DDoS reaches weapons-grade refinement
Denial of service (DoS) attacks, or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, are not new to the realm of cyber security. DDoS attacks have been active in the cyber security realm since 1999, when a computer at the University of Minnesota was attacked by a group of roughly 100 machines that were infected with a piece of malware known as Trin00 (MIT Technology Review, 2019). That bit of malicious code caused those disparate machines, all running on separate networks, to coordinate sending large amounts of packetized data traffic toward that university endpoint, resulting in a network crash.
It took university administrators a few days to get the systems and the university network back online – not exactly an end-of-days attack, but it would be an early indicator of what was to come. In the months that followed that attack, cyber-criminal operators and nation-states took on that attack strategy and began to leverage openly available...
