Planning a DDoS Attack? Plan Carefully Not To Be Ridiculous

Of course it is quite visible that cybercrime is getting more and more attention from the press lately exactly as we expected: many talented developers are out of their jobs and for some of them a natural alternative is in cybercrime business where they can make good money – and fast.

But now it looks like same as in any business there can be situations that are totally hilarious with the latest example arriving from Russia. Such hilarious situations will most certainly take place if amateurs take part in cybercriminal activity – and this is exactly what happened this time.

Today’s story is related to a TV reality show ‘Dom 2′ that is quite unique as it’s been airing daily for almost 5 years now on TNT TV network and there are quite a number of people here who think the show should have ended years ago and who are too irritated to even tolerate its mere existence on TV – even though no one is obliged to watch it, of course.

The idea behind the show is quite simple as young men and women live in one house building both a new house and romantic relationships. The goal is to prove their love to each other and to the audience so that the winning couple will receive the constructed house as a prize (“dom” is actually Russian for “house”). The reality show has been a subject of many animated discussions for quite a while now as it is criticized for dumbness of both its idea and its participants and for its enormous length, of course.

But all such protests will hardly influence the plans of the TNT network that runs the show while it generates revenue off ads and various paid mobile services and branded goods – so chances are it will run forever. What’s more, the commercial success of this particular reality show has been confirmed by Sony Pictures that acquired rights for the show’s format in 2005. I am not sure about what the corporation actually did with its rights but the initial plans involved use of “How To Build Your Love” (the English title for the show) in Latin America and Spanish-speaking states of the US as they believed such a show would be a hit over there.

I hope this description explains why the show gets such enormous attention here in Russia. And as any huge project it gets both tons of admirers (those people that still vote with their eyes and money) and numerous haters as well – and the Dom 2 reality show is no exception though probably the number of haters is growing faster than the number of admirers the longer the show runs.

And here is where the hilarious part begins. Some of these haters could think of nothing better than arranging a DDoS attack against the TNT network website to protest against the reality show and its presence on TV. The idea was first discussed on a popular yet slightly geek-oriented website where an anonymous user posted a simple piece of code that can be used to launch a DDoS attack against some website. The code was supposed to initiate multiple requests to the site that were intended to overload and cause downtime of the site.

The only problem for the novice hackers was that they did not want to do their homework well and they simply grabbed the code without thinking twice – so they initiated an attack against the tnt.ru site instead of tnt-tv.ru where the TV network is actually located.

The tnt.ru site is owned by the local representative of a Holland logistics company TNT Express and this company was slightly hurt by what was planned as a large-scale attack: since the site of the company itself runs on www.tnt.ru while tnt.ru itself is only used to connect to the world wide web by employees, the site itself did not even experience any downtime while the employees of the company were left without their emails and internet access for an hour until another connection was established.

The irony is that the reality show actually has its own website – dom2.ru – that would have probably been a better target of the poor hackers than the website of the TNT network itself – as it hosts numerous other entertainment shows that are probably enjoyed by many of those hackers as well given that the audiences of such comedy shows and the website that was used to arrange the poorly-planned cyber attack do not differ all that much.

But the poor hackers did not bother to check who exactly their attack will target – and the blind actions had very predictable results: the TNT network was unaware of the attack until it was discovered by press people while the TNT Express thought the damages were not even significant enough to initiate a lawsuit against the hackers they have logs for.

To tell you the truth, sometimes when I read about Russian hackers arranging an attack here and there to punish some companies or authorities for something the hackers are unhappy about, I feel some guilty kind of proud – I know it is totally wrong but the way no one can cope with the power of our developers still feels somewhat good to me. But in this particular case I think our hackers should be more than ashamed and should also avoid public discussion boards to discuss any potential targets – not to get into such situations again as it really does not feel good – choosing a wrong target for the attack twice looks more than just stupid to me. Honestly, it looks like their reputation will be destroyed soon if such amateurs will continue with their experiments.

Via (in Russian)