Distributed Denial of Service Attacks — How and Why

Jun 24, 2015 | Latest News

Anonymous , that vaguely defined world-wide network of hackers took a lot of Canadian government websites down recently, amonge those affected – the House of Commons, Canada.ca, Transport Canada ,the Senate, Justice Canada Foreign Affairs, Citizenship and Immigration.
Why? They don’t like bill C-51.
How did they do it? – they used a Distributed Denial of Service attack!
It meant these government agencies were unavailable, and some employees of the government couldn’t get their email, access their Blackberry’s or get on the internet. The DDoS attack lasted about 4 hours.
DDoS attacks try to use up the resources available on network servers. They monopolize CPU cycles, memory resources, disc storage and bandwidth until the servers affected can no longer cope. They may make more requests than a server can cope with, or may get fancy and use DNS services to expand the damage, and also help to disguise the source of the attack.
A DDoS attack is almost impossible to prevent without prior warning.
You can try to filter traffic from the attack source, or move your DNS to get out from under the attack but the reality is that there is little that can be practically done to prevent these types of attacks. Good monitoring, and vigilance are the best defence! A DDoS attack can target any site on the internet, at any time.
.Lexicom is analysing and monitoring our server traffic constantly, looking for the unusual and the malicious.
Unfortunately, we expect these types of attacks to increase, as “kiddie hackers” acquire the tools to launch such attacks.
Why do they do it? To say they can, to make a point, as a form of civil disobedience, a grudge against a firm or person, unfortunately rational behaviour is generally not part of the process.

Client Resources

REGISTER - TRANSFER - RENEW - HOST  WITH A .ca Registrar

www. 

Submit your domain search with the extension you wish to use, i.e. yourdomain.com, .ca, .net, .org, etc.

KUDOS

I forgot to say in my previous email that when I was discussing this with Kendra a couple of days ago she said that yours was by far the best firm she had ever worked with on websites and that your staff were so good.

L. W. , Director
International Policy Network, London, UK

KUDOS

It sure is a pleasure working with you and your people – they always make me feel as if I’m your only customer.

R. L., IT Manager
National Center for Policy Analysis, Dallas, Texas

KUDOS

To be honest, when (it was) suggested that we design a web page, I was less than enthusiastic. But thoroughly enjoyed the process — it was very easy working with you. I can’t believe how quickly everything came together. And the result is fantastic. Thanks.

D. G.
Doctor and author of Code Blue
Toronto, Ontario