Slam the door on the bad guys

摘要

Organized crime is alive, well and scouring cyberspace for easy pickings. That message is repeated time and again to companies that conduct business over the internet, but the messengers aren't sure everyone is listening. While there is a whole range of online possibilities for the less-than-honest to choose from, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where e-commerce sites are flooded with useless information to the point where diey become overloaded and have to shut down, have become the weapon of choice for many extortionists. "It's a great crime if you are a bad guy," says Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. "On Saturday you take a company down for 15 or 20 minutes, then you send them a email saying 'Did you like that? We can do that all week-unless you pay up'."