Here is some good news - the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has published guidelines and best practices for mitigating large-scale botnet infections on residential Internet networks. The timing of this publication couldn’t be better - just after Twitter and a number of other social networking sites were effectively downed for several hours by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on one individual blogger. Regardless of the motives behind this DDoS attack last week, t... [More]

Last Thursday, a Georgian blogger called "Cyxymu" - with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger and YouTube - was targeted in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.  This technique uses a network of tens of thousands of compromised computers (aka “botnets") to flood a website's servers with page view requests, making it impossible for legitimate traffic to get through. If the amount of connection requests is large enough, it can crash an entire website, as happened to... [More]