Monday 16 March 2009

The BBC, the botnet and other DDoS attacks


No doubt that the most commented DDoS news of the week were related to the botnet that the BBC hired. In fact it was the staff of one of its programs called Click. The program's goal was to demonstrate how easy it is to hire a botnet to perform criminal activities. The botnet was used to send SPAM to a especially set account and to launch a DDoS attack to security company website's specifically set for this purpose. Although the ethics of the action has been critiqued, the fact is that they have demonstrated how easy and cheap it is to hire such services.

In other news, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in hiss presentation at SOURCE Boston commented about the new "trends" in cyber crime. Nazario said that cyber criminals are not just selling kits for running malicious software on unprotected computers. Now they sell services for script-kiddies and criminals who are just not good enough to use the malware by themselves. The audio of the presentation here.

The DDoS attack to the torrent site Mininova continued during this week. Here you can see some trends in traffic that the attacks have generated.

Sunday 8 March 2009

DDoS in March

To the surprise of some, the Pirate Bay website was under a DDoS attack earlier this week. Still no news about the intellectual authors. The site is stable for now.

According to an analysis of the anti-virus firm Sophos, the worm Confiker could start a DDoS attack to some sites, including Soutwest Airlines. The collateral damage would be a DoS due to the spread of the worm. The note on TechRepublic.

And the torrent's site Minova has been attacked by a DDoS. According to TorrentFreak the attack has reached the 2 Gbps peak. It seems to come from bot networks that appear to be in Germany and Argentina.