Silk road down for over 24 hours now.

[Wuji]

Looks like a DDOS'ers have successfully taking down Silk Road for over 24 hours now.  Will be interesting to see how they deal with this and if it has any effect on the price.  Since I doubt price movement of BTC has anything to do with buying and selling of goods it shouldn't.  I think BTC will follow the gold bubble.  Continue to go up based on pure speculation and bull ego and then a big avalanche back down again.

[solidshotnosh]

Who do you think keeps attacking these sites?

I mean DDOS is just kind of pointless unless you simply don't want a site operating right?

[Wuji]

It could be anyone.  I doubt it is a government since they are such a low volume business compared to Mexico or most any other import nation.  I doubt it is extortion since paying them does not guarantee they stop, there is no way to verify you are paying the person doing it, and it will only encourage others.  I would speculate it is either 1.) A group of kids being vandals because they can and very little risk of law enforcement caring.   OR 2.) People trying to move the price of BTC for their own personal gain.

[wordofmouth]

competition anyone?

[chriswen]

Wow, it's actually very hard to DDOS silk road.

[Wuji]

Competition is possible although there are no real bigtime competitors I know of.

Some say the TOR network is hard to DDOS but, I suspect this theory doesn't hold up as well as people believe.  The main issue is that most traffic routing via TOR to Silk road goes through low bandwidth channels.  If you have a huge number of hosts to flood a site it wouldn't be that hard to flood a bunch of low traffic channels.  This is just my understanding  I have never looked at the topology of TOR so I could be wrong.

One reason I think it could be more to do with BTC is that a large number of people keep BTC in Silk Road accounts.  If the site is down they can not use their BTC.  This wouldn't help competition in the short term since vendors couldn't cash out and go somewhere else.  Could be a long term competitive FUD strategy.  It does however lower volume on MtFUX though since people can't get to accounts.

[Wuji]

One reason people think TOR is hard to DDOS is because it does not allow UDP.  Most DDOS is UDP based and TOR only allows TCP.  Still this does not make TOR impossible to DDOS it just means you need to flood a lot of nodes with TCP protocol.  I'd imagine using a lot of zombie PC with TOR clients one could map out TOR nodes and develop a fairly simple plan to flood enough nodes to make TOR fairly unusable.

[dg2010]

One reason people think TOR is hard to DDOS is because it does not allow UDP.  Most DDOS is UDP based and TOR only allows TCP.  Still this does not make TOR impossible to DDOS it just means you need to flood a lot of nodes with TCP protocol.  I'd imagine using a lot of zombie PC with TOR clients one could map out TOR nodes and develop a fairly simple plan to flood enough nodes to make TOR fairly unusable.

Given how the TOR network operates and the bandwidth constraints, I imagine it's easier to take a site down in terms of traffic required. But harder to do, given that you need your zombies to connect to the Tor network first.

[Wuji]

One reason people think TOR is hard to DDOS is because it does not allow UDP.  Most DDOS is UDP based and TOR only allows TCP.  Still this does not make TOR impossible to DDOS it just means you need to flood a lot of nodes with TCP protocol.  I'd imagine using a lot of zombie PC with TOR clients one could map out TOR nodes and develop a fairly simple plan to flood enough nodes to make TOR fairly unusable.

Given how the TOR network operates and the bandwidth constraints, I imagine it's easier to take a site down in terms of traffic required. But harder to do, given that you need your zombies to connect to the Tor network first.

Anyone know the total bandwidth of all TOR nodes?  I know the Spamhaus attack was 300Gbps.  I'd be surprised if all TOR nodes combined had anywhere near that capacity.  This attack seems to be affecting a lot of TOR sites I've been trying to use.  Far slower than normal.  I suspect someone is just flooding .onion sites with requests.  I have to be overlooking something.  This seems so trivial a way to take TOR down for anyone with a sizable botnet.

[Wuji]

So after more research Silk Road has two larger competitors BMR and Atlantis.  Atlantis seems to be having issues and is somewhat usable.  Mixed reports on BMR being slow for some usable for others.  Also seen people doing TCPDumps on successful Silk Road connections and getting garbage spewed back at them.  Seem like more than just a DDOS.  The nodes are returning malformed data.

[BitSmile]

I think it's just zombie pcs "refreshing". I read somewhere that the thing that supposedly would make DDOS agains the Tor network has not been implemented, because it would require a fair amount of resources. With a sizeable botnet, the zombies could just send legitimate requests over and over, making sites like silk road and such, with stone age servers, be almost unusable.

[Wuji]

One reason people think TOR is hard to DDOS is because it does not allow UDP.  Most DDOS is UDP based and TOR only allows TCP.  Still this does not make TOR impossible to DDOS it just means you need to flood a lot of nodes with TCP protocol.  I'd imagine using a lot of zombie PC with TOR clients one could map out TOR nodes and develop a fairly simple plan to flood enough nodes to make TOR fairly unusable.

Given how the TOR network operates and the bandwidth constraints, I imagine it's easier to take a site down in terms of traffic required. But harder to do, given that you need your zombies to connect to the Tor network first.

I don't think it would be hard to write or update a botnet that had the tor bundle implemented to connect.  Also there are .to sites that proxy to the TOR without the need for the network stuff to be enabled.

[SaintFlow]

If i where this new atlantis place, this is what i would spend my money on 

Would mirroring the site under many different addresses make it ddos proof in tor?

[notme]

I think it's just zombie pcs "refreshing". I read somewhere that the thing that supposedly would make DDOS agains the Tor network has not been implemented, because it would require a fair amount of resources. With a sizeable botnet, the zombies could just send legitimate requests over and over, making sites like silk road and such, with stone age servers, be almost unusable.

1. I doubt Silk Road is running on "stone age servers".
2. The speed of the server has pretty much nothing to do with DDOS resistance.  DDOS is accomplished by saturating the network connection, not attempting to overload a machine that is simply piping data from disk to the network port.

[UltimateReaper]

Poor Silk Road. I really like that place.

[Wuji]

Would mirroring the site under many different addresses make it ddos proof in tor?

The problem is that all transactions are stored in a database.  In order to mirror the databases have to be sync'd.  When you have high speed transactions this gets difficult with distance due to latency.  Wall street gets around this having invested billions of dollars in fiber connects and centralizing everything in one spot.  Of course if Wall street was the new 104 story building about to be completed I'd compare MtGox or Silk road as a 2 man pup tent.  Not to be critical but they are small potatoes.

[Templeton]

It's still down...  Hope my BTC are safe 

[dave111223]

Would mirroring the site under many different addresses make it ddos proof in tor?

The problem is that all transactions are stored in a database.  In order to mirror the databases have to be sync'd.  When you have high speed transactions this gets difficult with distance due to latency.  Wall street gets around this having invested billions of dollars in fiber connects and centralizing everything in one spot.  Of course if Wall street was the new 104 story building about to be completed I'd compare MtGox or Silk road as a 2 man pup tent.  Not to be critical but they are small potatoes.

But couldn't all the mirrors be run from the same source?  Because the DDoSers would just be targeting the website distribution in general, as opposed to targeting the specific source computer (if they could locate/target the source server then what would be the point of Tor)

So couldn't the dread pirate roberts just run 100 instances of Tor on the same server all with different tor addresses, but still serving up the same data from the same database?

But then again I have a really limited knowledge of Tor so this could be completely wrong.

[afbitcoins]

How longs it been down for now ?

[massivebitman]

Price will go up if  SR is down hopefully. Less coins to be sold.