UK election day 2024: traffic trends and attacks on political parties

The 2024 UK general election, the first since Brexit officially began (January 31, 2020) and after 14 years of Conservative leadership, saw the Labour Party secure a majority. This blog post examines Internet traffic trends and cyberattack activity on election day, highlighting notable declines in traffic during the afternoon and evening as well as a DDoS attack on a political party shortly after polls closed.

For context, 2024 is considered “the year of elections,” with elections taking place in over 60 countries. We’ve covered elections in South Africa, India, Iceland, Mexico, the European Union, France, and also the 2024 US presidential debate. We also continuously update our election report on Cloudflare Radar.

The UK’s snap election on Thursday, July 4, 2024, typical of British Thursday weekday elections, contrasts with weekend elections in other countries. Polling stations were open from 07:00 to 22:00.

Generally, election days do not result in drastic changes to Internet traffic. Traffic typically dips during voting hours but not as sharply as during major events like national holidays, and rises in the evening as results are announced.

On July 4, 2024, traffic initially rose slightly from the previous week, then fell around noon Continue reading

Review: R86S (Jasper Lake – N6005)

Introduction

R86S Front

I am always interested in finding new hardware that is capable of running VPP. Of course, a standard issue 19” rack mountable machine like a Dell, HPE or SuperMicro machine is an obvious choice. They come with redundant power supplies, PCIe v3.0 or better expansion slots, and can boot off of mSATA or NVME, with plenty of RAM. But for some people and in some locations, the power envelope or size/cost of these 19” rack mountable machines can be prohibitive. Sometimes, just having a smaller form factor can be very useful:
Enter the GoWin R86S!

R86S NVME

I stumbled across this lesser known build from GoWin, which is an ultra compact but modern design, featuring three 2.5GbE ethernet ports and optionally two 10GbE, or as I’ll show here, two 25GbE ports. What I really liked about the machine is that it comes with 32GB of LPDDR4 memory and can boot off of an m.2 NVME – which makes it immediately an appealing device to put in the field. I noticed that the height of the machine is just a few millimeters smaller than 1U which is 1.75” (44.5mm), which gives me the bright idea to 3D Continue reading

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 incident on June 27, 2024

Introduction

On June 27, 2024, a small number of users globally may have noticed that 1.1.1.1 was unreachable or degraded. The root cause was a mix of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) hijacking and a route leak.

Cloudflare was an early adopter of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) for route origin validation (ROV). With RPKI, IP prefix owners can store and share ownership information securely, and other operators can validate BGP announcements by comparing received BGP routes with what is stored in the form of Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs). When Route Origin Validation is enforced by networks properly and prefixes are signed via ROA, the impact of a BGP hijack is greatly limited. Despite increased adoption of RPKI over the past several years and 1.1.1.0/24 being a signed resource, during the incident 1.1.1.1/32 was originated by ELETRONET S.A. (AS267613) and accepted by multiple networks, including at least one Tier 1 provider who accepted 1.1.1.1/32 as a blackhole route. This caused immediate unreachability for the DNS resolver address from over 300 networks in 70 countries was impacted, although the impact on the overall percentage of users was quite Continue reading

MUST READ: ChatGPT Is Bullshit

Bogdan Golab sent me a link to an (open access) article in Ethics and Information Technology arguing why ChatGPT is bullshit. Straight from the introduction:

Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.

Have fun!

Install NordVPN on Linux for an Added Layer of Security

By default (and design), Linux is one of the most secure operating systems on the planet. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can or should assume that the out-of-the-box experience gives you all the security you need. I tend to assume this: If a computer is attached to a network, it’s vulnerable. You should always keep that in mind when considering the security of the desktop or server you are using and you should take any means possible to protect the data within and the data you transmit and receive. At this point, you’ve probably heard of virtual private networks (VPNs). They’re everywhere. Of course, the VPNs of today aren’t exactly the same as the ones we used years ago. Back in the day, when you needed to connect to your company network (to access various resources), you connected to a VPN, and your local computer was treated as if it was a part of the remote network. Although those types of VPNs are still in use across the globe, the type of VPN most people talk about today is more about privacy and security. What Modern VPNs Do Essentially, a modern VPN hides your IP address and Continue reading

First round of French election: party attacks and a modest traffic dip

This post is also available in Français.

France is currently electing a new government through early legislative elections that began on Sunday, June 30, 2024, with a second round scheduled for July 7. In this blog, we show how Cloudflare blocked DDoS attacks targeting three different French political parties.

2024 has been dubbed “the year of elections,” with elections taking place in over 60 countries, as we have mentioned before (1, 2, 3). If you regularly follow the Cloudflare blog, you’re aware that we consistently cover election-related trends, including in South Africa, India, Iceland, Mexico, the European Union and the 2024 US presidential debate. We also continuously update our election report on Cloudflare Radar.

Recently in France, as in the early stages of the war in Ukraine and during EU elections in the Netherlands, political events have precipitated cyberattacks. In France, several DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) attacks targeted political parties involved in the elections over the past few days, with two parties hit just before the first round and another on election day itself.

The first political party, shown in yellow in the previous chart, experienced a DDoS attack on Continue reading

Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click

To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier.

The popularity of generative AI has made the demand for content used to train models or run inference on skyrocket, and, although some AI companies clearly identify their web scraping bots, not all AI companies are being transparent. Google reportedly paid $60 million a year to license Reddit’s user generated content, Scarlett Johansson alleged OpenAI used her voice for their new personal assistant without her consent, and most recently, Perplexity has been accused of impersonating legitimate visitors in order to scrape content from websites. The value of original content in bulk has never been higher.
Last year, Cloudflare announced the ability for customers to easily block AI bots that behave well. These bots follow robots.txt, and don’t use unlicensed content to train their models or run inference for RAG applications using website data. Even though these AI bots follow the rules, Cloudflare customers overwhelmingly opt to block them.

We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do Continue reading

MUST READ: ChatGPT Is Bullshit

Bogdan Golab sent me a link to an (open access) article in Ethics and Information Technology arguing why ChatGPT is bullshit. Straight from the introduction:

Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.

Have fun!

PP021: Critical Vulnerabilities, AI-Assisted Scams, Compromised VPNs, and More Security News

It’s an all-news episode for this week’s Packet Protector podcast. We cover critical vulnerabilities in the MOVEit file transfer software and in thousands of ASUS routers, and a remote code execution vulnerability in a Windows wireless driver that you really should patch. We discuss a Wall Street Journal article about how AI tools are helping... Read more »

HS077: Should IT Lead or Follow?

The evolving role of IT in business is the topic of lively discussion between co-hosts Johna Johnson and John Burke.  Johna argues that IT should align with business goals, acting as an executive assistant, while John believes IT should take a proactive leadership role, driving innovation and framing business problems. They explore the challenges IT... Read more »

Layer 8: A Semantic Networking Layer for the Age of AI

In the most famous line from the classic mockumentary “Spinal Tap,” Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist, points to an amplifier and notes the additional number on the dial, saying that it “goes up to 11.” Alas, “this one goes to eight” does not have quite the same ring, but it might be time to use this phrase to describe a new layer of the traditional networking stack — the semantic layer. The addition of Layer 8 is driven by AI applications and their new exigencies. The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model, a conceptual framework that has guided network design and communication for decades, is facing a new challenge in the age of AI. As AI continues to permeate various aspects of technology, including networking, the traditional seven layers of the OSI model may not be sufficient to capture the full requirements and realities of AI-driven networking. Layer 8 is my proposed extension to the OSI model that aims to address the unique requirements and capabilities of AI in the context of networking. Unlike the existing layers, which focus on the technical aspects of data transmission, Layer 8 is concerned with the semantic understanding and intelligent processing of the Continue reading

What’s the Future of Distributed Ledgers?

SEATTLE — Blockchain may no longer be at the peak of its hype cycle, but the technology is still sparking innovation, as real-life use cases emerge. Distributed ledgers (DLTs), for instance, which allow for the secure recording and transfer of digital assets without reliance on a centralized authority, have obvious advantages for financial organizations. DLTs are at the core of an emerging ecosystem built on open source. In this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at Open Source Summit North America, Hedera, and OSSNA keynote talk on DLTs with Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS. For DLTs, Baird said, “We have an open source ledger, the blockchain is open source, you can think of it like an operating system that’s open source. You can run programs on top of it that are open source, you can run programs on top of it that are not open source.” The layer built on top of all this is also open source. “We had to come up with an algorithm for how they’re going to talk Continue reading

NB485: A Final FU for Greg

Greg Ferro bids farewell to Network Break, and Drew Conry-Murray and Johna Till Johnson bid farewell to Greg. Of course, the podcast must go on, so we also cover some tech news. First, Nokia acquires optics maker Infinera, Broadcom brings new features to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and campus switch sales drop. A Microsoft subsidiary... Read more »

The Keynote Answers You Expect

Keynote Starfield

Good morning! How are you?

I’d like to talk about keynotes, again. You know, one of my favorite subjects. I’ve been watching them intently for the past few years just hoping that we’re going to see something different. As a technical analyst and practitioner I love to see and hear the details behind the technology that drive the way our IT companies develop. Yet every year I feel more and more disappointed by the way that keynotes take everything and push it into the stratosphere to get an 80,000 foot view of the technology. It’s almost like the keynotes aren’t written for practitioners. Why? The answer lies in the statement at the top of this post.

Perfunctory Performances

When most people ask someone how their day is going they’re not actually looking for a real response. They most certainly aren’t asking for details on how exactly the person’s day is going. They’re usually looking for one of two things:

  1. It’s going great.
  2. It could be better.

Any more than that drags someone down into a conversation that they don’t want to have. Asking someone about their day is a polite way of acknowledging them and making a bit of small Continue reading

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