A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the UK Ministry of Justice’s Web site, which brought it down yesterday for several hours, would have been difficult to defend against.
Ian Shaw, MD of IT security company MWR InfoSecurity, comments: “This sort of attack is difficult to defend but to robust and secure websites they are not likely to cause any long term damage. They generally cause inconvenience
to the user. The impact will vary depending on the service the site offers and the length of the downtime.”
Research has shown that DDoS attacks are increasing in both size and complexity. Although they are illegal in the UK, they could be launched from countries that don’t have legislation against them.
“DDoS attacks rely on PCs and other devices being used to fire traffic at the target site, often without their owners being aware,” Shaw says. “Eventually, with enough traffic aimed at a single site, it will cause outages.”