The DDoS attack survival guide

How botnets and application vulnerabilities have made DDoS attacks more damaging than ever before, and what you can do to fight back.

By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor

May 05, 2010 — CSO —

Google. Twitter. Government websites. Fortune-500 companies. All are victims of crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The attacks have grown in reach and intensity thanks to botnets and a bounty of application flaws. This collection of articles will bring you up to speed on how the threat has evolved and what you can do to better protect your organization.

UPDATED 2/23/2011

ARTICLES

What it's like to get hit with a DDoS attack
Akamai often finds itself scrambling to stop a DDOS attack against one or more of its clients.

LOIC tool enables easy Wikileaks-driven DDoS attacks
As the tools employed within the pro-Wikileaks distributed denial-of-service attacks highlight, attack software is getting insanely simple to deploy and use.

DDoS attacks are back (and bigger than before)
DDoS attacks are back in the headlines. Thanks to the rapid proliferation of botnets, the threat may be bigger than the bad guys had even planned.

DDoS returns: What researchers are learning about targets, tactics
Two IT security specialists share what they've learned about the targets chosen for DDoS attacks and how to adjust security strategies based on those lessons.

Report: Layer 7 increasingly under DDoS gun
A new report shows an upward trend where attack tools exploit layer 7 to maximize the impact of DDoS assaults. Here's what you can do to blunt the threat.

With botnets everywhere, DDoS attacks get cheaper
Cyber-crime just doesn't pay like it used to.

How a bookmaker and a whiz kid took on a DDoS-based online extortion attack"
Facing an online extortion threat, bookmaker Mickey Richardson bet his Web-based business on a networking whiz from Sacramento who first beat back the bad guys, then helped the cops nab them.

Security experts scramble to decipher Twitter attack
Facebook exec claims Twitter, Google and others were attacked to silence pro-Georgian activist.

PODCASTS

The long, strange evolution of DDoS attacks
CSO Senior Editor Bill Brenner launches a series on distributed denial-of-service attacks. Here, he interviews Andy Ellis, CSO of Akamai. Given the nature of the business, when a denial-of-service attack is in progress or being attempted, Akamai is among the first to see and respond to it.

Evolution of DDoS: Why it's only getting worse
CSO Senior Editor Bill Brenner talks to Breach Security application research director Ryan Barnett about the shift in tactics attackers are using to deepen the damage their DDoSes can inflict.

Read more about malware/cybercrime in CSOonline's Malware/Cybercrime section.

Other stories by Bill Brenner

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• US Bank knocked offline by DDOS attack that hit US, South Korea
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• Ongoing DDoS knocks FTC.gov offline, hits others
• Report: ISPs Fear Many More DDoS Attacks in 2010