What You Need to Know About the World’s Largest DDoS Attack
Shelly Palmer
The last week has seen probably the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever. It’s being reported in fairly dramatic terms, with the New York Times and BBC talking about the internet getting jammed or slowed down. So what’s actually going on? Here’s a rundown of some key points: A what attack? DDoS attacks, as the “distributed” part suggests, involve large numbers of computers bombarding a target system with traffic, with the idea being to stop that system from functioning. A bunch of South Korean banks and broadcasters got temporarily crippled by such an attack a week ago, for example. Who got hit this time? The intended target appears to be Spamhaus, a European organization that maintains a blacklist of ISPs that supposedly host “spam gangs” and refuse to stop serving them as customers.
