Re[2]: Skype Network Remote DoS Exploit
I'd consider this uh, untrue. Didn't happen on the last patch Tuesday, nor=
the one before. What made this month special? Did those millions of=
Windows users who update all coordinate their activity? Not likely.
As to other services that depends on running on consumers computers to=
provide services, there are not many on the scale of Skype that vampire=
bandwidth and CPU in the same way. Certainly none of the bit torrent=
networks crashed, but then I suspect that they are far more tolerant of=
user's computers coming and going, and far less dependent on their=
persistence.
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---Matthew
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 8/20/2007 at 1:39 PM Steven M. Christey wrote:
>The outage being experienced by Skype was apparently due to massive
>simultaneous reboots and reconnects after systems installed their
>Windows patches.
>
>from http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/what_happened_on_august_16.html:
>
> The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users'
> computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they
> re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows
> Update.
>
> The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources.
> This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the
> lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction
> that had a critical impact.
>
>I wonder how many other services are impacted by simultaneous Windows
>scheduled updates.
>
>Anyway... given that this was going on at the time the SecurityLab.ru
>exploit was released, and the exploit only claims a DoS (and only
>seems to make a series of requests to long URIs), was the exploit
>actually effective, or was the "DoS" just part of the larger outage?
>
>- Steve