On February 10th there was the biggest DDoS attack on the Internet. No one knows who was targeted. A DDoS attack is when a hacker sends so much traffic to a website or server that the server can’t handle and crashes under the amount of strain of the data. When the server crashes the hackers are able to take the information without any trouble. These attacks made headlines back in 2011 when Sony’s PlayStation Network went down. Hackers called Annonymous took millions of users’ personal data. The same hackers also attacked Visa, MasterCard and Paypal.
These attacks can be very powerful and are getting more serious with each attack. Last years attack by Spamhaus was considered the most powerful DDoS attack in history, which topped out at 300Gbps. February 10th attack broke that record at 400Gbps. There are company’s out there that defend from DDoS attacks and if it weren’t for them we would have another Sony issue at hand. There might be a day when these attacks become harder to defend, and who knows what kind of data will be next to taken.
I don’t understand why people would want to do such a thing. Some have reported that these hackers want to take down big corporations and say how the corporations are unfair. What they are really doing is hurting regular people. They are taking credit card information and selling it to random people so they can then charge your accounts with random stuff. Hopefully this doesn’t turn into a way for people to troll the Internet by shutting down random websites or servers.