A Quick Primer on DDOS Attacks
So after the massive DDOS attack last week I was interested in learning more about cybersecurity & DDOS attacks around the world. DDOS stands for Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which are usually powered by massive botnets of computers, all infected with malware that allows them to be controlled by cyber baddies. Think of it like this: The website is like a radio talk show station switchboard, and each person calling in is one computer connecting to a website. Normally a station receives an anticipated level of calls and the switchboard is capable of handling them. These are all people that are calling the station because they actually want to connect to the station: they are legitimate connections. Now in a DDOS attack imagine hundreds and hundreds of people who don’t like that radio station getting together and all calling in at the same time, all the time. They don’t want to actually connect to the radio station, they just want to take up space in the switchboard and call queue so legitimate connections can’t get through. Those guys are the bots in a DDOS attack; they flood a website with so many calls from people who aren’t interested in the show that the real callers can’t get through to who they’re trying to talk to.
Real Time DDOS Attack Map
So all this lead me to find Norse’s live DDOS attack map. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) the United States is both the world’s largest origin of DDOS attacks and the most-targeted (as of 10/27/2016). I’ve been throwing the map up on my second monitor while working on something and checking it out whenever I have time to kill. If you have a second you can some very interesting data; when I started writing this article the above line was true, but in about half an hour China has surpassed the United States as the predominant origin of DDOS attacks, so it’s clearly a very fluid frontier of modern day cyberwarfare.
Edit @ 5:10pm
And now the U.S. is back in the lead as the origin location, with a pretty consistent ranking of first in targeted as well. The United Arab Emirates is the only other country being targeted to anywhere close to the United States.
