Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Before I came to the SEI CERT Division, I worked as a network engineer in various environments, including for Internet service providers, where I assisted organizations that were on the receiving end of DDoS attacks and also had to handle clients who were either unknowingly or deliberately sourcing attacks themselves. I also worked as a network engineer for enterprises that had to be ready to defend themselves against DDoS attacks. At CERT, I lead a team that performs network data analysis to understand traffic on our sponsors' networks, often working to identify abnormal conditions and anomalous behavior that might indicate attacks or other threats to the environment.

Conficker is a quick spreading worm that attacks vulnerability in Windows operating systems. It has the potential to create spam, perform identity theft, phishing exploits and several other malicious activities. Unfortunately committing DOS or DDoS attacks are not very difficult. According to an expert “all it takes is a laptop and few dollars” to apply DDoS techniques. All that is required is an internet search that can guide you step by step on how to do it. You need not even have a high degree of expertise. It is no wonder criminals make use of this strategy for ransom in return for normal service.

We have recently seen more sophisticated attacks, such as the recent Dyn attack. As IEEE Spectrum recently reported, "Attacking a DNS or a content delivery provider such as Dyn or Akamai in this manner gives hackers the ability to interrupt many more companies than they could by directly attacking corporate servers, because several companies shared Dyn's network.

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