Giant Bomb Presents: Introducing Gino Grieco

Tell me all of the secrets to a happy marriage.

Kick your assailant in the genital triangle.

@hassun: I'll do a bit more research and get back to you.

it was a good read, and interesting interview

the one thing I will add that network equipment is becoming more automated or 'smart'

where pattern inspection of packets like the ones Verisign, F5 or Nexusguard provides for its costumer is becoming better and more able to stop DDoS attacks once they happen.

so its not impossible to stop DDoS attacks in the cases of Xbox live and PSN, it just very costly to do it at that scale.

This podcast's tags could make an amazing anime: Martial Arts Hacking City.

@stressedoutcat: Good to know! Like I said in the interview, I'm not an expert so it's good to hear that more strides are being made. Are those pieces of equipment used in the ISP level or the corporate server level?

@thatpinguino: can be used both, it depends on how big of a infrastructure you want to protect.

the way it works is the Ddos protection filters out traffic by having all the traffic go to their services first, which filters out normal traffic from the 'bad' traffic.

normal traffic gets routed to the servers.. 'bad traffic' simply gets dropped.

the thing to keep in mind is that companies the size of Microsoft or Google do not deal with ISPs, they deal with multiple peering providers.. basically they have multiple direct lines going to their multiple data centers around the word directly.. so it no longer viable to do it at 'ISP level'.

@stressedoutcat: Thanks for the explanation and the clarification!

Ok here's my pitch: a new series in which I ask every user on Giant Bomb about the origin of their username.

@wrathofgod:

Japanese title for Speed Racer.

This was a great podcast. It's really nice to see community members on in some sort of official way.

@hassun: according to my great Uncle Eddy, it was to turn of his hearing aid.

@wrathofgod: It's the initials of my first and middle name with an underscore. Inventive, I know.

Grats duder! Awesome read and good interview. =) Looking forward to seeing what you do next.

Cool podcast and article.

But I have some comments about DOS attacks in general. For background I work in cyber security at a major bank as an in house hacker. I have to deal with DOS attacks pretty much once a month there are many protections against them. Many people don’t understand that a DOS attack may not be just about volume of traffic.

The simplest DOS attack is the equivalent of walking away half way through a sentence. The TCP “handshake” that happens pretty much anytime you are using the TCP protocol. In the past you could just send the start of the handshake and the server would sit and wait for a response. Do this a couple 1000 times and the server wouldn’t be able to respond to anyone. Now this particular attack isn’t found that often and if you are vulnerable to attack this way fire who ever set up your network.

Another kind of attack witch is exploit based. It simply that whatever underlying Service or Deamon has a security flaw. This allows an attacker to crash the target computer or whatever is running the website on that server with a handful of packets. Attacks that simply crash services are more common but not as fun as the ones that allow you to gain control but are still risks.

Also I second what StressedOutCat said. (F5 for lyfe)

@wrongway: I actually describe a bit of that half handshake sort of thing in a blog I wrote about DDoS attacks. We didn't really have time to dive into all of the different permutations in the interview or the article, but I always love hearing about the different, weird techniques people figure out.

@thatpinguino: Oh ya I didn't mean you should have dived into all the different types. Just wanted to share some real world examples of how a attack works in general. Also people think that if they understand the analogy they understand the method and these can be very different.

AY GINO!

@thatpinguino: i just realized your name is part of your nickname, because of the way Austin said it. Well Gino isn't Guino but you get the point :P

Oh, cool. The guest contributor is one of the site mods, I had no idea.