A Brief History of Malware and Cybercrime
12 notable developments in three decades of online threats, with notes on responses.
When it began: In the second week of February, 2000. In the first and one of the biggest denial-of-service attacks to date, Canadian hacker MafiaBoy launched a distributed denial-of-service attack that took down several high-profile Web sites, including Amazon, CNN and Yahoo!
What it is: Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks (from a single IP address) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks (from multiple IP addresses) typically involve inundating a computer, router or other networked device with more packets of data than it can process, effectively blocking any legitimate requests to access the system. Like viruses, DoS attacks began as pranks to show off computer skills but quickly graduated to illegal uses like extortion, in which a criminal will attack or threaten an attack unless a website owner pays him.
Response: Null-routing, in which an ISP collects all of the traffic going to a site and redirects it to a dead-end; network monitoring; takedown services offered by security vendors that attempt to trace the source of the attack and shut it down. For an example of how a DDoS extortion attack and response played out read "How a Bookmaker and a Whiz Kid Took On an Extortionist—and Won" on CSOonline.com.
spam
Receive the latest security news as it breaks.
