2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

Introduction

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon  capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer. In this paper, we explore the specific phenomenon of DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights organizations, seeking to understand the nature and frequency of these attacks, their efficacy, and the responses available to sites under attack. Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth.

This paper makes recommendations for how independent sites can best mitigate the impact of DDoS.

This work sponsored in part by the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation.