Most of us go about our daily lives without much concern over whether our email
will be delivered, our online shopping sites will have what we need,
or our cat videos will still stream.
But what happens when those things that we take for granted,
aren't there due to criminal activity,
and maybe we're an unwitting accomplice.
Welcome to Cautionary Tales from the Dark Side,
where we delve into some of the infamous case files of history and see just what
lessons they have to teach us. In today's tale,
we'll be exploring one of the world's first documented DDoS attacks as we
delve into the story of Mafia Boy.
This is Project Rivolta.
[Inaudible].
Just what is a DDoS attack? Well,
DDoS stands for a Distributed Denial of Service and it uses
multiple comprised devices to flood a target with too much traffic,
overwhelming that target and effectively crashing it.
Targets can be websites, services, or whole networks.
And the usual goal is to take that target offline or stress it so much such that
it can be further exploited.
DDoS attacks require an army of devices to generate all that traffic.
Our devices that we unknowingly offer up through malware,
phishing and unpatched vulnerabilities.
While some may think DDoS attacks are just simple fun.
They're gonna have some pretty serious implications.
For many organizations the DDoSs attack could mean their core business is
involuntarily knocked offline,
leading to lost revenues, upset customers and damaged reputation.
By the third quarter of 2019,
DDoSs attacks had increased 241% as compared to
2018 and ended up costing companies more than
$10 billion.
In February, 2000. A 15 year old high school student known as Mafia Boy launched
one of the first recorded DDoS attacks by hacking into the computer networks of
several universities.
He then used their servers to launch an attack that took down several major
websites, including [Organisation identification redacted].
According to the market research firm Yankee Group,
this attack incurred $1.2 billion in economic damages
and drew the attention of then US Attorney General, Janet Reno.
Launching some of the cyber crime laws that are in place today.
Now, before you go spinning up your own DDoSs attack,
you should know that DDoS attacks are illegal under the computer fraud and abuse
act,
and can earn you up to 10 years in prison with a fine up to half a million
dollars for initiating a DDoS attack without permission.
Even with the threat of some serious hard time looming,
there are still those who will do these things.
It's up to us to be vigilant and protect ourselves while we
might not be able to totally prevent a DDoS attack.
There are certainly some things that we can do to decrease the risk and reduce
the collateral damage of an attack. First,
just as with any potential disaster or risk,
we should have a plan that plan should detail out the who's, the what's,
the how's that all need to be done if the worst occurs. Next,
we should make sure that our infrastructure is kept updated and secured,
unpatched security holes are a common way attackers can infiltrate systems.
So it's important to make sure that we're current and using all the best
practices to keep our attack vectors to a minimum.
Another way we can help mitigate a DDoS attack is to simply absorb it.
We can architect our infrastructure and applications in such a way as to
be able to absorb unusually heavy load.
We should also eliminate bottlenecks where possible and build in some
scalability and fail over capabilities. Speaking of scalability,
many organizations leverage cloud providers as they offer on demand
resources,
and also have many tools built in specifically to combat DDoSs
attacks cloud-based services like content delivery networks,
DNS and firewalls can all absorb massive attacks,
buying time to block the perpetrators. Finally,
we should invest in comprehensive monitoring and logging across all our it
systems using analytics and even machine learning.
We can detect unusual activity outside our normal baseline and react to the
potential threat quickly and decisivly.
16 DDoSs attacks take place every minute.
That's over 23,000 every single day with more and more devices
connected to the internet.
That means than ever increasing army of unsuspecting soldiers.
How many of your devices in your own home may already be unwitting
ponds in somebody else's attack? I'm Scott Pletcher,
and this has been Cautionary Tales from the Dark Side.
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