Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are usually done by individuals calling themselves “hacktivists.” Their purpose is to crash a website server by overwhelming it with activity by “bots” and is generally an aim with a political purpose. These attacks can take up 111gbps to 179gbps, and in April of 2013, took 144 million packets-per-second. If the “hacktivists” are against a company’s stance on a specific issue or multiple issues, the “hacktivist” will attack in an attempt to show opposition and illustrate the company’s weakness. A “hacktivist” may also attack a company, such as a bank or finance company, which they believe makes money off of the downtrodden of society. Some hackers have used DDoS attacks for extortion in an attempt to make companies pay a designated amount before their servers can go back online. A DDoS attack can even be carried out by hackers who deem the company in competition with another company the hacker supports. It is also beginning to look like DDoS attacks are being used in fraud techniques and many alerts have been issued to companies to be aware of these possible attacks.
Created by the marketing team at Prolexic Technologies.
