Historic DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are large-scale, brute-force attacks aimed at overwhelming servers and taking down an unprotected website at anytime regardless of size. Here are some of the most notable DDoS attacks in history that represent intentional efforts to take down websites for a wide variety of reasons.

If you're concerned about your site's vulnerability to DDoS attacks or other security breaches, read more about Radware’s Attack Mitigation Systems (AMS) a real-time network and application attack mitigation solution that protects the application infrastructure against network & application downtime, application vulnerability exploitation, malware spread, information theft, web service attacks and web defacement.

Lone Teen Knocks Yahoo! Down with DDoS Attack (February 2000)

This was one of the first major wakeup calls illustrating the danger of DDoS attacks and the need for protection against them. A lone 15-year-old Canadian teen, Michael Calce, singlehandedly took down the top search engine at the time, Yahoo.com, for almost an hour.

Calce, who was better known for his online alias, Mafiaboy, also went on to attack several other top sites on the internet at the time, including EBay, Amazon and CNN. He pled guilty to more than 50 charges and spent eight months in a detention center for the infamous DDoS attack he named, "Project Rivolta."

Estonia's Government Sites Flooded by Unrelenting DDoS Attacks (April 2007)

This prolonged DDoS attack took down a wide variety Estonian websites including the prime minister's website as well as several government sites and financial sites. The widely-accepted motivation behind the attack was the removal of a six-foot-tall statue of a Russian soldier that was in the country's capital of Tallinn, meaning the attack was political in nature.

Anonymous Goes After Scientology (January 2008)

This was the first highly publicized attack from the now-widely-known "hacktivist" group, Anonymous. The attack known as Project Chanology, knocked the official Scientology website, Scientology.org, offline. The group claimed the attack was in response to The Church of Scientology attempting to remove content from the internet.

Protect Your Site from DDoS Attacks with Radware AMS

As illustrated in these events, any website can fall victim to a DDoS attack for any number of motivations from a group or even a lone individual wanting to bring down a website. Radware’s Attack Mitigation Systems (AMS) offers protection from DDoS attacks and other security concerns.