steffess92 wrote *PLEASE NOTE*

* I am not 100% straight due to a very alcoholic Christmas dinner so I may not make total sense to some people.

** I am not ranting about Lizard Squad/Finest Squad or any other hacking group that may or not be involved. Instead I am directing my frustration towards Microsoft and Sony.

Why?

Well for a start both Microsoft and Sony are corporate giants that have tens of thousands of tech professionals at their disposal, not to mention several billions of dollars worth of profits to re-invest into the company(s).

Apparently Lizard Squad issued a warning about a week ago that both Xbox Live and Playstation Network would be hit offline.

It seems (not saying it's fact) that Microsoft and Sony did not act and either though it was a bluff or did not deal with it adequately enough.

At the end of the day these hacking groups are amateurs when compared to MS/Sony and the fact that they managed to hit both consoles offline for 5 going on 6 hours is a massive failure on MS/Sony(s) part as it seems no backup plan was devised.

I feel sorry for all the little kids who got this for Christmas, some of the parents who are not aware of the hacking will be thinking the new console they bought is broken or faulty.

Rant over

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

You need to understand how technology and networking actually works before going off on a tangent that you do not understand. It is not as simple as "I am going to DDOS you", and being able to say "Okay let me turn on my Windows Firewall".. There is much much more that goes into it. With a company that has such a large server database there are definitely going to be some weaker parts that a hacker can exploit. For example lets say that have "US Central" as one of their servers..

US CENTRAL
NORTH SOUTH EAST WEST

Even though i am pretty sure their network topology is a lot more advanced than that, lets go with this. So you have you main Server, tied to sub networks below, and who knows if they branch out even farther, anyhow, lets say these hackers start at the US CENTRAL WEST subnet, and slowly start to work themselves in. Their are lengthy algorithms that protect networks but there are also password crackers that can guess hundreds of passwords a minute. That is one way they could break in.

Now the next step is understand what a DDOS actually is.. a Denial of Service attack. Its right in the meaning of the acronym what it does. It has nothing to do with hacking into anything really, all you do is flood a server with so many packets or communication requests that the server cannot determine legitimate requests or is moving so slowly that it cannot process any request. You cannot prevent a DDOS.. you can however prepare for one, but lets say you have enough bandwidth for 1 million bits for example; if they have 100 clients pushing 60,000 bits per second at your server, tell me how you can defend against that. Okay lets up it. A company like them, 100 million bits. Think about having 10,000 clients pushing 60,000 bits per second + the actual real players from around the world. It won't take long to overload the server and render it useless.

One last thing, you are doing EXACTLY what microsoft and sony did, or so you claim. You are saying that these guys have no talent and they are amateurs. Networking isn't baseball, you don't have amateurs who attack such massive companies. These guys are young too, which is even scarier, they have room to grow. They have figured out a way to cripple a large company and they are successful at it. It isn't like they are just pushing a big red button in a secret lab and unleashing hell. No. They sit in front of the computer for hours, days, trying to figure out what to do next.

Now with all that being said, I am not trying to side with any of the hacker groups. I am just trying to get you to understand that it isnt simply a press of the button. So much more goes into it than you think.

Rant over.

-prisonedalien wrote

You guys don't understand what they are doing... You can't prevent a DDoS. DDoSing is simply sending tons of meaningless information to the servers which causes it to overload. Think of it like this.. Say you have a small server that holds only 10 people. There are 6 on it right now. Now a hacker wants to take you down. They send tons of information to the server which then shuts it down. It would be like having 50 people on a server that only supports 10 people.

We guys (or some of us do) and DDoS is preventable, if you think otherwise you're deluded