Google has teamed up with Arbor Networks to create a visualisation of all the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks around the world.
DDoS are among the most common, effective and hard to face attacks websites can suffer. They are launched using so-called botnets of hijacked computers that are simultaneously instructed to connect to a particular website thus consuming all the available bandwidth or the web server’s resources, slowing the site down significantly or taking it offline.
DDoS have become the tools used by hacktivists and attackers driven by political reasons to hit websites of organizations they dislike: a way to digitally silence those organizations.
Even though it can’t bring down the enemy’s military forces, or a whole society’s infrastructure, considered the effect it can have on a specific company, agency or service, a DDoS attack is one of the tools in the hands of cyber army teams around the world to wage, if not a full scale cyberwar (that would rely on APTs and multiple kinds of attacks), at least cyberguerrilla operations.
For instance, the Syrian Electronic Army, a collection of pro-government computer hackers aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has used DDoS attacks to target media organization websites in their attempt to support the Syrian regime.
Anyway, the new Digital Attack Map, gives a clear idea of what is happening in the cyberspace, and lets you look back through at historic attacks, source and destination ports used in the attacks, and select specific countries.
