DDoS Attacks... Now forums are involved!

Though it has been only 5 months into the current year, we can already call it the most “DDoS productive” year as DDoS or DoS attack industry has reached its peak this year. Judging by victims and affected sites, this “bad luck” can be called as the Internet plague of XXI century. We have already covered the subject of DDoS attacks, their nature and the ways of realization. And also we have said that even such giants as Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, Datek, CNN and others failed to escape from it. This year the main victim of cyber criminals was Liberty Reserve payment system, which was disabled several times in 2008.

But not so long ago the Internet community has faced another problem – forums, which are considered the holy of holies of common people, also have got in wrong with somebody and were down by the ddos specialists. The machine of ddos has hit many famous forums, the places where just ordinary people were solving their problems and discussing some topics…

One of such examples is Roclub.com. Not so long ago the members and just guests of this well known forum could see the following message:

“Hello

Again its our turn to get DDos'ed. We have taken protective measures.
Ddos shileds are up. Let’s see how this attack effects us, in terms of site
downtime...

Regards
admin”

The similar one was published on another, not less famous forum Dreamteammoney.com:

“DTM is currently under heavy DDos attack. You may experience slow accessing speed or not able to access while surfing in DTM.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused, and we will try our very best to get this problem solved ASAP.

Thank you for your patience”


The number of victims of the cyber criminals is completed by a monster of online discussions Talkgold.com which was down earlier this week. And something prompts that it not the last attack….

So, what is the reason of these DDoS attacks? Why somebody wants to ban people to speak their mind? What are the results of such infringement of freedom of discussion?

It is very hard to answer these questions with confidence, but we’ll try to guess - step by step

What is the aim of these attacks? The main reason of all ddos-attacks is competition, exactly an aspiration for being “number 1” makes the rival to order such attacks. These attacks first of all hit the authority of the target site, or here - forums.

Another reason is a revenge which the competitors try to carry out on their rivals. There are some rumors that Talkgold.com was ordered by DTM for the ddos attack organized earlier on it. But there is no evidence of this supposition and who knows, may be it is true.

And what are the results? What damage is caused by these attacks?

As we have already mentioned, the first thing that is affected is reputation and the face of the forum as a company. Each day of outage results in a loss of several members and their trust in the forum. But here the troubles do not end. Not only the trust of the regular members vanishes but the desire of the advertisers to place their advertisement is gone as well.

Let’s see how such loss looks like in figures. For that purpose let’s go to the ad section of Talkgold.com. We can see that a week of advertisement on the site ranges from $12 to $80. Adding all the prices for the advertisement blocks which are to be promoted for a week and then dividing the sum by 7, we can get an approximate amount which is lost for one day of outage. So, one day of a 'brake' like that costs such forums as Talkgold.com, MoneyMakerGroup.com and DTM at least $1000, the upper limit is unknown…

Taking into consideration that average wage of an average American is 1,5-2k these “jokes” don’t seem to be funny and inoffensive.

But repeating the idea said above we want to say that reputation and image of the company ruined by ddos attack is very hard to get the face again, and people who have lost the trust once will hardly agree to try “everything from the very beginning”. So, those who order such attacks should think hard before pushing the button “start”, as it can happen so that they can get the same “present” in return.