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  Geebo 9:08 am on August 7, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Ajit Pai ( 20 ), ddos, FCC ( 29 ), net neutrality ( 32 )   

  FCC admits there was no cyberattack, blames Obama administration in the process 

  

  FCC Chairman Ajit Pai

  FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has not been shy in his zeal to repeal the Obama-era regulations known as net neutrality. These were the regulations that required internet providers to treat all internet traffic as equal. Last year, after Pai announced the FCC’s intention to repeal net neutrality there was a 60-day period in which consumers could go to the FCC’s website to make their opinions known. Due to the large amount of traffic that the website received it was unavailable at times during the comment period. The FCC claimed this was a denial of service attack (DDoS). This allowed Pai and the FCC to question the credibility of any comments in support of net neutrality. Now, the FCC has admitted that no such attack took place.

  Yesterday, Mr. Pai released a statement saying that the Government Accountability Office’s investigation showed that no denial of service attack took place. However, Mr. Pai quickly attempted to deflect blame from himself and the current administration. Instead, he blamed a former holdover from the Obama administration for the inaccurate information’.

  “I want to thank the Office of the Inspector General, both for its thorough effort to get to the bottom of what happened and for the comprehensive report it has issued,” Pai said in a statement Monday. “With respect to the report’s findings, I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former Chief Information Officer (CIO), who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable.”

  Specifically, Pai is blaming the FCC’s former chief information officer David Bray. Bray left the FCC last year to pursue a position with an international coalition that was created to ensure that the Internet continues to improve people’s lives. That coalition was founded by one of tej internet’s foremost pioneers, Vint Cerf. Whereas, Ajit Pai is a former executive for one of the country’s largest internet providers in Verizon.

  As has been Ajit Pai’s M.O. this is just more misdirection when it comes to having a free and open internet in our country. Pai makes laughable claims that net neutrality would stifle industry innovation and hurt smaller ISPs. Yet somehow, protecting regional internet monopolies like Verizon and Comcast wouldn’t do those exact things.

  While net neutrality may currently be dead, it doesn’t have to be that way forever. In many places in our country, today is election day for many primary races. If you want net neutrality restored, go to your local polls and vote for the candidates who support it. Things won’t change overnight, but they won’t change at all if we do nothing.

   

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  Geebo 9:46 am on October 24, 2016 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ddos, Dyn, hacking ( 31 ), internet of things/ ( 7 )   

  Why you couldn’t access the internet over the weekend 

  

  Starting this past Friday, a large part of the country were unable to access popular sites like Twitter and Netflix. What had happened is that unknown actors attacked an internet service called Dyn. To put it simply Dyn is a large backbone of the internet that handles the massive traffic to major websites. Dyn was used my so many websites that attacking Dyn is almost like attacking the entire internet.

  Dyn was attacked in what’s called a denial of service attack or DDoS for short. Think of it as millions of phones trying to call the same phone number at once. Even with services like Dyn only a certain number of people can get through to a website at the same time. This could crash any website and can cause a massive amount of damages in lost business.

  Normally in a DDoS attack a computer is infected with malware and whomever is pulling the strings of the malware will cause all the infected computers to send traffic to a website, unknown to the computer’s user. This new massive DDoS attack used devices from what’s called the internet of things (IoT). These devices include peripheral webcams, smart home devices like smart thermostats, or just about any other internet connected device that isn’t a cell phone, computer or tablet.

  The problem is that a lot of these devices don’t have the best security installed. Many of them have easy to guess passwords that don’t even require a password to be changed when installed. Unfortunately there’s not a lot that us, the end users can do. This record-breaking attack may have come because we’ve given up on security for convenience.