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Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction! The recent Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on Final Fantasy XIV’s gaming platform are quite surreal, yet a timely signpost of where things are heading. Using traditional cyber security technology, we are playing “whack a mole” against the ever-changing DDoS attacks.
We live in an age where DDoS attacks will only grow over time, while becoming more mature in the process. It’s no longer just a script kiddie activity. Considering a rising number of unsecured IoT devices are connected to one another, the potential for DDoS attacks to creep in and overpower an organization is very real.
Just last year, KrebsOnSecurity.com experienced the largest recorded DDoS attack, which came disguised as traffic designed to resemble generic routing encapsulation (GRE) data packets, a communication protocol used to establish a direct, point-to-point connection between network nodes. GRE lets two peers share data they wouldn’t be able to share over the public network itself.
Brian Krebs is a leading cybersecurity guru, but his site was struck by a DDoS attack more sophisticated than what had been seen previously. According to Krebs, this attack was seemingly launched almost exclusively by an extremely large botnet of hacked devices. Large DDoS attacks appear to stem from a method known as a DNS reflection attack. In cases like these, perpetrators can leverage unmanaged DNS services on the Web to create huge traffic floods.
Blockchain, a truly distributed system, has built-in protections against losing communication with nodes.
To date, the largest blockchain is Bitcoin. Even though Bitcoin is a truly open network, its protocol has warded off several attempts made to attack this network.What’s crucial to realize is the collective computing power available within blockchain makes it extremely hard to be successful in a cyberattack. Multiple blockchain nodes across many different institutions must be attacked to overwhelm the full system.
When it comes to a DDoS attack, the blockchain has protections to ensure transactions can continue even if several nodes go offline. Of course, not all blockchain networks are equal, and a particular network’s robustness largely depends upon its diversity and number of nodes and its hash rate.
Ethereum currently has 34,051 nodes; Bitcoin has 7,524. However, the hash rates are vastly different. Ethereum has a hash rate of approximately 55 TH/s (Tera [trillion] hashes per second) and Bitcoin has 5,660,000 TH/s. However, Ethereum hash rates are rapidly climbing day by day and are following a similar pattern to Bitcoin hash rate growth.
The public…
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