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DDoSES 'R' US

WikiLeaks, Demonoid, and security site felled by crude (but potent) attacks

All 3 have been the target of crippling attacks carried out over the past week.

Dan Goodin – | 25
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What do WikiLeaks, Demonoid, and security website KrebsOnSecurity have in common? They've all been the target of crippling denial-of-service attacks carried out over the past two weeks by faceless enemies determined to punish the sites for viewpoints or services they find objectionable.

Radical transparency website WikiLeaks is going into its sixth day of being largely unreachable, thanks to a torrent of junk traffic that makes it impossible for supporters to access the site. It's no modest achievement, since the outage extends to most of WikiLeaks's mirror sites and at times to Defense Fund Net Neutrality, the French non-profit agency that serves as one of the sole ways for supporters to fund the whistleblower site.

Life hasn't been easy for security journalist Brian Krebs, either. In recent days, his site has also buckled under the weight of a series of Web attacks. One of them comes in the form of a large number of computers bombarding his servers with multiple requests per second to load the same story. Other attacks relied on a technique known as DNS reflection, in which miscreants use misconfigured domain name system servers to flood a target with IP address lookups. The method is popular with attackers because a single spoofed request to a DNS server can increase the amount of data at the targeted website 70-fold.

Demonoid, one of the Internet's oldest BitTorrent tracker services, was also reportedly knocked completely offline late last month. It hasn't been seen since, although it's unclear if that's because of a raid on its Ukraine-based webhost or a continuing assault of garbage traffic.

The high-profile outages come as DoS attacks have surged 82 percent since June 2011, according to a recent report by Arbor Networks. Such assaults are among the crudest, since they require little skill and are carried out under the cover of darkness. With the wide availability of DIY DoS kits and their success of publicly punishing adversaries, they aren't likely to subside anytime soon.

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Dan GoodinSenior Security Editor
Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82.
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