A Self-Inflicted DDoS

Tuesday February 26, 2008 

This happens to be a couple of days old, but I just heard about it this morning, so thought I’d post about it.  Turns out that the government of Pakistan was a little less than enamoured with YouTube, because they were showing either blasphemous content, or videos that were critical of the government and recent elections, so they issued a decree that Pakistani ISPs needed to block access to YouTube.

Evidently one of the ISPs (PieNet), decided that the best way to do this would be to change the DNS records for YouTube so that they pointed to something a little more appropriate, in their opinion.  Apparently they didn’t think this all the way through, though, as it had the effect of knocking YouTube offline for about an hour, and even more dramatically for the Pakistani ISPs, they were now handling all of the DNS requests for YouTube, which brought their own segment of the Internet crashing to the ground under the crush of bandwidth.

PCCW, which is the primary carrier of Pakistan’s traffic, then determined that until they could get this sorted out, the best way to deal with it would be to knock the *entire country* offline.  Effectively they suffered a self-inflicted DDoS attack.

Now, China has a history of changing DNS entries inside their country in order to block web users from getting to some sites, but evidently they’re a little better at doing it because it never gets outside the country.  Not that it’s right, but they don’t bork the whole internet due to their censorship.  However, whatever the Pakistani ISP did really messed things up, and it’s scary to think that it was seemingly that simple to knock off one of the busiest sites on the Internet.

To say nothing of the horror that geeks everywhere must have felt when they couldn’t watch the dancing cats or the ripped music videos or TV shows. 

But what if it had been Google that they pulled down?  Or a large-scale national ISP?  While this incident may have been accidental, hopefully it’s not a sign of things to come.

Filed Under Security

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