Amateurs to Blame for DDoS Attacks

In an interview with Ziff-Davis Enterprise Contributing Editor Steve Kovsky, Sourcefire Director of Vulnerability Research Matt Watchinski cites evidence of poorly written code, low bandwidth, and a general lack of sophistication as indications that the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that disrupted U.S. government and private sector Websites over the Fourth of July holiday weekend were perpetrated by amateurs and not the North Korean government. Watchinski, who heads up the Vulnerability Research Team at Sourcefire, purveyor of the open-source intrusion detection engine Snort, says that if the attacks had been a state-sponsored act of cyberwarfare, "I would expect far more sophistication in the tools and the amount of data they could actually generate."