Don't laugh at Estonia -- it could happen to you
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/02/44OPsecadvise-denial-of-service_1.html
By Roger A. Grimes
November 02, 2007
In April of this year, Estonia suffered under a huge denial-of-service
attack. Lest you think that Estonia is some little, underprepared
country that doesn't follow basic computer security practices, you need
to know that the same thing could happen to your country.
Today's Internet is so screwed up, security-wise, that there is
absolutely nothing any country has that would stop a massive distributed
DDoS (denial of service) attack. Think SQL Slammer worm, but using
millions of bots designed to cause traffic floods. Bot nets under the
control of one malicious hacker (or group) are often measured into the
hundreds of thousands of nodes and, some analysts say, millions of
compromised machines. If a very large bot net was used to attack a
single country's Internet backbone, it would take that country -- even
the most technology-savvy nation -- a few days to get legitimate traffic
going again at previous levels.
Worrying about country-sized attacks isn't in most of our job
descriptions, but mitigating smaller DDoS attacks against our
organization are. To find out what most administrators could do to
mitigate DDoS attacks against their company, I spoke to an administrator
who has been there and done that: Paul Laudanski, founder and leader of
CastleCops.