Slashdot Mirror
Has Progress Been Made In Fighting DDoS Attacks?
alphadogg writes "As the distributed denial-of-service attacks spawned by this week's WikiLeaks events continue, network operators are discussing what progress, if any, has been made over the past decade to detect and thwart DoS attacks. Participants in the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) e-mail reflector are debating whether any headway has been made heading off DDoS attacks in 10 years. The discussion is occurring while WikiLeaks deals with DDoS attacks after leaking sensitive government information, and sympathizers launch attacks against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and other significant e-commerce sites."
"sympathizers", when has this word ever been used in a good way
Nazi sympathizers
Russian sympathizers
Terrorist sympathizers
It's a term used to describe supporters of those who you think of as bad.
A neutral term would to be used is simply "supporters".
A number of sources have begun describing DDOS attacks not as cyber-attacks but rather as digital sit-ins that are completely legal. A DDOS (Note the Distributed) is basically a ton of people visiting the site at once so that others can't. In essence, the unknowing visitor to mastercard.com is also contributing to the DDOS by merely visiting the already flooded site (albiet in a small way) just as an unknowing visitor to a bank is contributing to a sit-in by disrupting the flow of work. Their mere presence is making the work more difficult. However, there is nothing illegal about one person visiting a bank and standing there, just like there isn't anything illegal with a number of people going to a bank... at the same time. Ultimately, the question isn't "has progess been made" to stop DDOS attacks, but SHOULD there be progress to stop them? Sounds like an easy question to answer but in the case of freedom of expression, it makes the waters a bit more muddied.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
The article talks a lot about botnets, but how many botnets are actually involved in the wikileaks attacks? I haven't read about any and my bet is that there probably aren't a lot. Why? Simple, the purpose of most botnets has turned from fun into profit. 10 years ago most of the botnets were designed just to screw with people, delete files, open ports, ddos ebay etc. However over the past 10 years a lot of the creators of botnets have found that they can use the botnets to generate lots of cash by moving spam, selling information etc. I doubt that very many of them would want to risk subjecting their botnets to discovery and removal by getting involved in in such a high profile attack.
Monstar L