https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976825
This, predictably, broke I2P.
What network, distributed or decentralized, can survive such an event? Most of the protocols break down once you hit some N% threshold of the network being bad nodes, asking it to survive 1000%+ bad nodes when others usually is something like "When at least half the nodes are good". Are there existing decentralized/distributed protocols that would survive a 1000% attack of bad nodes?
How does that work?
It's the only complaint I have of the current state of Tor. Anyone should be able to run directory authority, regardless if you trust the operator or not (same as normal relays).
Either way, it’s opportunity cost.
Of course, it's far from being 100% effective, but it mitigates the issue significantly.
Why does i2p (per the article) expect state sponsored attacks every February? Where are those forming from, what does the regularity achieve?
How come the operators of giant (I’m assuming illegal) botnets are available to voice their train of thought in discord?
Because The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) allows government dissidents to communicate without the government oversight. Censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication
> Where are those forming from, what does the regularity achieve?
At least PR China, Iran, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait. censor communication between dissidents.
> How come the operators of giant (I’m assuming illegal) botnets are available to voice their train of thought in discord?
How would you identify someone as 'operators of giant botnets' before they identified themselves as 'operators of giant botnets'?
please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P
Not wanting to be overly critical, but any net-infrastructure project kind of has to keep bot-attacks in mind and other attack vectors, in the initial design stage already. Any state-actor (and other actors, though I would assume it is often a state financing the bot network behind-the-scene) can become potentially hostile.
>they accidentally disrupted I2P while attempting to use the network as backup command-and-control infrastructure
So were they hostile or were they using it normally?
I didn’t really understand the link between Alice and Bob until I saw a green floaty dot go through a pile of spaghetti with the word compromise beneath it.
Honestly, did the bot implementation have bugs or was it a proper implementation that crashed the network due to sheer numbers?
Also, how does changing the encryption standard affect anything if the bots tried to integrate correctly with the network?
Is the problem "fixed" or is it not? Elsewhere I found large number if botnet devs got pissed off with this botnet operator and 600k nodes went offline. Might this have much more to do with the situation getting better than simply changing encryption?
Also, was there any suggestion a quantum breaking attack was attempted? No. So why put the emphasis on "post quantum" in this article?
Bad. Very bad.
In general I don't think law enforcement wants discord to take these down or ban them. These guys would have no problem to just make some IRC servers or whatever to hang out on instead, which would be much harder to surveil for law enforcement - compared to discord just forwarding them everything said by those accounts and on those servers.
I know several people whose Discord accounts were banned because they participated in a server that later had some talk of illegal activities in one of the channels. There are similar stories all over Reddit.
In the same scenario, even if Walmart is right about who they ejected 75% of the time then they still have ~1 shoplifter remaining and ~1 very upset person.
Even in an ideal world where Walmart is right about ejection 100% of the time it doesn't mean they start receiving 0 new shoplifters either, it just means the number of people wrongly made upset is 0.
Discord's problem (on both ends) lies in lack of depth in investigating bans. It takes resources to review when someone shouldn't be banned and it takes resources to make sure you ban everybody. Putting too low of resources into banning just means that both sides of the scale manage to get tipped in the wring direction at the same time.
Also, how would you even go about classifying them as botnet operators?
It’s basically impossible. They have money, IPs, identities, anything you could possibly want to evade.
They aren’t requiring age verification for everyone to join servers and chat. The headlines and panic really got away from the actual story.
Once established communication can transparently be processed through a socks proxy, or integration with SAM or similar https://i2p.net/en/docs/api/samv3/