The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to share a new report, "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites" by Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts, Ryan McGrady, Jillian York, John Palfrey
Overview:
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.
The full report is available online.
Public results of the survey can be accessed here.
A list of public media reports on DDoS can be accessed here.
For more information on the Berkman Center's DDoS research project, visit: http://cyber.harvard.edu/research/ddos.
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Bonus:
- Ethan Zuckerman reflected on the report's findings.
- Jillian York explains the paper's findings for Al Jazeera.
- John Palfrey shares his thoughts on the paper.
- The BBC reports on Berkman's research.