Posted: 27th Nov, 2004 By: MarkJ
Betfair's chief technology officer has called on both the government and ISP's to do more towards combating cyber crime, especially DDoS attacks:
David Yu said that DDOS attacks may have only really affected a handful of businesses so far but any company that relies on the web to transact with customers or partners should be aware of the problem.
Yu claimed that although its own service provider Cable & Wireless had been very effective, there is a lot more that ISPs could be prevent DDoS attacks and help security agencies track down the culprits.
"I think there is more that network providers and ISPs can do. A lot of these attacks stem from individual [broadband-connected] PCs being compromised and then using that broadband access to flood these sites. We think that ISPs could do a lot if they took more responsibility. We do see a mix -- we see some network providers who work very actively to try and cleanse their system and provide high-quality bandwidth and the others who don't."For the record, a Distributed Denial of Service attack revolves around flooding a target system/server with a mass of packets (data/data requests). This has the effect of slowing the system so much as to make it inoperable.
Physically protecting against such an assault is not nearly so strait forward as some people think, despite the relative simplicity of the attack itself. More @
ZDNet.