Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) - The Digital War

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. They target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.

Wikipedia says, In computing, a denial-of-service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users, such as to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is where the attack source is more than one–and often thousands of-unique IP addresses.

There is a different types of DDoS Attacks. They are: Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) flood, (S)SYN flood, Teardrop attacks, Peer-to-peer attacks, Permanent denial-of-service attacks, Application-layer floods, Nuke, HTTP POST DoS attack, R-U-Dead-Yet? (RUDY), Slow Read attack, Distributed attack, Distributed attack, Telephony denial-of-service (TDoS), Sophisticated low-bandwidth Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack, Denial-of-service Level II, Advanced Persistent DoS (APDoS), DDoS extortion.

In some cases a machine may become part of a DDoS attack with the owner's consent, for example, in Operation Payback, organized by the group Anonymous. The LOIC has typically been used in this way.

UK's GCHQ has tools built for DDoS, named PREDATORS FACE and ROLLING THUNDER. HOIC is also popular. 

Defense techniques are: Firewalls, Switches, Routers, Application front end hardware, Application level Key Completion Indicators, IPS based prevention, DDS based defense, Blackholing and sinkholing, Clean pipes.

An Unintentional denial-of-service can occur when a system ends up denied, not due to a deliberate attack by a single individual or group of individuals, but simply due to a sudden enormous spike in popularity. This can happen when an extremely popular website posts a prominent link to a second, less well-prepared site, for example, as part of a news story. The result is that a significant proportion of the primary site's regular users – potentially hundreds of thousands of people – click that link in the space of a few hours, having the same effect on the target website as a DDoS attack. A VIPDoS is the same, but specifically when the link was posted by a celebrity.

When Michael Jackson died in 2009, websites such as Google and Twitter slowed down or even crashed. Many sites' servers thought the requests were from a virus or spyware trying to cause a denial-of-service attack, warning users that their queries looked like "automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".

News sites and link sites – sites whose primary function is to provide links to interesting content elsewhere on the Internet – are most likely to cause this phenomenon. The canonical example is the Slashdot effect when receiving traffic from Slashdot. Sites such as Reddit, Digg, the Drudge Report, Fark, Something Awful, and the webcomic Penny Arcade have their own corresponding "effects", known as "the Reddit hug of death", "the Digg effect", being "drudged", "farking", "goonrushing" and "wanging"; respectively.

Report says that:

1. According to TrendMicro, you can buy a week-long DDoS attack on the black market for 150$ only!

2. According to ATLAS Threat Report, daily more than 2000 DDoS Attacks are observed world-wide by Arbor Networks.

3. According to Verisign/Merril Research, 1 out of every 3 of all downtime incidents are attributed to DDoS attacks.

4. According to my own survey USA, China, Russia, North Korea, European Union, Iran, India, Pakistan are the attacker most of the cases even also they all are victims of it.

Who is attacking whom? Lets find out:

USA > Russian + Iranian + North Korean Websites.

Russia > USA + European Union Websites.

North Korea > South Korea + USA Websites.

Iran > European Union + USA Websites.

Bangladesh > India + Pakistan + European Union Websites.

India > Bangladesh + China + Pakistan + European Union Websites.

China > Russia + European Union + USA Websites.

Popular DDoS attacker teams are: Lulzsec (Anonymous), Phantom Squad, Lizard Squad and many more.

Stories of this month Victims of DDoS:

1. Abe’s official website latest to come under possible cyber attack by Anonymous

2. Mysterious hackers attempting to bring down entire internet by DDoS-ing critical servers

3. OpTrump: Anonymous declares war on Donald Trump with DDOS attack following Muslim ban speech

4. Moonfruit takes down thousands of sites after a DDoS attack

5. Boston internet service disrupted briefly by DDoS attack

6. Xbox Live Suffers DDoS Disruption

7. Anonymous Claims Responsibility For 40 Gbps DDoS Attack on Turkish Servers

8. Turkish banks & government sites under ‘intense’ DDoS attacks on Christmas holidays

9. DNS Root Servers Hit by DDoS Attack

10. Sputnik Türkiey website became the target of a DDoS attack

11. Greek Banks Hit by DDoS Attacks, Hackers Ask for Bitcoin Ransoms to Stop

Since 2009, I have seen DDoS become the powerful method to shut down any website within a shot range of times. After the invention of LOIC, it has became one of the easiest way too. Just download, install, place and play!

This post contains a lot of data from different sources including Wikipedia, Digital Attack. Thanks for understanding.