DDOS Attacks

Although this site wasn’t in any way, shape, or form affected by yesterday’s Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack against Internet Haganah (which brought all of Hosting Matters down) it is awfully interesting that it’s taken this long for the Terror/Anti-terror war to come to the net.

Internet Haganah is a site which rooted out terrorist websites and urged the web hosts and DNS hosts to shut them down. This is a great thing to do, in that the internet is believed to be very frequently used for communication between the dirty scumbags. It also makes it a fairly dangerous thing to do. Mucking around with folks who believe strongly in killing innocent people can be hazardous to one’s health. Currently Aaron Weisburd, Internet Haganah’s fearless leader, is looking for donations to keep the site afloat — they’re going to have to co-locate to avoid being subject to this type of attack in the future and that costs money.

There are rumors floating everywhere that this was an al Queda sponsored attack, although this cannot beconfirmed. Honestly, though, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

One of the worst things about DDOS attacks is that they are VERY difficult (sometimes simply impossible) to trace to their source after the fact and they are VERY difficult (sometimes simply impossible) to prevent. It all comes down to the fact that no matter how big your pipe is, there’s still a finite amount of data that can fit through it, and when one source decides to monopolize the pipe, there’s not a whole lot that can be done.

They’re hard to trace because the culprits don’t want anything in return, so they’re able to provide false “return addresses” — something I think ISP should filter. Even worse, the DDOS attack can be run from machines compromised by virus, so even if the attacking computers are found, the owners of said computers aren’t necessarily the ones responsible.