Bad luck, Ireland: DDoS attack disrupts isle's National Lottery A DDoS attack disrupted the Irish National Lottery’s website and ticket machines on Wednesday (January 20). The draw took place as normal despite two hours of disruption beforehand. "Indications are that this morning's technical issues were as a result of a DDoS attack affecting our communications networks," a statement from …
And according to one 'Gavin Patterson' BT boss holidaying at the Davos corporate supernational lovefest:
""Mr Patterson said. “When I’m talking to chief executives, I point out that we provided the security for the London Olympics. That was in 2012 but, even then, we had to fight off 200 million attacks in four weeks."
What precisely is the fellow defining as an attack?
An unexpected packet.
Technically, that may not be wrong. But it's misleading.
As far as I'm concerned, anything destined for my network that wasn't specifically requested is an unwanted packet. If it bounces off my NAT tables, if it's hit connection limits on SMTP or on a blacklist, or if it's an unrequested probe or ping, that's not something that should be happening.
Classing it as an "attack" is a bit strong, yes, but it's equally unwanted, unrequested and potentially of a attacking nature.
But 200m in four weeks? That's only 82 a second. On any network of any size, I'd be shocked if your SMTP rejects weren't covering that alone. Hell, my personal server rejects several SMTP connections a second and that's with blacklisting, graylisting, and only a handful of personal domains.
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