DDoS attack evolution
Jose Nazario · Network Security · 2008
DDoS attacks are constantly evolving as the nature of technology used and the motivations of the attackers are changing. Even today, perpetrators are being caught and charged with DDoS attacks launched via botnets that cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage to the victims. Last year's massive attack on Estonian Government web sites bought this attack method squarely into the public eye. What motivates these attacks, and how are they carried out? What are the unique characteristics of these attacks, and how can their effects be mitigated? A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is designed to overwhelm victims with traffic and prevent their network resources from working correctly for their legitimate clients. DDoS attacks require a significant amount of bandwidth to successfully attack a big adversary, such as a Web-based media company, so they often command thousands of hosts in a botnet to simultaneously send traffic to a victim. This action has the effect of aggregating bandwidth to match or surpass the victim's network resources, as well as making specific host filtering difficult, since the attack is coming from so many places all at once.