Although the "distributed denial-ofservice" (ddos) attacks that recently paralysed several major websites came as a surprise to many people, they were long expected by most experts in computer security. The software tools used to carry them out first came to light last summer, and security specialists held a meeting in Pittsburgh in November to discuss how to deal with them. The following month David Dittrich, a computer-security expert at the University of Washington, summarised an analysis of the threat by concluding: "I can't wait to see what the new year will bring."
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