My host, UKWSD were taken down by a DDoS attack today. Its sucky because something as simple as that can take down a host and their servers. What makes me wonder is why such a small hosting outfit would be targetted in a DoS attack? The only thing I can think of is that they could be hosting a site some l33t0r h4x0r out there doesn’t agree with, and has decided to try and take down. Its a bit sad that this happens – the digital equivalent of radio jamming or standing in front of the TV.
The trouble is it happens rather too much and the worst thing is that there’s not a lot you can do about it. You can change your routers to slow down the flow of traffic a bit, or just pull the connection supplying the traffic (as UKWSD did), but ultimately you can’t stop it, its the person controlling the bot net at the other end who can. As we get more and more high-speed connections in homes at 1mb up to 8mb, we have incredible amounts of bandwidth for these people to play with, so it just compounds the problem. There are firewalls that can stop this, but they only work to a point.
Yet another annoyance of the net I suppose. 