[pchelpers] News:Analysis: Websites struggling for legal recourse for DoS attacks

Thursday 23rd November 2006
Websites blocked by ISPs when under a distributed denial of service 
attack (DDoS) face millions of pounds in lost business because ISPs 
refuse to take responsibility for hosting infected computers on their 
networks.

Typically, a distributed denial of service attack relies on an attacker 
remotely controlling numerous and widely distributed computers infected 
by viruses and Trojans. The attacker uses these 'botnets' to send a 
flood of requests to a website, which is often unable to cope and its 
servers fail, taking the website offline.

It's a relatively simple and cheap operation for the attacker. Keith 
Laslop, President of DDOS mitigation outfit Prolexic told us: 'I've seen 
them on forums where you can hire bots for next to nothing. Four cents a 
bot. So you could take down a site very cheaply. You could get enough 
together for, say, a 50Mbits DDOS attack. You could take someone out 
with that.'

DOS attacks are also becoming increasingly common. During the first six 
months of 2006, Symantec observed an average of 6,110 DoS attacks per day.

When an ISP sees this huge amount traffic aimed at one URL, the response 
can often be to block access to the target site.

However, the ISPs don't do anything about the infected computers of 
their own subscribers that are sending the flood of data in the first 
place. The result is that ISPs block access to, and therefore business 
from, websites targeted in this way.

More here:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/98598/analysis-websites-struggling-for-legal-recourse-for-dos-attacks.html
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