The Korean Times reports the arrest of a pair of hackers over the weekend on DDoS charges.
According to prosecutors, the pair, Lee and Park, operated a gambling website on behalf of a crime gang. In an effort to boost traffic to their own site, they used a 50,000-strong botnet to overload 109 rival sites during November and December 2010.
A botnet, of course, is a collection of malware-infected computers (often called "zombies") which can remotely be instructed to initiate network-related activity. Sending spam is a common criminal task for which zombies are used; visiting targeted websites deliberately to waste their bandwidth is another.
Since most web requests look alike, distinguishing the web hits of malevolent time-wasters from those of potential customers can be tricky. Sites which don't usually get a large number of simultaneous requests often aren't built to sustain heavy load.
Prosecutors also allege that Lee, who runs a server rental company - ironically the sort of outfit to which many websites outsource their operation, assuming that cloud-style services are better placed to resist attacks - DDoSed a prospective customer in retaliation for not signing up with him.
Read more
According to prosecutors, the pair, Lee and Park, operated a gambling website on behalf of a crime gang. In an effort to boost traffic to their own site, they used a 50,000-strong botnet to overload 109 rival sites during November and December 2010.
A botnet, of course, is a collection of malware-infected computers (often called "zombies") which can remotely be instructed to initiate network-related activity. Sending spam is a common criminal task for which zombies are used; visiting targeted websites deliberately to waste their bandwidth is another.
Since most web requests look alike, distinguishing the web hits of malevolent time-wasters from those of potential customers can be tricky. Sites which don't usually get a large number of simultaneous requests often aren't built to sustain heavy load.
Prosecutors also allege that Lee, who runs a server rental company - ironically the sort of outfit to which many websites outsource their operation, assuming that cloud-style services are better placed to resist attacks - DDoSed a prospective customer in retaliation for not signing up with him.
Read more
