News broke earlier today that multiple US government websites were hit with a massive DDoS starting July 4. Widely reported at 20-40GBps, which would easily rank as the largest ever. That's wrath of God big. Like hurricane Katrina vs. an afternoon sun shower. I think somebody got their terms mixed up and everyone else just used it. Even if it were actually gigabits and not bytes, which is what I suspect, that's still one of the largest recorded. South Korean govt sites began getting hit on Tuesday. North Korea was being bandied about as the prime suspect. More likely, it's someone whose views parallel theirs. Ironically, 40% of the traffic is coming from the South. Now we have an update. The attack actually started a week ago. And the NYSE, Pentagon and White House were among the sites attacked. Fox News is quoting a DOD official who says it was indeed North Korea (I'm still skeptical). And that the DOD is pissed because they were not made aware of the situation until today....when they read it in the news. Also, they're putting the botnet at about 18,000 machines globally, which would essentially rule out the 'gigabyte' number. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,530781,00.html?test=latestnews It is worth noting that these type of attacks don't aim to steal or break thru anything. Their goal is to simply overwhelm their targeted servers/networks with (bogus) traffic and knock them offline. However, there is a financial cost as well. That bandwidth is not free. Rather, it is quite expensive. But there's one difference between the US Government and, say, Yahoo or eBay being targeted: the government isn't losing income when their websites are down. Yahoo and eBay lose millions. The Russian mob began using a similar mentality to shake down gambling sites some years ago. They'd contract cyber criminals to take a site down for an hour, holding it hostage for a $50,000 ransom, for example. If the site owners didn't pay, they'd increase the price every hour. And the site owners generally paid up, as they lost even more money being down.
Cyber warfare is scary (depending on who depends on what in real-time, etc). Its why this new command was established as well. http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...Gates_approves_creation_of_U.S._Cyber_Command
if it can be tracked down to a nation state, then to me this is an act of war. sadly i have heard not one elected official comment on it, and barely a blip in the media about it.
it is indeed another form of warfare...used already....to target "Cyber-space" while traditional methods simultaneiously target traditional Land.Sea.Air. The proof is the hard part!
meh they aren't sophisticated attacks. usually its done by someone trying to just interrupt service. Its pretty much amature stuff.