Interesting "New Yorker" article about online extortion via DDoS attacks. Call me naive and underinformed, but I had little understanding of how this works. "In the most common scenario, the bots surreptitiously connect hundreds, or thousands, of zombies to a channel in a chat room. The process is called “herding,” and a herd of zombies is called a botnet."
posted by dersins on Oct 7, 2005 - 34 comments

The Strange Tale of the Denial of Service Attacks Aagainst GRC.COM: The story of Steve Gibson's infiltration into the hacker world after a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on his site. His in-depth analysis of the attacks is fascinating and scary, as is his assertion that new features in Windows XP will allow DDoS attacks to be more devistating than any currently possible attacks. [via DyREnet]
posted by tallman on Jun 1, 2001 - 30 comments

Germany Plans Infowar Against Websites? So, Wired News reports that German Interior Minister Otto Schily has said publicly that Germany should stage denial-of-service attacks on right-wing websites housed in other countries. AOL versus Germany as WWWIII/InfoWar I?
posted by bclark on Apr 9, 2001 - 6 comments

They bagged the kid who was responsible for all those Denial-of-Service attacks a couple of months ago. He's Canadian.

Here's an interesting legal question: could the US extradite him? The crimes were committed in the US, but he was in Canada at the time he did it, since he worked through the Internet. Whose laws apply?

(By the way, I've seen no indication that the US is considering extradition; I was just curious whether they could extradite him.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Apr 19, 2000 - 18 comments

DoS Attacks for Fun and Profit - It looks like the list has expanded quite a bit this week... enough that the FBI is going to hold a press conference today at 11 PST. This is almost enough to argue against unlimited bandwidth for the average consumer. I hope they track the bastards down; not only does this impact the future success of eCommerce ventures, but it lends to stereotyping the technically elite as potential closet-evildoers.
posted by othermatt on Feb 9, 2000 - 1 comment

If you had problems reaching MetaFilter over the weekend, this is why. Some script kiddies launched some gnarly smurf attacks against the regional ISP that provides bandwidth for this site. Oh well, it gave me time to code. I've added lots of little enhancements (like user pages, a working search engine), but still have to get the archives working and expand the preferences page.
posted by mathowie on Jan 19, 2000 - 0 comments