Last September, independent journalist Brian Krebs found himself the victim of a record-breaking digital attack when a huge amount of junk traffic (between 600-700Gbps) took his website, KrebsonSecurity.com offline. Ironically, Krebs is a digital security expert who had experienced numerous DDoS attacks previously; but nor he, nor Prolexic (the security company owned by Akamai protecting his site) was prepared for the unprecedented size of the attack.
Prolexic decided it could no longer help protect his site as the cost of the latest attack was simply too great (Krebs was a pro bono customer). Thanks to Google’s Project Shield, however, the website was quickly back up online. Project Shield was built to lend the support of Google’s infrastructure to protect journalists and human rights experts from DDoS-powered censorship of this kind.
In his first post following the DDoS attack, Krebs wrote, “events of the past week have convinced me that one of the fastest-growing censorship threats on the Internet today comes not from nation-states, but from super-empowered individuals who have been quietly building extremely potent cyber weapons with transnational reach.”
As Forbes likewise pointed out in its article about the Krebs case, “the subsequent concern is the eventual impact: criminals have the ability to censor the web, as in the case of Krebs.” Journalists, human rights organizations and protesters are all under particular threat of deliberate action to knock them offline. Smaller independent sites are particularly at risk because they don’t have the bandwidth to support flooding. There is frequently collateral damage on the surrounding networks as well. Governments are often the target of DDoS attacks, perhaps by other nation states.
Businesses, both public and private, are also at risk – ransoms can be demanded for the return of Internet service. This happened to news aggregator Feedly in 2014. After their service was crashed, they received an extortion letter, demanding a ransom to stop the flood of junk traffic. Feedly didn’t agree to the demand, and rates of success tend to be low, but this doesn’t stop attackers from trying. And just small amounts of downtime can cost a company thousands of dollars and a reliable reputation so that customers stop trusting their services. It is rumored that online gambling services frequently DDoS each other.
Brainstuff breaks down the type of attackers into six iterations, most of those listed above; but they also include “script kiddies” who perform DDoS attacks merely for fun, saying “Today’s DDoS is yesterday’s vandalism”.