“What had hit Estonia was a DDOS, a distributed denial of service attack. Normally a DDOS is considered a minor nuisance, not a major weapon in the cyber arsenal. Basically it is a preprogrammed flood of Internet traffic designed to crash or jam networks. It is “distributed” in the sense that thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of computers are engaged in sending the electronic pings to a handful of targeted locations on the Internet. The attacking computers are called a “botnet,” a robotic network, of “zombies,” computers that are under remote control. The attacking zombies were following instructions that had been loaded onto them without their owners’ knowledge. Indeed, the owners usually cannot even tell when their computers have become zombies or are engaged in a DDOS. A user may notice that the laptop is running a little slowly or that accessing webpages is taking a little longer than normal, but that is the only indicator.” Excerpt From: Richard A. Clarke & Robert Knake. “Cyber War.” HarperCollins, 2010. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 17:00:09 +0000
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