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It doesn’t take a genius to launch a DDOS attack
January 9, 2013 – When I was in high school, I used to control my classmates computers from my own PC. I would pretend
like I was doing work on my computer and remotely turn off people’s monitors in class, open their cd-rom
trays, bring up adult websites when the teacher was helping them, etc…How did I do this? It’s simple.
I had a program that I found on the internet, downloaded it, and saved it onto a disk. I would then take
that disk and pop it into any computer in my classroom that I wanted to infect. Usually my friends or people
I liked to pick on. (I was in highschool, gimme a break!) I would simply run the program real quick, which
literally meant just opening the file and popping the disk back out. Then I would return to my PC where
I would control these computers through my host program on my own PC. This program literally had an interface
with commands on it that a 3rd grader could read. Such as “open cd tray,” “turn off monitor,” “reboot OS,”
“Open website – URL ________.” All I had to do was basically click that button and those commands would happen.
As you can imagine, it was one of the most entertaining experiences of highschool that I had. THe reason I
bring this up is because of all the recent DDOS attacks that the internet is seeing. When you read about these
attacks, they sound complicated. When in fact, they are just as easy as what I was doing in my classroom…
There are programs on the Internet that can be downloaded in a matter of minutes and they are very easy to find.
Hackers can simply enter a few commands, IP information, etc…and they are good to go. This program will
send out a virus that infects hundreds or thousands of computers (zombies) which are taken over by the hacker.
These machines are now in the hands of the hacker. They are no longer working with 1 computer, they are working
with thousands.
So now imagine all of these computers sending thousands of requests against your website or network stack
simultaneously. You get the gist. It’s that easy.
You guys are probably thinking I am a hacker now, hahaha! Absolutely not. I want you to realize how easy it
is to do, and how important it is to protect yourself.
You may not think you’re a target for an attack, but that’s being extremely naive. Hackers don’t care what line
of business you’re in. If you make a lot of money, they will exploit you. They will ask you for X amount of
money to stop hacking your site, otherwise your site will remain offline. Period.
I am sure most of us remember when GoDaddy had an outage back in September, I think it was? That was a DDOS attack
against their DNS servers. This happens all the time to companies, but you don’t hear about it, unless they
are the GoDaddy’s of the world. Make sure to ask your DNS provider what measures they have taken to protect
themselves.
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