We’re coming through what is seeming like a tipping point in the history of DDoS on the Internet. Rather than targeting a company or online gaming, one of the largest DDoS attacks ever targeted an individual, Brian Krebs, most likely for his work exposing a so-called “booter service”, a DDoS-for-hire outfit called vDOS, which ultimately led to the alleged proprietors being arrested. A brief history of DoS volumes Public information about DDoS attack volumes are generally sparse outside of news releases and blog posts of DDoS mitigation companies, but even as late as last year, attacks of around 400 Gbps were exceptional events and pretty much the biggest the Internet had seen. ... Read more

I’ll be writing a bit more about DDoS attacks and security, and so I thought it would be handy to jot down some commonly used terms in one place. I’ll also look at how some of those terms are interrelated. The terms Spoofing As relates to TCP/IP, “spoofing” really just refers to forging some part of IP communications. You could, for example, spoof a source port to have response data thrown at a listening application that wasn’t expecting it, but generally we’re talking about forging the source IP address in an IP packet. ... Read more