Brian Kreb's website, Krebs on Security, was under siege last week with a DDoS attack which took its web hosting company, Akamai Tecnologies, massive resources to keep it on line.

Akamai had been hosting the blog as a pro bono service, but with the viciousness of the attack, it told Krebs that they could no longer provide the service.

The DDoS attack consisted of SYN Floods, GET Floods, ACK Floods, POST Floods, and GRE Protocol Floods. It also overflowed Krebs' inbox with subscriptions and Skype with garbage requests.

Akamai and DDoS protection outfit Prolexic were able to fend off the attack, the disruption was so great that they decided to stop hosting the blog.

Akamai said that the attack was so massive, would have cost "millions of dollars in cybersecurity services."

Google to the rescue with its Project Shield program. The purpose of Project Shield is to protect news outlets, journalists and free speech as a whole from online censorship. Kreb's website fit the bill.

"A number of other providers offered to help, but it was clear that they did not have the muscle to be able to withstand such massive attacks," Krebs noted.

Krebs says:

"I don't know what it will take to wake the larger Internet community out of its slumber to address this growing threat to free speech and e-commerce. My guess is it will take an attack that endangers human lives, shuts down critical national infrastructure systems, or disrupts national elections.

But what we're allowing by our inaction is for individual actors to build the instrumentality of tyranny. And to be clear, these weapons can be wielded by anyone -- with any motivation -- who's willing to expend a modicum of time and effort to learn the most basic principles of its operation."

Source: ZDNet