DDoS- Distributed denial of service is one of the most dangerous and maybe one of the kind of attacks a network is unprepared for.
If we delve into a bit of detail as to what is DDoS here is what Wikipedia has to say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_denial_of_service_attacks_on_root_nameservers
The attack isnt made on a particular network like many people would have thought. It hits where it “hurts the most”- the root Domain Name Servers. There are thirteen Root DNS servers which also serve as the internet backbone. Now, if these servers are under attack, not one, not a couple, not a bunch, but the whole internet can be pulled down!
Thankfully, the attack on the 6th of August was a very low profile attack which didnt manage to pull down the entire internet.
Websites like Yahoo, Google faced the attack with its super performant systems, but (comparatively)new websites like facebook and twitter faced the music. The worst hit was twitter which was down for some hours. Facebook was slow as a snail and was throwing all kinds of errors. Google’s services such as Youtube, Google sites and blogger.com was also partially affected.
If the reasons behind the attack are to be investigated, mashable came up with a good article about it at:
http://mashable.com/2009/08/07/twitter-facebook-2/
Thankfully, today the websites are back to normal. Is it the next level of warfare (considering the theory in the above URL) or some hacker trick? Its hard to tell at this point of time.
Now, the question arises…why is it hard to prepare such an attack?
The answer is simple. Internet is built on collaborative resources. At some point of time, you have to rely on systems that are not directly under your control. Now, if any of such systems are under attack ( although there are loads of security measures to safeguard such resources), you cant just plug away at another system as a “backup”.
So, the web admins do not much of a choice but to make sure that their systems are upto the mark and there is no glitch in their own system and wait….sounds scary!
