Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by __turbobrew__ on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @11:21AM
(#44367204)
I think ideally the customers router shouldn’t be touched, but the ISP can still do packet filtering on the next hop to drop any packets which don’t have a src ip matching the assigned WAN address of the router.
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Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by pedrocr on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @01:09PM
(#44368401)
Wouldn't that need a huge amount of extra hardware to do that filtering when the routers in each customer's home are mostly idle? Just setting egress filtering as the default and letting users override that if they need to for some reason should be a good outcome. The few that do change the default hopefully know what they are doing and won't end up part of a DDoS but they'll be few anyway so the impact will still be small.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by remram on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @02:34PM
(#44369273)
The router in the customer's home cannot be trusted. With cable at least, you are able to bring in your own modem and router. Even if not, swapping it is easy, you just have to clone the original modem's MAC. In practice this is probably quite common to save money if nothing else (cable box rental is $10+/mo).
Note that spoofing source IPs is only needed by the attacker in an amplification attack, not for the amplyfing devices and not for a "direct" botnet DDOS.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by SoftTalker on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @03:55PM
(#44370363)
I would in fact guess that it's not common at all. Setting up your own cable modem and router is going to be intimidating for the average consumer, and the ISP's answer to any problems is going to be "use our box instead" and they don't want to be on their own that way.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by __turbobrew__ on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @04:40PM
(#44370790)
I think it is less common now, but ISP routers on average used to be trash with issues — bufferbloat, memory leaks, crashes — so a number of people bought a higher end router to replace the ISP provided one. Mostly tech savvy people who were not necessarily in IT.
Nowadays my ISP just uses dhcp to assign the router an address so you can plug any box into it which talks ethernet and respects dhcp leases to be a router which is nice, albiet 99.9% of people probably leave the router alone.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by chainingsolid on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @05:18PM
(#44371168)
Common no, very easy to proliferate though as people become aware of the savings possible. And the 2 cases I've seen where litteraly order the same model online and swap it, no configuring required. And it wasn't even the family tech support guy(me) who came up with the idea. The ISPs incuding the router as a monthly line item on the bill are litteraly indirectly asking you to do this.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by SoftTalker on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @05:27PM
(#44371254)
Comcast/Xfinity in fact gives me a discount for using their router. Probably because (a) it lowers their support burden and (b) they are logging and selling my web traffic or at least DNS lookups.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by remram on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @10:36PM
(#44373185)
That's surprising to me, it was when I used Comcast (2016) that I first purchased a cable modem. It did save me money.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by SoftTalker on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @01:40PM
(#44379912)
Oh I also forgot that connection sharing thing they do where they broadcast a second SSID called "Xfinity WiFi" or something like that so that anyone with an Comcast login can use your connection.
Re:Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monument...
by citrin_ru on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @05:15PM
(#44371142)
> Wouldn't that need a huge amount of extra hardware to do that filtering
20 years ago Cisco (probably much longer) routers were able to do this without noticeable performance overhead (ip verify unicast reverse-path). I don't think modern routers are worse. Generally filtering is expensive if you need a lot of rules which is not needed here.