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The Root of the Botnet Epidemic |
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Source: Threat Post - Posted by Anthony Pell
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Over the course of a few days in February 2000, a lone hacker was able to bring some of the Web's larger sites to their knees, using just a few dozen machines and some relatively primitive software to cripple Yahoo, eBay, E*trade, Amazon, ZDnet and others for hours at a time. No one knew it at the time, but these attacks would come to be seen in later years as some of the earlier outbreaks of what has become a massive online pandemic.
Dennis Fisher talks with Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks about the Mafiaboy attacks, the history of DDoS attacks and the botnet epidemic.
The attacks themselves were nothing fancy. The hacker, who would later be identified as a 15-year-old boy from Montreal named Michael Calce, used a DDoS tool called Mstream to instruct a small army of machines he had previously compromised to send huge amounts of junk data at the remote Web servers he was targeting. But the technique was brutally effective: Yahoo, then the dominant search provider and portal site, was knocked offline for about two hours after receiving more than a gigabit of data per second from Calce's bots.
Read this full article at Threat Post
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