When thousands of protesters took down Web servers at Visa and MasterCard to show dissent about decisions to cut funding/censor WikiLeaks, and when counter DDoS attacks were used to take down WikiLeaks, DDoS received mainstream attention. These attacks are the consumption of bandwidth and processing power of servers by thousands of connections simultaneously hitting a server with the purpose of bringing it down, and according to the Arbor study, reports Connected Planet Online, DDoS attacks this year have been as big as 100 Gbps (as opposed to 49 Gpbs last year)—a 102 percent increase in the scale of attack.
“‘Security is not something you can buy; it largely consists of things you do and opex [targeted at] the right areas,’ said Dobbins, who recommends network operators use a combination of intelligent DDoS mitigation systems (IDMS) and access control lists (ACLs) in routers and layer-3 switches to protect servers from such attacks, as well as for policy enforcement.”
