Why the PCS?
Hardly Spartist revolutionaries, as unions go.
The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union says that its website has been under sustained cyberattack for the past five days. A statement on the union's site, which is running slowly at time of writing, said on Monday that the union "has been experiencing ongoing severe technical problems that have affected some visitors' …
"It stressed that no membership data had been compromised as a result of the DDoS attack."
"It is important to note that this has had no effect on the security of the information we hold"
Have just done a few basic security tests of input fields on the site (e.g. login / password retrieval etc.) and the site is RIDDLED with XSS and code injection vulnerabilities, if someone wanted to 0wn this site and the data behind it, it would take them about 15 minutes...
Pick an organisation. Any organisation. Find someone with a grievance (no matter how trivial) against said organisation. Assuming the individual is slightly unhinged, whereas they once might've sent a nasty letter, let the tyres down, or put dog turds through the letter box they can now rent a botnet for a few quid and send a slap from the comfort of their own home.
However I do agree that the trend is now to label website performance problems DDoS until proven otherwise. Makes you feel all important. Hoo-hah.
Can understand the scepticism but there is a marked difference between high traffic peaks which the PCS site gets on quite a few occasions and is mitigated against in a number of ways VS a proper DDOS, sorry but the traffic levels themselves are different for starters before you get on to the actual identified types (yes plural) and how we're dealing with it.