Google’s Digital Attack Map plots DDoS attacks around the world

  • 22 October 2013
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One of the most common attacks seen against a website is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, where malicious hackers command botnets of hijacked computers around the world to bombard a particular website with traffic – causing it to fall over.

The team at Google Ideas has teamed up with Arbor Networks to provide Digital Attack Map, a visualisation of denial-of-service attacks around the world.
There’s even a movable timeline, so you can look back through at historic attacks (see the enormous DDoS attack which started on August 8 2013, for instance, when the United States was getting pounded).

Pretty neat, eh?

The threat of DDoS attacks have been used by hackers in the past to blackmail websites into paying “protection money”, or risk having their site go offline. Victims have included gambling sites in the run-up to major sporting events.

However, in recent years it has become a favourite weapon of hacktivists and politically-motivated attackers who wish to silence a website that they dislike.
 
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Great graphics.

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Thanks for posting this story! We were actually just talking about this as a team the other morning. Very cool map.
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The following article is a update on Google's DDoS attacks
 
(Cyber criminals ride Google coattails in DDoS attacks)
 
 
By Antone Gonsalves | CSO/ Posted on July 28 2014 The easy access Google's Web crawlers have to sites is increasingly being exploited by cyber criminals in launching distributed denial-of-service attacks, a security vendor says.
Fake Web crawlers accounted for 4 percent of the total number of legitimate ones, called Googlebots, analyzed by Incapsula.
In investigating more than 50 million fake Googlebot sessions, Incapsula found about 34 percent were clearly malicious, with roughly 24 percent of those used in DDoS attacks against a website's application layer.
A Googlebot is the search software Google uses to collect documents from the Web in order to build its searchable index. Googlebot requests to Web servers are identifiable through a user-agent, which is the online equivalent of an ID card.
 
InforWorld/ Full Read Here/ http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/cyber-criminals-ride-google-coattails-in-ddos-attacks-247075
 
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The following article is a update on Google's Maps
 
(Google Maps community competition falls foul of Indian regulations)
 
By Richard Chirgwin, 29 Jul 2014
 
Google has found itself in hot water in India, with the country's Central Bureau of Investigation launching a formal investigation into Google Maps for allegedly publishing the location of sensitive military bases.
The problem arose because of a community competition held last year - Google's Mapathon 2013 - in which the Chocolate Factory asked citizens to map their local neighbourhoods. Falling foul, perhaps, to a US-centric mindset, Mountain View neglected to obtain the necessary approval from the official mapping agency, Survey of India.
 
The Register/ full read here/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/29/google_maps_community_competition_falls_foul_of_indian_regulations/
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Really? Now we have to worry about Google Maps attacks? It never stops does it? 😞

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