Famous Examples of DDoS Attacks

Introduction

The DDoS attack has become very common nowadays. It basically is an abbreviation for Distributed Denial of Service attack. So first and foremost we will understand what happens during a DDoS attack. It is apparently an attack that attempts to make the target online service unavailable to the host/user. This is achieved by jamming the online service with excess of traffic from more than one source. DDOS targets a wide variety of important data, like resources from banks to news websites, and then create a major challenge in making sure people could publish or/and access these important information.

Famous Examples of DDoS Attacks

1. Kevin Poulsen vs. KISS-FM: Kevin was teenage telephone hacker back in 1990 when this incident occurred. He jammed all the telephone lines so that only he could be the 102^nd winning caller at the KISS-FM of Los Angeles. The winning prize was a Porsche. In the ensuing months he tapped into Hollywood actresses, the FBI as well as the Army. He was sentenced to 51 months in prison, banned from touching a computer for 3 years and was fined as well. Today he works as a journalist.
2. Adrian Lamo vs. The New York Times: In 2002 Adrian hacked into The New York Times’ server and searched himself on Nexis Lexis the cost of each search was $300000 incurred by the company. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail as it was federal crime.
3. Mafiaboy vs. CNN, Dell, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon: In February, 2000 15 year old Michal Calce was responsible for launching a major DDOS attack that crippled some of internet’s most famous websites. He crippled the search engine Yahoo of the time and went on to batter the servers of the remaining sites. This he did to make a name for himself. He was sent to a juvenile detention centre although he faced 3 years in prison.
4. David L. Smith vs. Microsoft Word and Excel: The man used a stolen American online account to spread a virus that was named after a sipper’s name. The virus “Melissa” spread onto 50 accounts through email and jammed servers. In the end “Melissa” gave viral lap dances to 50 million accounts that resulted in a loss of $80 million.

How does it impact the host?

Like already discussed earlier the dedicated denial of service attacks has existed for many years but these security threats have become more frequent powerful and dangerous to become only more and more complex. In this age these types of attacks are much easier to launch than they were before. Since more and more hackers are entering into the industry and unsuspecting organizations are many therefor they fall easy prey to the former.

The repercussions in the aftermath of a successful attack can be very devastating with the loss of money which generally ranges between billions of dollars in terms of lost revenue and this excludes the irreversible damage that is done to the company’s once good brand image and reputation.