Stefano Demiliani WeBlog

DDOS Terrorists

Terrible to see this morning an other news like this... Hackers are attacking again some big Italian ISP Providers (such as Aruba) with a great amount of DDOS attacks (peak of more than 3 Gbit/s of traffic), causing with problems to the provider and all its users. :(

Terrible also to see that there are also groups of hackers that launch dangerous messages to the ISP: "you pay us or we will break your services".

This is a dangerous situation and I think we all must do something to avoid these facts.

What we must understand is that in a Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDoS) attack, an attacker can use your computer to attack other computers around the world only by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities on your system (he can force your computer to send huge amounts of data to a web site or other servers). All of us could be the source of a great attack agains big ISPs.

Obviously, there's not an effective way to say that "I'm totally protected under DDOS attacks" but some little measures can be adopted to prevent this. Personally, I recommend to all of you to take this actions:

• Install and maintain an antivirus software (always recommended) and an anti-spyware tool.
• Install a good Firewall and configure it to restrict incoming and outgoing (extremely important) traffic to your computer. According to this, I recommend to adopt a better Firewall than the built-in Firewall with XP SP2 that (absurd for me!!! ) don't check for outgoing traffic.
• Monitor your network traffic to see if there are strange peak of data sent.

Obviously, these are only little actions to do, but I think that if anyone of us would adopt these countermeasures, all these DDOS phenomenons will decrease.