DDOS

Many of my readers are curious about hacking, testing and the ins and outs of setting up a security testing facility.

So here goes a nice white paper authored by Harry Bulbrook at the Durham Technical Community college, explaining how to set up a secure lab for testing and learning. It is a year old, but it still is a great resource that enables you to easily set up and maintain your lab without interfering with your production network.

Arbor Networks Jose Nazario gives an upate on the Estionan cyberwar over at Techrepublic.

He states:

"We do see attacks against big corporations and big governments, and if you look at those attacks, some of them are probably politically motivated as a way of speaking out. I don't think this is going to become as common as seeing people on the streets. But it's something that some governments have to consider much more than I think they needed to five years ago."

The Estonian Cyberwar has a positive side! Finally politicians are getting the message that Cyberterrorists will use all means to take out a country.

Seems EU and Nato is receiving the message from the Cybercriminals. It is in due time. Internet has been a great source of information, and provides a perfect communication tool. Add to it the ease of attacking and exploiting users, companies and now countries, and you really start wondering why the governments has been so slow understanding the risk.

According to Infoworld, Estonia recieves help from NATO to trace the DDOS attacks. They are now recovering.

The attacks are traced to many different countries - US, Canada, Brazil amongst others. I wonder where is the surprise? After all, the first D in DDOS is Distributed. As in different locations, computers, countries. Doing so makes it hard to trace the attack, and easy to take down services in a cheap manner as there is no need for the attacker to invest in a large amount of equipment. Just spread the bots using virus, trojans and worms. Manage the bots through different relays and stay hidden.

Estonia, one of the Baltic States, is held hostage by a DDOS attack against many governmental web servers. Officials in Estonia claims the attacks originate from Russia. Russia, as usual, denies commenting.

What called the attack? The moving of a statue in downtown Tallinn. In other words, what most of us would think as nothing worth caring about. Obviously, someone disagrees.