair coin throwing experiment,then 50 percent of them will be heads. So I know that 16 of them will be heads. I hope you are not saying that you think there will always be 16 heads and 16 tails! Your comment below seems to suggest you think this is so. If so, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about probability. What we do is i simply place all the 32 coins on the table in a row or column. I look at the first coin and determine if it is a head or a tail. I repeat the same proccess till i count 16 heads. If I count 15 heads at coin 31, then I cant reduce the entropy. How ever, if i count 16 heads at coin 30,then I dont have to check that coin 31,I already know its a tail,so I have less than 5 bits of entropy. How does knowing what has already come before tell you that coin 31 is a tail without your having to look at it to see? It certainly sounds to me that you have a very weird, and very wrong, concept of probability. --Tim May "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler
reliance that's scary
At 10:13 AM 8/16/03 -0400, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: > >Security, as Schneier says, is a process. It's also a mindset, and I think >one either has the mindset or he doesn't. And for those that don't have it, >it is *very* difficult to impart. And you don't get any droid-demonstrable features for all your efforts. Whereas being able to control from a network has gee-whiz sellability. And the customer has a hard time imagining the attack -how are they going to find the network, how are they going to guess the password. I had the pleasure ca 1997 of figuring out how to browser-enable a multiton industrial machine (the kind with big red "stop" buttons, rotating lights on it when it was operating, and stickers showing various forms of dismemberment possible) once. A password was the only access control. I hope anyone who installed this understood firewalling and air gapping... (Meanwhile, my garage door is "protected" merely by the number of possibilities, 256)
Re: [cta@hcsin.net: Re: CNN: 'Explores Possibility that Power Outage is Related to Internet Worm']
On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote: >Somehow I have difficulty believing the these people could be so totally lame > as to be running mission-critical stuff like this on windoze. Please say it > isn't true. The Microsoft salesmen know the coercive sales tactics. The clients' well-being isn't in their interest; their interest is only a new sale. Hence in their world Windows are suitable for just about everything. By exploiting psychological tricks, they are able to convince less technically capable personnel (eg, the management) about their system's alleged superiority. Not that different from eg. car dealers. A friend some time ago complained about having to ditch a Linux webserver because his company managers did some special deal with Microsoft which gave them substantially lower prices if they would run ALL systems exclusively on Windows. But I forgot the details. > Is the military also now dependant on windoze? Some time ago there was a widely publicized incident with Windows NT controlling a battleship. After a crash the ship had to be towed to the port. From then it's known that NT is an acronym for Needs Towing. > Bizarre, absolutely bizarre. And somehow entirely unsurprising. > And here I thought it was probably caused by people with potato guns > firing tennis balls filled with concrete, attached to coils of wire cable, > dropping them across the power lines and transformer stations. The cable will vaporize at the moment the lightning from the power line hits it, or it will be too heavy to be brought up by anything reasonable. (You don't need even a full contact, getting it to the sparking distance is enough.) That will trigger the breakers and switch the line off for few seconds. But then the power will be switched on again. Then you need to short it the second time. The wire you used will vaporize as well, but the breakers won't switch back on for the second time, claim an error, and an inspection of the power line is required to find the shortcut cause before it can be switched back on, as the electronics then considers the short circuit to be permanent. (I hope I am right here.) Also be aware about the danger of the step voltage at the moment the lightning from the power line hits the ground - you don't want to be anywhere too close, so you will avoid the potato gun and resort to something safer, eg. a suitable rocket engine. In Colombia, the rebels routinely "dark" the cities by blowing up the high voltage masts. If the mast is in a difficult-to-access place, it can take days to build a replacement. There are thousands of miles of power lines, good part of them in less inhabited areas. It is extremely difficult to prevent this kind of attack. To add insult to injury, the adversary can get ahold of the map of the power transmission networks rather easily - they are in all kinds of sources, from tourist maps to maps for pilots, and one can get fairly good idea about the power feeds to a city by just driving around it with open eyes. Underground lines exist, but are more expensive, so they are quite unusual. However, I'd bet that this affair was a plain old Murphy-based cascade failure. On another note, a nice reading about the world of energetics is Arthur Hailey's "Overload".
Re: paradoxes of randomness
hi, Okay- I need 5 bits to represent 32 coins.I count as coin 0,coin 1,... coin 31. If it is a perfectly random fair coin throwing experiment,then 50 percent of them will be heads. So I know that 16 of them will be heads. What we do is i simply place all the 32 coins on the table in a row or column. I look at the first coin and determine if it is a head or a tail. I repeat the same proccess till i count 16 heads. If I count 15 heads at coin 31, then I cant reduce the entropy. How ever, if i count 16 heads at coin 30,then I dont have to check that coin 31,I already know its a tail,so I have less than 5 bits of entropy. So if it is a perfectly random experiment,I wouldn't get 16 heads before i look at coin 31,which is the last coin and thats what you said-isn't it? So how did chaitin get to compress the information from k instances of the turing machine in http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/summer.html under the sub-section redundant? he says- "Is this K bits of mathematical information? K instances of the halting problem will give us K bits of Turing's number. Are these K bits independent pieces of information? Well, the answer is no, they never are. Why not? Because you don't really need to know K yes/no answers, it's not really K full bits of information. There's a lot less information. It can be compressed. Why? " If the input programs are truely random-there is no redundancy and thats a contradiction to the claim in the paper. Thanks. Regards Sarath. >It's simple, if I am correct. The redundancy simply > makes you care > less about the specific instance you are looking at. > > > To represent 32 coins-i need 5 bits of > information. > > Since the experiment is truely random-i know half > of > > them will be heads,so in this case using 5 bits of > > information,i can determine all the coins that are > > heads and that are tails. > > Same deal, unless you are counting pairs, in which > case you cannot > distinguish between the members of a pair. You need > an extra bit to > tell a head from a tail. > > > So-the question is what is the minimum number of > bits > > or entropy required to determine which all coins > are > > heads and which all coins are tails,is it 5 bits > or 6 > > bits of information? > > With 5 bits, you can count to 31, so you need 6. > > Just my two tails. > __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: paradoxes of randomness
also sprach Sarad AV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2003.08.17.1219 +0200]: > Okay- I need 5 bits to represent 32 coins.I count as > coin 0,coin 1,... coin 31. No, you can't count coin 0. Or how will you represent no coins? I would appreciate if you wouldn't simply include the quoted message in your reply. Either reply in its context, or delete it altogether. -- martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.) \ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; [EMAIL PROTECTED] invalid/expired pgp subkeys? use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver! "i have smoked pot. it is a stupid business, like masturbation." -- thomas pynchon (v) pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
