The hacking collective Anonymous advocate the use of two common Denial Of Service and Distributed Denial Of Service (DoS/DDoS) attack tools.
These tools come with the Sci-Fi militarised names of High Orbit Ion Cannon and Low Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC/LOIC) and are used by serious Anonymous types and wannabes alike in coordinated attacks on organisations. (HOIC is an HTTP tool and LOIC has TCP and UDP DDOS attacks). The Wikis on these tools make great reading, honest.
It appears that law enforcement types are now hot on the trail of users of these tools. A hacktivist was found guilty and sentenced to two years probation for his part in a HOIC/LOIC attack on Koch Industries earlier this year, an attack which only took them down for 15 minutes before they sprang back up again through the power of exceptional sysadmin skills and IPS rather than little blue pills.
The good news about this prosecution is that law enforcement agencies were able to identify, trace and prosecute an individual after a very limited outage which will no doubt lead to tool development to make them more anonymous, but for now makes the World Wide Web slightly more stable.
If you would like to know more about DOS/DDOS and how to identify if you are a target, or identify and defend against an attack itself, contact ITC on [email protected]
To keep up to date on the latest in IT Security or want further information on our services to protect you from these and other digital threats, visit our website at www.itcsecurenetworking.com
