[ISN] Cyberattack Against WikiLeaks Was Weak

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:23:00 -0600 (CST)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/wikileaks-attack/

By Kevin Poulsen 
Threat Level
Wired.com
November 29, 2010

In the first test of WikiLeaks’ resiliency since a staff rebellion 
earlier this year, the organization recovered within hours from a 
distributed denial-of-service attack during its rollout of leaked State 
Department cables Sunday. But experts who monitored the disruptive 
traffic say the attack was relatively modest in size.

WikiLeaks’ main web address and its “cable gate” site were unreachable 
as the organization’s media partners published their first analyses from 
a massive trove of a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables Sunday 
afternoon. Hours earlier, WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter: “We are currently 
under a mass distributed denial-of-service attack.”

But Arbor Networks, which analyzes malicious network traffic crossing 
the internet’s backbones, reports that the DDoS generated between 2 and 
4 Gbps of disruptive traffic, slightly above the average for all DDoS 
attacks, but well below the peak 60 to 100 Gbps consumed by truly 
massive attacks against other websites over the last year.

“The traffic that we’re looking at going to the network where WikiLeaks 
was hosted at the time the attack started is 12 to 15 gigs per second, 
so 2 to 4 gigs on top of that is not much,” says Jose Nazario, a senior 
security researcher at Arbor.

[...]


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Received on Mon Nov 29 2010 - 22:23:00 PST

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