Welcome to the club Graham – all of us who blog on security get minor attention from the scumbags with power to inconvenience our sites, our traffic, our servers etc. Even our office is under a DNS Relection attack – and has been for MONTHS. Thank you Sophos for the UTM which provided us traffic despite hundreds to thousands of DNS queries per minute to our office locations (which has no DNS lookup services running here).
DDoS attacks are simple but destructive – if your website goes down for any period of time, your customers can’t get through and you end up losing new sales, losing customers, or missing out on ad revenue, depending on what your website’s purpose is.
A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is a cheap but effective way to take out your target’s website by flooding it with so much traffic that the web server becomes overwhelmed and the website crashes.
There are those who use DDoS attacks as a kind of online protest, such as hacktivist groups like Anonymous.
Then there are those who do it to “amuse” themselves, like the Lizard Squad who took out Playstation and Xbox servers on Christmas Day last year.
And then there are other DDoS attacks that come from cybercriminals who don’t care about politics or hijinks – they just want money.
Recently a cybergang calling itself the Armada Collective has been attempting to extort money from victims by threatening DDoS attacks unless a ransom is paid in bitcoins.
If there is one thing to take from this article – it is:
No-one should ever pay internet extortionists.
If you want to read more info on the Cluley website attack – head over to naked security.