DDoS Attacks: Size doesn’t matter

People often think that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks-you know like the ones that knocked the Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music recently–require hundreds of attackers generating gigabytes of traffic per second to pound a Website down into the ground. Ah, no they don’t.

A DDoS attack can blast a site off the Web with a mere trickle of traffic. As Radware, a global application delivery and application security company for virtual and cloud data centers, just pointed out in its “2011 Radware Global Application & Network Security Report,” smaller, less intensive attack can cause more damage than DDoS attack tools that gobble ten times the amount of bandwidth.

How small? Radware’s Emergency Response Team (ERT) found that the majority of successful DDoS attacks were made with less than 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps). Sure, some attacks, like the one that got WikiLeaks in 2010 used 10Gbps level attacks, but, really, you don’t need to that much traffic to knock the stuffings out of a Web site.