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Few Historical DDoS Attacks:

In February of 2000, many popular websites such as Yahoo!, eBay, CNN, Amazon, ZDNet
remain unavailable due to a DDoS attack, according to CNET.com reporting.

During the three-hour downtime, Yahoo suffered a loss of $500,000; the volume of activity on
CNN.com decreased by 95% and ZDNet was virtually inaccessible and the downtime led to
huge losses.

An attacker scanned a network to a number of vulnerable hosts to find loopholes in the host,
software used by the host turned into a "zombie" and spread the attack.

A lucrative attack

In early 2000, most of the hackers were engaged in creating a botnet to launch a DDoS attack
and follow the same steps as Mafia boy.

With the advent of Internet worms such steps were automated, so a hacker could now set in
motion large-scale attacks.

In August 2005, the 18-year-old Farid Essabar who had never even learned programming
arrested for distributing the Mytob worm.

The worm opens a backdoor on the infected MS Windows host, connects to a remote IRC
server, and waits for commands.

The worm activates itself at startup, copying itself to network shares, thus opening the door to
massive DDoS attacks on all hosts.

The attack was on broadcast live on CNN, when the computers of the TV station itself infected.

Why had he done it? Not so much to disrupt the functioning of the corporate network, but to get
loose thousands of dollars from companies by threatening them with DDoS attacks on their
networks.

DDoS and activism

In 2010, the attackers increased the volume of seizures significantly and they launched the first
attacks that exceeded the 100Gbps limit, which roughly corresponds to 22,000 times the
average bandwidth of an Internet user in the US in 2010.

50 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2015 Edition
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