Distributed denial of service: A Utopia or Nightmare

Does the internet promise a future vision of an advanced civilisation, or will there be an altogether darker, nightmarish scenario where cybercrime and distributed denial of service attacks reign?

Stephen Fry is notorious for his love of IT and gadgets, so much so, he has been given his own column in The Guardian, ‘Dork Talk’. In it, he raises the age-old topic that has captured the imaginations of writers and futurologists throughout recent history – whether technology will save us, or whether it will be our un-doing. Cybercrime, distributed denial of service attacks, online gangs and blackmailing are already real threats, so who’s to say the future will be any different?

Distributed denial of service attacks step up to challenge

As IT security steps up, the hackers are quick on their heels. Distributed denial of service is a common way of blackmailing commercial outfits by bombarding their server with more traffic than it can handle, causing websites to crash. As Fry says in Dork Talk, we all like to think of a utopian future, but along with the dreams come the nightmare – the vision of malevolent machines. But it isn’t so much the machines that we need to worry about turning on mankind, history to date shows that men are perfectly capable of creating their own nightmares.

DDoS, Trojan horses and malware

Fry acknowledged that the usual perception about the future of technology lies in the notion that our liberty and privacy will be threatened by ‘untrammelled corporate and bureaucratic greed’. But Fry poses a completely different scenario to this. He outlines the risks of distributed denial of service attacks, computer viruses, Trojan horses and malware, designed to “spitefully screw with your operating system, rendering it inoperative.”

Distributed denial of service – the ultimate cyber threat

For Fry, we live in a world where we have to burglar alarm our homes, and by extension, we need to use distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection for our computers. As Fry reveals the nightmare picture he’s painting of a future riddled by DDoS and viruses is not in the distant future, it’s happening now. “Imagine malicious code written by cunning, ruthless criminals from, oh, Russia let's say, that could turn your computer into a slave machine, a zombie PC that can connect with other zombie PCs to create a whole network of robot computers that would grow almost exponentially in power and bandwidth,” Fry writes. This may sound, as Fry says, like something from a sci-fi film, but it’s already too late.

Botnets and malicious distributed denial of service attacks

“Such botnets exist,” Fry writes, “and one of them, the Storm botnet, has grown so fast, so terrifyingly and so cunningly that in the past eight months it has overtaken all the others. Storm is an amalgam of millions (no one knows quite how many) of slave PCs. It sends out billions of spam messages, stock market scam mails, and appears to be behind many examples of DDoS attacks, which for reasons of malice, politics or criminal extortion close down or threaten to close down legitimate servers by flooding them with more data traffic than they can handle.”

The nightmare future is already here. And experts say Storm is just the beginning. Big corporations ignoring the threat of a distribution denial of service attack are going to have to sit up and take notice. As Fry more eloquently put it: “So there you are. Botnet: not a diaphanous material designed to make the buttocks look more alluring, but rather the very stuff of sci-fi nightmares. And it's living with us now. Be vigilant, my friends.”

Webscreen is an IT network security technology that is designed to protect Web servers and other network appliances from a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). A DDoS attack is a deliberate attempt (malicious) to stop a Web site from working by flooding it with thousands or simultaneous connections. This is usually done for financial gain but can be for political or commercial reasons. Webscreen's unique Guarantee of Service (GoS) technology not only mitigates the impact of denial of service (DDoS) attacks but enables IT managers to maintain access for critical users and priority customers during any high level network activity period. Including a range of network optimisation and monitoring tools, Webscreen helps deliver maximum performance from network infrastructure resources. Find out more, contact Webscreen call 0870 3890022.