Denial Of Service Attack - (still) Piece of Cake

Ever since the Wikileaks founder has been apprehended, there has been reports all across of "Rise of Hackitivists". Companies like MasterCard, Visa and PayPal received plenty of DoS (Denial Of Service Attack). I don't think the attacks resulted in stealing of digital information, it was instead crippling of online services.

BTW, Hackivist is a new term referring to the Hacker community dedicated for some sort of a social cause, unlike the other group of hackers, which are mostly after money.

It's surprising to note that communities like these were able to organize and launch attacks of this magnitude within hours notice. It almost feels like that performing DoS is still piece of cake for the dedicated ones. What further surprises me is that these companies are still so vulnerable. I believe it's more due to the nature of attack. These days the DoS attacks are mostly distributed, meaning they can originate from anywhere in the world. It would be very difficult for any protecting device to differentiate from genuine visitors to the web site from the Hackers. The web requests from DoS probably look same as any other web request.

There was an interesting article on New York Times few months ago, "What’s for Sale on the Bug Market?", that tells how easy it is loan computing time from hackers and do whatever you like. These hackers have little bots (or Trojans) installed on millions of computers across the world. Once you read that article on how your (average citizen's) personal informations are traded including their computing, you wouldn't be that surprised how these Hackivists are able to pull attacks like these.

What's the solution: Have a good anti-virus installed on your computer to start with. Don't visit sites that you don't know much about. Do not open suspicious emails.