Posted on 10/21/2009 3:17:21 PM PDT by virgin
WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- After interrupting President Barack Obama's address to Congress on health care reform by shouting "You lie!," US Representative Joe Wilson received a formal reprimand from the House of Representatives. His actions also made his online fundraising campaign the target of a distributed denial-of service attack over the weekend, which sent his site and those of about 150 other Piryx (www.piryx.com) web hosting clients offline.
According to a Computerworld report, a DDoS attack started flooding joewilsonforcongress.com and Piryx's servers on Friday afternoon, continuing into the early hours of Saturday morning. Piryx chief executive officer Tom Serres told Computerworld that the traffic generated was initially manageable until "massive bandwidth spikes," measuring about 1 gigabit of traffic per second, knocked servers offline.
Wilson's and about 150 other Piryx clients' hosting services went offline before traffic blocking filters successfully mitigated the attacks Saturday morning.
A specifically nonpartisan operation, Piryx is a start-up based in Austin, Texas that provides services for managing online campaigns and fundraising for politicians and nonprofit organizations.
While politically motivated attacks of this sort are somewhat unusual in the US, it seems to be increasingly common for hackers to take on political targets. Several high-profile US and South Korean websites were attacked in July, and Georgia's president's website was knocked offline as tensions rose between it and neighboring Russia. These examples and others show that political beliefs have the potential to spill over into explosive online attacks.
Supposedly, you can pay some online thug $30/day to carry out one of these DDoS attacks on your behalf. With such a low cost, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.
Can they back track to see who did it?
From what I’ve read, it wouldn’t seem feasible to track these down. These attacks are usually carried out by an unknown number of computers that are infected with bots. Whenever the owner of these bots wants to start an attack, he/she/it sends out the command to all these bots, and in turn, these bots do all the dirty work.
Um . . . I don't believe you. You wouldn't happen to have a link to such a service, would you? Just to prove you're telling the truth.
For sure it was motivated by the scum bag in chief.
Nope, I don’t have a link to any of these services. I just read about them on some blogs a while ago, just after the Russians attacked Twitter and Facebook to shutdown some Georgian blogger.
If you know the process name of the bot and your firewall lets you selectively choose which apps/processes to block, I guess it’s possible.
Too bad. Of course, you realize I only wanted the link in the interest of research? Not that I would hire such a service myself.
Most of the infected computers get infected when people download pirated software from ftp sites. The trojans keep quiet until they are needed. Or so I've heard.
His actions also made his online fundraising campaign the target of a distributed denial-of service attack over the weekend,
Can they back track to see who did it?
Sounds like an acorn hit.
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