— by Lin McNulty —
Thousands of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks occur on the internet every day. On Thursday, however, Rock Island, through an upstream network, experienced just such an attack.
Wikipedia describes these attacks as typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. A DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door or gate to a shop or business, and not letting legitimate parties enter into the shop or business, disrupting normal operations.
All is back to normal today, however. Rock Island’s Gerry Lawlor indicated these events happen every day, globally. In fact, he was looking at a map at the time we spoke that showed 8,000 attacks all happening in that instant.
“This is normal,” he said. “It’s just that Rock Island was part of the invasion this time.
“Take a look at this (https://map.norsecorp.com/) for 10 minutes to get an idea of whats goes on every second of the day around the world. Such events happen all the time. The goal of every network administator is to minimize their impact.”
So, while it sounds frightening, especially when the attack is believed to come from China, it is routine in the web world, part of the deal.
The interruption was two attacks with the first lasting around seven minutes and the second for a couple of minutes. Rock Island services today are back to normal.
