[dns-operations] DNS servers "probed" by people who want to kill the Internet?

[Paul Hoffman]

On 15 Sep 2016, at 7:37, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 07:29:11AM -0700,
>  Paul Hoffman <phoffman at proper.com> wrote
>  a message of 13 lines which said:
>
>> You should go back and read what Bruce wrote again. The article does
>> not say that Verisign is reporting an attack on its name servers:
>
> I did read it and it says exactly what I said "mentions explicitely
> the .com/.net name servers" Let me quote Schneier:
>
>> Verisign is the registrar [sic] for many popular top-level Internet
>> domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there's a global
>> blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common
>> top-level domains.

That is Bruce's conclusion, not Verisign's. It is true even if Verisign 
hadn't published it's normal state-of-the-DDoS report. And it is as true 
now as it has been for two decades. Bruce's article indicates that he 
has additional information about the probing of infrastructure, but 
doesn't say that the additional information is about Verisign's 
infrastructure. It might be, or it might be about other infrastructure 
that is a lot easier to attack.

--Paul Hoffman