Back on Christmas day there was a lovely attack on both Sony and Microsoft by a group known as, the Lizard Squad. This attack effectively disabled all online communication. No-one could play their new GTA on their XBOX One, or play their new tomb raider on Play Station 4 (is tomb raider still a thing?) This attack, to the outside world, sounds like the work of malicious hackers trying to do no-good and take out the "establishment". But (this is a huge but) it wasn't a group of "hackers", the media will call them such simply because they are terrified and invoke fear into the general masses. If they aren't hackers what are they? Script Kiddies deploying a DDOS attack. What who and why? Will all be discussed in this post.
Lets start with the harder objective of the two, DDOS which is an acronym for Distributed Denial Of Service attack. What is this you ask? Its actually a built in flaw with most networks, your at home router can easily fall victim to this. a DDOS attack is when multiple systems simultaneously attack a single IP address.
For example perezhilton.com's IP address is 67.215.65.130, if you ping it, you get information. The router takes note that I'm trying to connect, saves my source IP and says "this guy is connecting." Small problem, these routers are limited to what their memory can handle, lets be honest we aren't putting 128TB of memory in these suckers, maybe 2GB on the crazy high end of things, but realistically a few hundred megs at best.
If too many unique hosts try to connect at once, the memory gets filled and topples over allowing for one of two things to happen, let EVERYTHING IN, OR block everything. In the case of these Lizard squad kids, they applied this to Microsoft and Sony, forcing them to choose the block everything route. There are countless other options these two tech Goliath's could have chose, and I'm shocked they didn't but... what can you do I guess?
Which lets be honest letting everything in sounds horrible, too many flaws and problems.
DDOS attacks are insanely simple though. All you need is one computer, and one zombie horde (yes that's a thing believe it or not). Whats a zombie horde though? A zombie horde is when hundreds if not thousands of computers get infected with a small bit of code, nothing insane that'll disorient and steal your personal info (which they could if they so chose). This code lays dormant on the infected computers until the master computer sends a code out too all the zombies. 1 little bit of code, sent to thousands of computers gets progressively larger as it bombards a single IP from this huge mob of computers.
Problem is... anyone can rent a zombie horde... anyone can learn DDOS... its not a crazy fascinating new thing. Its just annoying and usually facilitated by script kiddies, sometimes its used by legitimate groups like anonymous trying to protest the government, but a huge majority is just a bunch of script kiddies trying to piss someone off.
Now whats a script kiddie? A script kiddie is literally what it sounds like, a kid who learned a script. That kid who in your intro to computers class used shutdown /m \\$computername /r /f /c "too much porn" on your computer and laughed every 20 damn minutes. This guy who learned something new in an attempt to annoy people. There is no use for what these kids do, but they learned something that's cool right? If enough kids get together and learn malicious code together, they try to out malicious their friends, in an constant attempt to win the pissing match of stupidity.
Script Kiddies are NOT hackers, they should never be considered hackers, these are kids who want to be hackers but are nothing more than a nuisance. Learning these "skills" will help in becoming a real hacker, but when the media classifies a script kiddie as a hacker, its just annoying.
Its like calling a teen with a learners permit a race car driver, sure its possible they might get their one day, but they aren't there yet. Let these learners permit hackers remain known as script kiddies.
Not the most riveting post, I know, I'm sorry, but hey thought I'd get my beef out, I hate script kiddies, and I hate what they stand for. Classifying them as anything more than a pest is agitating. But I guess that's just me. Until next time, be safe my goblins.
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