I’m a victim of Microsoft

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Apologies for the poor availability of this site for the past several days. It was on the receiving end of a DDOS attack. I finally ended up blocking around 50 class C subnets, a total of 6,000-plus IP addresses. This affects more actual computers and users than that number, of course, because many of those addresses are probably the outside of a NAT router. Very brute-force, but what else ya gonna do?

It’s possible that there are real readers on some of these subnets who have suffered from the carpet-bombing. I would tell ’em that I’m sorry, but they won’t be reading this.

I would not claim that ‘something must be done’ — well, no, that’s not true. Back up a minute. Wiping Microsoft Windows off the face of the earth would be a hell of a good thing, since it’s certain that 999 out of 1,000 — maybe 1,000 out of 1,000 — of these infected systems hammering me with bogus traffic are Windows systems. Windows is an OS designed to be infected, for marketing purposes.

But usually, when people say that ‘something must be done’, they mean that ISPs ought to monitor traffic more, or the Gummint should hire more cybercops and prosecute more people. I would prefer not to see any of these things done.

People who study military history sometimes like to observe that there are times when the advantage lies with the defender, and other times when the advantage lies with the attacker. This seems to be a time when the advantage lies with the attacker. Though I’ve been a defender myself for the past few days, I’m not sure I’d like to see that turned around.

But Windows — ecrasez l’infame! That’s not a question of policing or supervision. That’s a case where people bought a crappy product because the pallid goggle-eyed creeps who sold it had, have, an effective monopoly (pace all you Apple fanbois out there).

 

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