The dangers of Distributed Denial of Service attacks were once again brought to the forefront even as the controversial whistle blowing site Wikileaks found itself booted by its U.S.-based Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net on Thursday. The reason for the termination of service to Wikileaks, explained EveryDNS.net, is due to the multiple denial of service attacks that are threatening the free service's ability to serve the other 500,000 websites that depend on its services.

The DDOS attacks against Wikileaks are real, and appear to be coming fast and furious. A couple of tweets sent out on Wikileaks' Twitter account on Nov. 30 read: "We are currently under another DDOS attack." That tweet is followed two hours later by "DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second."

While most of the international furor understandably revolved around the embarrassing contents of the diplomatic correspondences, at least one European Union home affairs commissioner has expressed concerns over the DDOS on Wikileaks. Cecilia Malmstrom compared the DDOS against Wikileaks with earlier attacks against Estonia and Lithuania, writing on her blog (Translated): "This time it is Wikileaks. Next time, the target may be the Swedish stock exchange, a nuclear plant or a sensitive patient record at a hospital."

So are businesses helpless when it comes to DDOS attacks launched by a rogue individual or even commercial rivals? While a comprehensive solution is necessarily complex, a quick study of what happened to Wikileaks reveals a couple of relatively simplistic measures that can be adopted.

Take cover behind cloud-based servers

The increasing size of botnets and prevalence of broadband connectivity makes it easy to set up massive DDOS attacks. As you can imagine, defending against tens of thousands of machines can be cost prohibitive if relying only on one's own infrastructure resources. So why not rely on cloud-hosted servers like Amazon's EC2 platform when the going gets too tough for your existing infrastructure? Depending on the complexity of your website, some advanced planning and provisioning will be necessary to throw the switch at the right time.

Spread the word via social media

Businesses can consider tapping into social media to keep in touch with customers when faced with a DDOS. Interestingly, the use of Twitter appeared to be a reliable and effective way for Wikileaks to communicate the latest developments to its followers.

What's more, the sheer size and attraction of most social media services means that they have more than ample experiences in weathering DDOS attacks. While there are limitations in how much information can be conveyed on some services such as Twitter, having a channel of communication is surely much better than having users left completely in the dark.

Do you have any additional suggestions on defending your organization against a DDOS attack? - Paul Mah (Twitter @paulmah)