Holiday E-Commerce DDoS Attack Hits EC2 Cloud

ARos writes "A holiday DDoS attack targeted a west-coast DNS provider, which is known for serving large-scale E-Commerce sites (including amazon.com and walmart.com). 'Neustar, which provides DNS services to high profile website addresses under the UltraDNS brand, said the flood of malicious traffic, just two days before Christmas, was directed at the company's facilities in San Jose and Palo Alto, and that the effects were mostly limited to California users.' CNet adds: 'In addition to the high-profile sites, dozens of smaller sites that rely upon Amazon for Web-hosting services were also taken down by the attack. Amazon's S3 and EC2 services were affected by the problems, according to Jeff Barr, Amazon's lead Web Evangelist, who retweeted a report to that effect without clarification and confirmed it in later tweets.'"

Why?

[Brad1138]

Who is so damn board that they have nothing better to do than "attack" a web site? What feeling of accomplishment do they really get and/or what point are they trying to make? They need to get out of their mothers basement and do something with there lives.

Re:Slashdot, now slower than all the major commerc

[juuri]

Says the person with the ID over one million.

Slashdot used to be quite fast with the aggregation, it is quite terrible now. When CNN or the BBC are reporting tech news faster than a site that is supposed to be for tech nerds that's a good indication of the quality and speed. What's worse is this write up actually has misinformation in it that was disproven ALREADY... but this is so slow coming here, well...

Re:Attack vectors shifting?

[Katchu]

Perhaps this is because the sources are not idle time-wasters simply marking territory. The source may be political/military tests to determine how to effectively damage commerce. Check out the usual suspects. [OT] I sometimes (used to) read Usenet newsgroups with Google Groups, but some political/military spam attacks have rendered many groups there virtually useless. No commercial spammers would so effectively drive potential clients away. This spam does not appear when I use a newsreader.

Re:East Coast, no problem

[sopssa]

Ok, here's a solution.

Trace as many of the IPs as possible and let their owners know their computers have been using BitTorrent.

Any of them don't do squat about it after X amount of time, confiscate their computer for knowingly aiding and abetting a copyright infringement. Or something.

Enough people get in trouble for not doing jack about their computers being used for copyright infringement and you can see vigilance going up.

Re:Consider extortion

[bartwol]

Protection from the protector, *and* protection from his competitors (read: "territorial dominance").