How a Bookmaker and a Whiz Kid Took On an Extortionist — and Won Facing an online extortion threat, 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.
posted on Mar 14, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Oct 7, 2005 - View this thread

Microsoft = Megatarget. A new worm is rapidly spreading across the Internet, functioning like a massive DDOS attack and crippling ISPs in South Korea. It's host? Microsoft SQL server. (Get yor fix on, then reboot!) What impact will it have over here, I wonder...
posted on Jan 25, 2003 - View this thread

After the whole Napster deal, I turned to DALnet for my music needs...but, for the past few weeks, DALnet has been under DDoS attacks preventing me, and countless other from accessing the servers. I find this interesting because while DDoS attacks on RIAA make the news and stop after a few days, but I have yet to see DALnet's problems publicized at all. Anyone else at all find this weird that the hated RIAA his limited DDoS attacks, while smaller and more venerated org like DALnet has attacks lasting more than a week?
posted on Jan 18, 2003 - View this thread

The RIAA is at it again, this time there are supposedly plans to DDoS people who are sharing "illegal" files. Via The Register and ZDnet.
posted on Oct 18, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Jun 1, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Apr 9, 2001 - View this thread

Kuro5hin.org has been silenced, because of a massive DDOS/Spam attack. For those of you that did not know the site, "K5" was a techy discussion forum, much like Slashdot, but with an open submission queue, meaning that everybody could decide on what topics showed up on the first page. Which was ultimately one of the means used to bring it down. Censorship by IP flooding? cyber-vandalism? doesn't matter; a nice, interesting community site has been forced off the Net...
posted on Jul 26, 2000 - View this thread

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 on Apr 19, 2000 - View this thread

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 on Feb 9, 2000 - View this thread

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 on Jan 19, 2000 - View this thread