Bloody June: What’s behind last month’s DDoS attacks?

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2449855/security0/bloody-june-what-s-behind-last-month-s-ddos-attacks.html

By Jon Gold Follow
NetworkWorld
July 7, 2014

The list of DDoS attacks in the month of June has made for grim reading. 
High-profile sites have been targeted by extortion demands, online games 
got disrupted and at least one company was put out of business as a direct 
result.

While it’s tempting to look for a single cause at the root of this 
apparent tsunami of distributed denial-of-service activity, the reality is 
considerably more complex. Online activism, the profit motive and even 
potential nation-state activity contributed to June’s high volume of DDoS 
attacks.

The only commonality, in fact, may be the ease with which DDoS attacks can 
be launched. Experts like Molly Sauter, an academic and author of the 
forthcoming book The Coming Swarm, say that the process is childishly 
simple.

“Literally, if you have a credit card and if you’re bored, it could be 
anyone,” Sauter told Network World. “It’s so easy to rent a botnet – most 
of them are out of Russia – and you can rent one for stupid cheap, and 
then deploy it for a couple of hours, and that’s really all you need to 
target a major site like Feedly or Evernote.”

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