Skip to the main content

2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

Published

Introduction

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon  capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer. In this paper, we explore the specific phenomenon of DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights organizations, seeking to understand the nature and frequency of these attacks, their efficacy, and the responses available to sites under attack. Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth.

This paper makes recommendations for how independent sites can best mitigate the impact of DDoS.

This work sponsored in part by the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation. 

 

You might also like


Projects & Tools 03

DDoS research project

The DDoS research project seeks to understand the ways in which DDoS attacks are becoming a popular technique for limiting access to independent media and human rights sites…

OpenNet Initiative

A collaborative project between the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and…

Past

Circumvention

The Berkman Center's Circumvention project is engaged in designing and conducting research aimed at gaining a broad understanding of the usage of circumvention tools.