A Live Map of Ongoing DDoS Attacks

Daniel_Stuckey writes "Check out the Digital Attack Map. It was produced in a collaborative effort by Google Ideas and Arbor Networks to raise awareness about distributed denial of service attacks. You know, those malicious digital attempts to choke, or shutdown websites by sending them volumes of traffic far too large for them to handle. The map 'surfaces anonymous attack traffic data to let users explore historic trends and find reports of outages happening on a given day,' as its about page explains. Created using attack data from Arbor's 'ATLAS® global threat intelligence system,' this is the D.A.R.E. of DDoS — it's about the danger of having information streams cut off. Under the heading 'DDoS Attacks Matter,' Google and Arbor explain that 'sites covering elections are brought down to influence their outcome, media sites are attacked to censor stories, and businesses are taken offline by competitors looking for a leg up.'" This comes alongside Google's announcement of Project Shield, the company's homegrown DDoS mitigation service.

Re:why hasn't the IETF solved the DDoS problem yet

[Qzukk]

There's an ISP level solution to a major chunk of it, but they're too busy cracking down on bittorrent and competing voip/video services to do anything about it.

A lot of DDoS traffic has spoofed source IPs in order to make it difficult to track down the source. All the ISP has to do is prevent packets from leaving their network if they aren't addressed from their network, and at least what's left can be traced back to the source. For instance, this would eliminate using DNS servers as reflectors for attacks, since these attacks rely on sending a DNS request with the From address forged to be the victim's from address.