Political DDoS: Estonia and Beyond

In the spring of 2007, the country of Estonia suffered a deluge of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, coordinated to coincide with street-level protests. These attacks caused nationwide problems for the heavily wired country of Estonia and did so again when they recurred in early 2008. These attacks were not the first such politically motivated attacks and they will certainly not be the last. This talk explores the world of DDoS attacks and their growing role as an online political weapon. It also covers how Arbor Networks measured the Estonia attacks, how other attacks are measured, and what these attacks mean for the Internet at large.