DDoS, Ngrok, Signal, Audio, BanBot, OpSec, Snowden, Starlink
This post is 100% ready to be published, just remove this remark! Other changes have been also already done (!)
Friends service API is suffering from DDoS attacks - Yet, I don't even know if Cloudflare would help, unless you'll tighten the setup and then APIs might stop working. When I tried some high level ahem, load testing stuff. It worked surprisingly well. Point is that you'll just need huge number or "basic browsing / API access simulators" so nothing stands out regular, except number of users. Is that a attack, or just overload? Who knows. Very hard to block, especially automatically. Only thing that helps, that there's CAPTCHA client check first, and then you can access the site, and now you've broken all the APIs which naturally won't complete CAPTCHAs, unless you whitelist the good sources manually or have good statistical history data for that. That's easier if the requests are clearly invalid, and there's back-end feedback to the front. But without that. It's just HTTPS traffic, nothing wrong with it. As example APIs which require authentication can easily detect failed attempts and prevent access based on it.
Wrote my first Windows Service and Signed Windows Driver package today. Phew, many little things to know and some things just work slightly differently than what I'm used to. But it was all good.
Firewalls and NAT are such a problem, that there are commercial solutions. Ngrok (@ ngrok.com) - If you need such service, they also seem to provide free tier.
Some of the Ukraine related Telegram channels got over one million users, yes, really. No wonder the Telegram media servers are bit lagged when 50 megabyte video is posted to the channel. Maybe they don't have adequate load balancing solutions for such extremely heavy rooms. Of course it's also possible or even likely (?) that some entities are trying to on purpose prevent that content distribution using whatever means are available. Fake clients, DDoS, swarms of intentionally extremely slow clients reserving and keeping resources busy on the server side and so on.
It's also interesting dirt campaign where it's claimed that Signal has been comprised and people should use Telegram for secure communication. I guess people know which organization / party might be behind such claims.
Windows audio issues, I though it was only Linux / Ubuntu / ALSA problem that suddenly audio got totally insane distortion effect. So bad it's really hard to even understand what the audio behind the effect is. But now, just today, Windows did it too. I wonder where they find these developers, whom are utterly incapable writing something like audio mixer that wouldn't distort audio to ridiculous rock levels.
Further improved BanBot (similar to fail2ban, but different implementation for Windows) management console, now supports subnets, ipv4, ipv6, cidr, and automatic address space coalescencing and centralized unbanning when necessary. Nice. Took a few hours to implement, create tests and deploy.
OpSec fail - In one of the reports someone posted a photo of him and some friends re-grouping in Ukraine. Russian missile killed them in 30 minutes after the posting. Yep, social media can literally kill you and quite quickly.
Also this Snowden's Tweet is legendary, I don't know what conclusion should be drawn from this, but I guess everyone is free to make their own conclusions. Full direct quote from Twitter: "I'm not suspended from the ceiling above a barrel of acid by a rope that burns a little faster every time I tweet, you concern-trolling ghouls. I've just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful, because I called it wrong. - Feb 27, 2022 · 9:37 PM UTC". Ref: TweedId: 1498049577131208705
Starlink / SpaceX is now prioritizing modifications to new satellite cyber defense and overcoming singal jamming. It seems that satellite jamming is a thing, even if it should be illegal.
Something different? Pulsed inductive thrusters (PIT) (@ Wikipedia)
2023-05-21