I have to ask the obvious of how a DDoS is sophisticated. Anyone have more details of this? There has been limited discussion here on AO about this attack but given the size of it and it's impact it certainly brings into question the idea that attacks are going down (CSI/FBI 2004 Survey).

Most DDoSes that I've heard about -- MafiaBoy's being the most prominent -- have been fairly simple, straightforward tools. Perhaps DRDoS? Could this been GRC's situation on a large scale?

Comments?

Source: SecurityFocus


Leighton provided few additional details, except that the attack was coordinated, large and sophisticated. The volume of traffic was unprecedented even for a company that "sees a lot of attacks," he said.

"It had components that we had not seen before," he said, declining to comment further.

Akamai, which distributes the content of the sites on more than 15,000 servers worldwide to speed delivery and improve reliability, said third-party monitoring services overstated the impact of Tuesday's problems. Keynote Systems Inc., a monitoring service whose statements were widely reported Tuesday, said the availability of the top 40 sites it monitors dropped from 100 percent to just over 80 percent during the outage.