DoS (Denial of Service) Attacks against DSLReports.com
DSLReports.com has recently come under a few DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. Some have speculated that it relates to their coverage of the Pluto Data credit card theft coverage. The coverage made it into an article at MSNBC.com that mentioned BroadBandReports.com (same website as DSLReports.com).
Regardless of why it happened, it has happened. The attackers could not have picked a worse target. DSLReports.com is a wonderful site where industry professionals chat and help each other solve technology problems. The site is chock full of useful FAQs and intelligent users waiting to help out.
DSLReports.com proved to be very resilient through all the attacks. It was slowed down somewhat but available most of the time. The investigation to catch the attakers is still ongoing and as such the site has smartly been quiet on what they have found out so far.
I hope that this will not be a continuing trend in the years to come. I fear it will be. Website A says something that Annoyed Company B does not like and so they hire BotNet Operator C to set Unwillingly Infected Home User #1-4,000’s computers to attack.
There are many ways to combat these problems. I do not favor government regulation of the Internet. I believe, perhaps naively, that we can force computer software and security awareness to change. Microsoft has been doing some great work to clean up its operating system mess. If Microsoft is able to make it harder for a home user to have their computer unwillingly hacked, then this problem will be less pervasive.
BotNet operators will not be able to rent out their attacking bot infested computers if they find that it is next to impossible to infect other people’s computers quickly and efficiently. They will have no army of co-opted computers.
We’ll see how this all pans out. It is things like this that scare many people away from the Internet. Was all of this ordered by the Pluto D Nicosia scam artists? I doubt we’ll ever know. It is still a big deal either way. Smaller sites can easily be shut down or monetarily hurt by these sort of antics. We were lucky this time that DSLReports.com is huge and has some great minds behind it.