August 21, 2007 - If one wants to have a significan impact on a country, an Internet-based attack can be an effective solution. This was demonstrated when Estonia, one of the most wired countries in Europe, found itself under a huge Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The malicious attack was launched from one or more botnets (bot networks) containing thousands of enslaved computers. The attack was traced to the Russians and almost caused an international incident.
The motive for the attack was that the Russians were angered by the fact that Estonians removed a 6-foot-tall Russian statue from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. The powerful DDoS targeted thousands of Estonian government and financial websites, causing them to lose significant amounts of money. Since the attack was from outside their borders, some Estonian websites had to block all international traffic. This allowed the DDoS attack to be stopped, but at a great cost, including the loss of foreign clients and visitors.
The Internet-based attacks used by many hackers are DDoS floods targeting Domain Name Servers. The typical DDoS attack uses a botnet composed of thousands to hundreds of thousands of infected computers worldwide. The computers are infected by and controlled by cyber criminals using Trojans or other kinds of malware. At the hacker's command a botnet can start a DDoS attack on any target around the world. All the computers in the botnet simultaneously send huge amounts of requests to the DNS servers flooding them with data. Because of the huge volume of bogus requests, the DNS servers are unable to resolve legitimate requests coming from clients or visitors of a website. Eventually the targeted DNS and related websites go down.
Source: Wired
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Secure64® is a software developer providing highly secure DNS and server applications with built-in denial-of-service protection features to help ensure your Internet-dependent business is always accessible. Based on the genuinely secure SourceT® microOS, Secure64 DNS remains highly available during network attacks and is immune to compromise from rootkits and malware.