George Conard.

—Can you explain what a DDoS attack is and does to a website?
DDoS stands for distributed denial service. A DDoS attacks means that someone who doesn’t want the content on a website to be read sends so much traffic towards that website that no one else can get inside. It’s like creating a traffic jam. It’s the simplest analogy.

—DDoS attack have existed since the beginning of internet?
I am totally not a historian of internet security. I’ve been working in this area since the late 80s and I think that the general idea is that DDoS attack have been around for very long. What we are seeing, though, is a massive explosion in the frequency and the scale of the attacks over the last few years. In Brazil we’ve seen over 200 percent year over year increases. There are roughly 125,000 DDoS attacks every day. Its getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, and the size and scale of the attacks are getting bigger as well. The attackers have more resources.

—What makes this kind of attacks different from, say, just cracking a website and destroying everything?
A couple of things. It’s obviously a different technical approach. Trying to actually crack and penetrate a server usually involves different vectors, it often involves social engineering to try to get someone’s passwords. And once you are on it you can do different things. Obviously if you actually had enter the server you can turn it off, make it inaccessible. It is easier for someone who is not particularly technical to go out on the internet and buy a DDoS attack. One can go on to the internet and buy an attack for as little as five dollars. The cheapest I’ve seen is $4,99.

—There is a market for this kind of attacks.
Absolutely. There are people out there who have services that will be called networks stressors or something like that, and you can go and pay for the attack.

—What is the role that Project Shield is going to play with this kind of attacks?
Our goal with Shield is to eliminate DDoS as a form of censorship. We have seen these attacks particularly directed at journalists and human rights websites publishing information some people might not want. Project Shield is a tool or a service to defend those news sites from DDoS attacks. We use our own defenses to shield those sites from an attack. Ultimately, though, our goal is to get to the point where every news publisher, every journalist in the world is protected from DDoS attacks, so these attacks are no longer relevant as censorship.

—What differentiates Project Shield from other services like Project Galileo from Cloudflare?
I know Galileo but I can’t speak on behalf of Cloudflare on the details of the service. I understand that they have a slightly different process where they receive sponsorship from organizations, things like that. But I think it’s great what they are offering. The more of us that are working to offer solutions to organizations who need support and who are vulnerable to these attacks, the better. I would encourage any site to look at both of them, understand what the features say and which one is going to work better for their situation.

—What type of data is Project Shield going to store?
The starting point to talk about that is to understand how DDoS protections runs. There are three different ways you can protect yourself from DDoS attacks. One, is that you can write code and try to do it yourself; if you are a big organization, you’ve got really talented network security engineers, you can try to do that. For most organizations that’s not really an option. Two, is you can buy network security hardware. And for most organizations that leaves the third, which is a cloud based service like Cloudflare or Project Shield. The way that all of these services work is that traffic towards the website first comes through the provider providing the DDoS mitigation service. That necessarily means that you see all the traffic, because otherwise there is no way to defend against attacks. And you have to see the headers for the request and things like that, in order to determine what is a legitimate traffic. Project Shield works that way as well. We have traffic logs. We commit to not store that for ever and we only use it for very specific purposes, which are 1) to actually defending against DDoS attacks, 2) to improve our defenses and more generally 3) to improve the product as a whole.

—You are now in Mexico where Project Shield is going to be launched. But SIP gathers big players in the news industry in Latin America. How are you planning to reach smaller players?
Shield is currently protecting everything from an individual investigative journalist, just one person, all the way up to number one news site in European countries, for example. It’s really for a wide range of people. We work to establish partnerships to reach all of those types of organizations. So we do things like this, talk to the press and try to help others to amplify the story we are trying to tell. Particularly because we are working to protect journalism. We promote it on other websites. I spend a lot of time out of the office —I am based in New York— but I’ve been… I kind of lost track of the number of countries this year. Talk to gatherings of journalists. I was at Hacks/Hackers, the Media Party in Buenos Aires a month and a half ago. I am going to Media Party Africa next week in Cape Town.

—We can see the web as a human body and the DDoS attacks as viruses. If we use antibiotics, viruses may grow stronger. What happens when we have full protection for DDoS attacks? What is coming next?
There are two pieces on that. I am not sure if the biological analogy quite holds. But you are right that there are a lot of different factors of attack. And as technology evolves and as people gets smarter then they come up with creative new ways. I would think about this in two tracks. One is that people are going to continue to try to make DDoS attacks stronger, more powerful, harder to block. We will continue using our great engineering to defending us. Beyond that though is just not only DDoS attacks. You talked about cracking a server. I talked to journalists who were very concerned about how can they secure their communications with their sources and protect themselves, even physically. There is a larger conversation we need to be having about digital security across the journalism space. It starts with individuals in a lot of cases. I don’t think that threats are ever going to go away. I would love to be wrong about that. But i think that we can jump much further by building awareness of all these threats. There are good tools out there that will help protect people.

—If you can give some words to Latin American reporters or small news organizations that are not aware of these threats. What would you tell them?
The threats to journalism and to free press throughout Latin America are growing. It’s not just in the digital spirit. It’s in the physical spaces. We see that. And DDoS is something that is very easy to use to stop you from publishing the great stories that you are researching and writing. And second, it’s actually quite easy to get protected from it, whether is from Project Shield or from something else. My message is usually: Don’t wait until your readers need you the most and you find out that you’ve just been wiped down under an attack. Going back to the biological analogy, get inoculated now so when your readers really need you, you are available for them.

1. Se necesitan 100 años para tener mil millones de líneas telefónicas fijas, y sólo 20 años para llegar a 5 mil millones de suscripciones móviles
2. Para el 2014 una mayoría de consumidores accederán a internet por dispositivos móviles antes que por computadores
3. El pronóstico del tráfico anual de datos móviles (75 exabytes) para 2015 es equivalente a 19 mil millones de DVD
4. Hacia fines de 2015 la población usuaria de internet móvil crecerá 56 veces, hasta llegar a 788 millones
5. El 2015 los dispositivos móviles superarán al total de computadores de casa
6. El 2015, 500 millones de usuarios móviles tendrán aplicaciones de salud en sus equipos
7. En 2015 las utilidades por concepto de aplicaciones móviles serán de alrededor de 40 mil millones de dólares
8. Los ingresos por tecnología M2M (Machine-to-machine) crecerán más de 3,5 veces entre 2010 y 2015
9. La experiencia televisiva será más personal y social, pero menos familiar
10. El tráfico generado por 20 hogares será más grande que el tráfico total de internet en 1995
11. Nuevos servicios en la nube: «Tu escritorio donde estés»
12. Los ingresos de las redes sociales crecerán más de 4 veces entre 2010 y 2015
13. Para 2015 se espera que 500 millones de personas alrededor del mundo usen sus teléfonos móviles como boleto de metro y bus
14. Los MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) podrían generar 20 mil millones de dólares en 2015
15. Se estima que el 2015 por cada habitante del mundo habrán 2,5 dispositivos conectados a internet

Fuente: 1001 Medios y Neo Labels

por Soledad Vargas*

Los senadores Camilo Escalona, Marcelo Muñoz y Carlos Bianchi presentaron un proyecto al congreso que busca sancionar a quienes insulten o injurien a otros por medio de internet. La noticia, publicada por algunos medios como El Mostrador, ha causado diversas polémicas en distintos medios de comunicación que ven esto como un acto de censura.

La iniciativa estipula que quienes insulten o injurien a alguien por medio de internet no quedarán impunes y deberán responder ante la ley. El proyecto señala: “serán responsables civilmente de los daños y perjuicios que ocasionaren”.

Para los administradores de sitios Webs —y principalmente de foros como Portalnet— también resulta preocupante. Continúa señalando el texto: “En caso que no pudiera determinarse el autor material de dicha acción, dicha responsabilidad recaerá en los administradores de los respectivos sitios”.

Twitter no se ha quedado atrás, por medio del hashtag #leymordazadigital muchos usuarios han expresado su molestia, como consignó radio Cooperativa.

Los senadores que patrocinan el proyecto plantean que la medida busca evitar casos de bulliyng o agresiones bajo la libertad del anonimato, y así resguardar la integridad de las personas que muchas veces se pasa a llevar por medio de las redes sociales. En El Mostrador TV, el senador Bianchi argumentó que “lo que se busca es regular sin prohibir las comunicaciones”.

Países como España e Inglaterra también se han visto en la necesidad de regular el uso de las redes. En un artículo publicado el año 2007 en El País se expusieron diversos casos de injurias y ofensas que terminaron en los tribunales de justicia y reabrieron la polémica respecto a qué hacer con los usuarios anónimos y la gran cantidad de trolls que circulan en blogs y sitios web.

Enlace: Proyecto de Ley: Sobre responsabilidad civil en caso de ofensas cometidas a través de Internet

{*Estudiante de primer año, Escuela de Periodismo UAH}