Twitter DDoS a somber reminder about the malice of botnets

By now, you must have read about the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that left several popular social networking sites reeling. Twitter was among the worst hit, and was down for several hours at one stage since the attack started early on Thursday morning. It appears to be working fine now, though some reports on the web indicate that it is suffering from some periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.

As expected, the attacks originated from a number of botnets that have been directed to execute the DDoS. To me, this audacious attack is really a somber reminder of the scourge of botnets.

And truth be told, there are few sites with the necessary resources to withstand the hammering of tens of thousands of illegally commandeered computers. Yet with more homes getting access to broadband than ever--and at faster speeds--this susceptibility to DDoS will only increase.

End users and ISPs alike cannot pretend that nothing can be done. Indeed, something has to be done, and quickly before botnet problem escalate any further. George Ou over at Digital Society thinks that ISPs at least, have a duty to block malicious traffic--what do you think?

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at Guardian.co.uk

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