Yeah I'm sure one day it will transpire Cloudflare is affliated with intelligence agencies too. The solution to a "sudden DDoS" is to put their website behind Cloudflare. Wonder who can do those sudden attacks?
That’s been my pet theory from day 1, and not because of DDoS. Simply because they are the SSL terminator for most of the internet and can see anything going on in cleartext (and I’ve seen them protecting some shady stuff)
I recall a PRISM slide showing the diagram of Google and the public internet, with a big arrow on GFE saying, quote, “SSL added and removed here! :-)”
If NSA aren’t installed at Cloudflare, I wonder what they are even doing.
Sorry for necro-replying, but assuming you're talking about cloudflare they already do.
They took down KF (which is hosted in the US, so seemingly to be legal), but have always allowed everything from sites dedicated to livestreaming animal abuse to ISIS-affiliates hosting beheading videos (both which AFAIK is illegal).
Well, we kind of can, given that "SSL added and removed here :-)" was a pretty explicit workaround to the issue of encrypted communications in Google's infrastructure, just not between sites (IIRC).
Either way, if they were directly colluding with Google, they would have had a much simpler time siphoning off that data.
It's within the realm of possibility that NSA is collecting data with Cloudflare's consent. It seems unlikely that Cloudflare would jeopardize their entire business model over it. Unlike other companies in the leaked NSA slides that participated in PRISM, Cloudflare would face a near-total loss of customers. Their entire value proposition is being an unobtrusive traffic intermediary.
Within the realm of possibility? Let's be honest, if you are a top NSA executive and you couldn't find a way to get your hands on Cloudflare's private keys (bribing or threatening the right person), you are not getting your Christmas bonus.
It is of course inconceivable that the NSA do not have the private keys for dozens of browser trusted certificate authorities
That nonetheless doesn't help them unless they are doing active MITM. In order to do that they'd have to have at least some physical presence at Cloudflare or on the path to Cloudflare.
I mean, it is the CIA, but if you encrypt it before it leaves the box, and you're decent good with the key material, how are they going to get at it? Tapping the fiber then gets them encrypted flows, which isn't nothing, but, well, it would be surprising if they had access to the clear text.
> Unlike other companies in the leaked NSA slides that participated in PRISM, Cloudflare would face a near-total loss of customers
People didn’t care when they learned about PRISM, why would they care now when it’s a known fact? The sane stance would be to assume Cloudflare is in cahoots with NSA.
All the companies involved in PRISM made public statements saying they ceased participation. Google undertook a costly initiative to add encrypted connections over their datacenter circuits. The NSA leaks were a forcing function that led to a massive uptake of encryption. Up until that point it was common for websites to support only HTTP.
The NSA leaks dominated news cycles for the entirety of 2013.
> All the companies involved in PRISM made public statements saying they ceased participation. Google undertook a costly initiative to add encrypted connections over their datacenter circuits
This is as helpful as Whatsapp's so called E2E encryption comms (that just happens to not be applicable by default in certain situations).
Most modern booters are not maintaining public websites that could be the object of DDoS attacks. They're renting residential IP addresses from free VPN users.
Yeah, their origin is a story of absolute incredible luck. Cloudflare came out of nowhere and suddenly massive sites with huge user bases around the world, including places like 4chan, were getting DDoSed. Then they immediately announce that they transitioned to Cloudflare. Hell of a lucky time to make a company that the entire internet suddenly became absolutely dependent on.
The funny thing about that era is you knew they started using Cloudflare because they went from stable with constant uptime to going down and showing a Cloudflare banner randomly all the time for a good year or so. They ran worse with Cloudflare than they did while they were allegedly getting DDoSed. The whole company glows, as the late great HN commenter Terry Davis would've said.
Am i the only one that actually remembers this time period? It wasn’t that long ago. The confidence of your assertion is completely misplaced. I remember exactly where i was when I first read about CF, on launch day. DDoS attacks were CERTAINLY a big issue before Cloudflare came along. A whole lot of script kiddie energy was poured into them. LHC? Slowloris? IRC C2? This wasn’t niche stuff. That’s why I remember the CF launch, because I and everyone else knew that it was a big deal, given what the landscape had been for quite some time. Sorry if you personally didn’t have your finger on the pulse for whatever reason, but this was far from a niche issue, even for big sites / usual targets like 4chan.
I was there and recalled there being occasional script kiddy DDoS attacks here and there. But the uptime when being attacked was still much, much better than the first 1-2 years of actually using Cloudflare.
"I wrote all the code from scratch, including a 20,000 line of code compiler that makes x86_64 machine code from HolyC or Asm and operates AOT and JIT.
My JIT mode is not interpreted. It optimizes and compiles to x86_64 machine code.
I was chosen by God because I am the best programmer on the planet and God boosted my IQ with divine intellect." -Terry A Davis.
I recall a PRISM slide showing the diagram of Google and the public internet, with a big arrow on GFE saying, quote, “SSL added and removed here! :-)”
If NSA aren’t installed at Cloudflare, I wonder what they are even doing.