Throwback Thursday: What DDoS it all Mean?

This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to March 2000, when DDoS attacks were a newly emerging menace.

Today, DDoS attacks are a well-known form of cyber abuse — indeed, even this week, Swiss encrypted webmail provider

ProtonMail

has been

the target

of a sustained DDoS attack.

In early 2000, however, DDoS attacks were far from common (even though the concept had been around for some time), so when, in February 2000, some of the Internet’s largest websites including

CNN

,

MSN

,

Yahoo

and others were disrupted by DDoS attacks, the media went into overdrive with the story, describing ‘cyber-attacks batter[ing] web heavyweights’.

In March 2000, to bring some clarity to the issue,

VB

ran a tutorial piece on the latest attack phenomenon, in which former editor of

Virus Bulletin

Nick FitzGerald asked “what are DDoS attacks? How might they affect you and what should you do to avoid them?”

The tutorial can be read

here

in HTML-format, or downloaded

here

as a PDF.

Posted on 12 November 2015 by

Helen Martin