Inside the World of the Dark DDoS Today’s distributed denial of service attacks are different than the kinds that we saw at the dawn of the millennium when the threat emerged. They’re becoming more nuanced, and subtle – and they could result in a lot more than a downed web server. In the early days of DDoS, volumetric attacks were all the rage. Politically or …
I think the main cause for all this chaos is a very obvious but also often ignored one: ignorance. And sometimes even accompanied with total unwillingness to do something about it and to think about what you're doing. The "I don't need to worry about security because I use OpenBSD. On that subject: how do I install software again?". And I only mentioned OpenBSD because of its reputation for safety, you can basically swap it out for any other Unix-like operating system.
When people connect computers to the Internet they're more than often totally ignorant about the possible risks. Totally convinced that there's no need for all that because who would want to hack their computer, right? All they want is to run their own stuff and they don't need all the extra fuss.
Yet that is usually when the problems begin. Too many people don't realize that every single computer is a welcomed one because it only helps to expand the next botnet even further. And the worst part is obviously that most people don't realize what's going on until it is too late. Worse: with todays broadband providers and cheap bandwith it also wouldn't surprise me one bit that plenty of people even fail to realize the obvious when it is too late. Shrugging the extra bandwith away and thinking their services became more popular.
In my experience the excuses can vary from "I use a safe OS", to "My computer has a dynamic IP address, so I'm safe as long as I'm not hosting anything". Where the latter doesn't even know how to use netstat.
Want a secure Internet? Why not start small with going over your own stuff, instead of ignoring it while thinking "this would never happen to me".
Instead of stating what needs to be done to choir here, I would hope that you're educating users. Most haven't clue on what to look for or where to look for it. Network traffic? What's that?
I'm still upvoting you because these things need to be said and said often.
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