Yesterday, forty South Korean government Web sites (including the Presidential Office, National Assembly, and the U.S. Forces Korea) as well as corporate institutions (five major banks and securities companies) came under a large scale DDoS attack. In July 2009, attacks on seventeen South Korean government and corporate Web sites lasted three days. So far, the most recent round of attacks has only led to temporary shutdowns at some sites, however, the Korean Communications Commission expects another round of attacks today.
On March 3rd, WordPress was also hit by DDoS attacks. The attack lasted about two hours, and affected a number of high profile “A-list” Web sites, such as CNN, BBC, and TED as well as other 18 million hosted blogs. According to WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, the attack “may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs.” Attribution remains unclear.
At “multiple gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per seconds,” the attack is the largest in WordPress history. In 2008, WordPress experienced 268 DDoS attacks in a week, at a peak of 24,000 packets per second and 264 Mbp/s. According to John Dunn over at PC World, “that such attacks are now reaching into the Gigabits is a symptom of the greater resources that can now be accessed by attackers.” These can be seen in the 10 to 15 Mbp/s DDoS attacks experienced by Burma’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications ISP in the lead up to the country’s first elections in two decades in November 2010 (as compared to the 814 Mbp/s DDoS attacks in Estonia 2007).
In a separate incident, just less than two weeks ago, amid calls for a “Jasmine Revolution” in China, the main Web site of Boxun (an independent Chinese news resource based in the US) received what it calls “the most serious DDoS attack we have received.” For more on DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights groups, see the Berkman Center for Internet and Society’s 2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Services Attacks.