Anonymous Takes Aim at Google+

[theDreamer]

That was the issue being discussed that you hopped into.



There was no "question that Google had issues with Google+ already".



This claim was never made. The post you're addressing was an argument against the claim of a publicity stunt, not against Google+'s ability to handle DDoS. As you already know, when anything is in beta, things are generally changed/fixed/etc. So, as to their servers' abilities to handle a DDoS, I doubt anyone will really be able to say yes or no, but I'd shy to the 'yes' side.

The point of my post was to show that what happened to Google+, running out of server storage, was not a valid argument for them failing to an outside attack.
One line was laughing at your post the next was a general discussion of the original topic...geez.

 

[kllrnohj]

hacked, proprietary source code stolen '09/'10

It is *PRESUMED* source code was stolen. As in, someone who isn't Google randomly decided that source code was stolen.

Moreover, Google wasn't even hacked. Various accounts had their passwords acquired through normal social engineering means (such as phishing). Google itself wasn't actually hacked. Nor was gmail in any way compromised.

unencrypted gmail and "other cloud services"

Who says it isn't currently encrypted?

@kllrnohj,
your assumptions about google's capacity to withstand a substantial DDoS are undermined by the crippling they experienced due to worldwide demand on their servers in 2009.

Uh, no it didn't. Again, proof. If you are referring to the "Michael Jackson incident":

On June 25, 2009, the day Michael Jackson died, the spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for

DDoS protection kicked in for 25 minutes - hardly a "crippling". In fact, quite the opposite - they weren't crippled at all.

network load is relatively constant in the long term. to argue against that is to argue against statistical data, google's bread and butter. I can't understand some of your reasoning. google isn't going to waste money on bandwidth they aren't going to use, just like any other company and person. given that their profession is collecting and analyzing our movement through their servers, how do you come to the conclusion that they wouldn't be better at it than any other service-oriented sector.

It is only constant if you don't grow, but DDoSs don't occur over month long periods - so what happens over the long term is irrelevant.

Likewise, there is *plenty* of stuff Google can cut off without affecting users. Such as the web crawlers. Your grasp on how the internet is actually hooked together also seems a bit suspect. Google doesn't "pay" for bandwidth in the same way you or I do - thinking in those terms gets you nowhere in this discussion. You really need to start taking into account the architecture of the internet itself when you are dealing with the scale of companies like Google and Amazon.

 

[mope54]

DDoS protection kicked in for 25 minutes - hardly a "crippling". In fact, quite the opposite - they weren't crippled at all.

So if a website can't function, it returns with a 404 or a page stating "We're sorry," for 25 minutes you're calilng that DDoS "protection"?

That's not protection, that's the Denial of Service!

 

[Lycidas]

The point of my post was to show that what happened to Google+, running out of server storage, was not a valid argument for them failing to an outside attack.
One line was laughing at your post the next was a general discussion of the original topic...geez.

I am not going to read for you. Good day, sir.

 

[theDreamer]

I am not going to read for you. Good day, sir.

Wow, what happened to this section have good debates on popular topics.
Now a discussion gets going and you just throw up your arms and leave.

 

[@dmin]

I would much prefer that someone takes down Larry Ellison and his oracle empire!

 

[kllrnohj]

So if a website can't function, it returns with a 404 or a page stating "We're sorry," for 25 minutes you're calilng that DDoS "protection"?

That's not protection, that's the Denial of Service!

Only people who were searching for the affected term saw a "sorry, we think you're a bot" page. From there, they just had to enter a captcha before being able to continue. No service was denied. Other search terms were unaffected, as was *everything else* Google hosts.

So yeah, no 404, no error pages, no denial of service.

 

[mope54]

Only people who were searching for the affected term saw a "sorry, we think you're a bot" page. From there, they just had to enter a captcha before being able to continue. No service was denied. Other search terms were unaffected, as was *everything else* Google hosts.

So yeah, no 404, no error pages, no denial of service.

That was only after the first 25 minutes. For the first half hour it was all down coughing up 404 error messages.

You didn't even know it happened until you googled it, so where were you in 2009? You're evidently not operating from memory...but want to dispute what happened like you were there nonetheless?

 

[mope54]

Someone cited the outage caused by users searching for news regarding Michael Jackson's death and subsequently writing it off as...well I don't know what these people are arguing for. They are using an odd definition for DDoS'ing a service as far as I can tell. Unless you guys think a server needs to physically melt or internet tubes need to pop or something, what do you consider to be a successful attack?

"Starting on the morning of May 14, at about 10:45 AM Eastern Time, Google and its related services starting to move extremely slowly. In some cases, Google services are reported to have completely stopped working."
http://blogs.computerworld.com/google_down

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137384/Update_Google_s_Gmail_hit_with_outage_again <--- it occurred more than once
"This past May, Google suffered a major failure when Google Search and Google News performance slowed to a crawl, and an outage seemed to spread from Gmail to Google Maps and Google Reader.

And last February, Google's Gmail was hit with a highly publicized two-and-a-half-hour outage.

That glitch came just a week after Google acknowledged that some users had experienced problems getting results from Google News searches over a span of more than 14 hours.

The scope of today's outage isn't immediately clear but it appears to be international."
(links are embedded in the original story)

 

[mope54]

apologies for multi-posting but I can't edit my earlier post

In March of this year, one of Google's data centers caught fire and "Google returned 404 errors (page not found) for over an hour in many locations around the world," however, the outage was "not because of the fire."

Apparently, the fire suppression sprinklers caused the most damage by ruining the routing system. But in response to someone's accusation that I don't understand what I'm talking about, that Google has more capacity than the internet's backbone (which makes no logical sense, but no matter), and apparently in his opinion loads are distributed all over the planet so one or more data centers could never lose functionality"

"The way Google tells the story, as the replacement router was installed and powered up, the backup of traffic caused four other Google data centers to crash."
http://www.awebguy.com/2010/03/google-returns-404-errors-after-data-center-fire/

That should make it abundantly clear that the posters arguing against my position simply do not have the facts correct and are arguing from assumption or emotion about how powerful they feel Google is. The reality is that Google is susceptible to a grand-scale outage, just like any other internet service business.