DDOS: Just a Matter of Resource

By Lynne Greer Jolitz

February 10, 2003

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A fast-spreading, virus-like infection dramatically slowed Internet traffic Saturday, overwhelming the world's digital pipelines and interfering with Web browsing and e-mail delivery.
—"Internet traffic broadly affected by electronic attack," Ted Bridis, AP Technology Writer, 25 January 2003

It has become a constant and repetitious cycle—a virus or worm exploits a security hole to creep into an unguarded system, hijack it, and then use its resources and connectivity to the Internet to target another system. It also replicates itself (often by going through unsuspecting victim's email address book), passing itself on to other unprotected systems in multiple ways. Before long, a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack is under way. There's no easy way to pinpoint who is the bad guy before it overwhelms the target servers, either by consuming all bandwidth resources or, more likely, by consuming all server resources.

There's a great deal of hand wringing about DDOS attacks. What do we do? Security experts will complain about poorly patched code and insecure systems. Internet experts will agonize over backbone vulnerabilities. Unix advocates and Mac OS/X pundits will gloat that the problem is a Microsoft bug, ignoring the fact that it's usually Unix servers that get waxed and Unix system administrators that look bad. System administrators will complain that they're overworked already, and it's impossible to keep up with all the security alerts along with all their other tasks, and that the code should have dealt with these problems already. Microsoft will complain that system administrators aren't patching their systems properly and making them look bad. And so the finger-pointing continues, and everybody wishes the problem would go away.

But we really have to face the facts—DDOS is here to stay. DDOS attacks are successful, not because someone is incredibly diabolical, but because it exploits legitimate communications channels to overwhelm a target.

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