March 30th, 2004
Press
DDoS Attacks for the Common Man
Around the peak of the dot-com era there was a series of incidents that introduced most users to the term DDoS, or distributed-denial-of-service attack. These came to be known as the “Mafiaboy” attacks. The attacks were somewhat scary in that they brought down, one by one, the biggest and most prominent Web sites on the Internet. Every day we wondered who was next, and—gasp!—could it be us? Eventually, the site for which I wrote the most was taken down just like all the big guys.