Arbor Networks' Curt Wilson has conducted an examination of numerous distributed denial of service tools currently available in the wild.
The offerings range from those designed by gamers to be used for single IP address attacks to knock a rival out of action, to the more serious versions that are being marketed directly to businesses as a method to gain a commercial advantage over competitors.
Wilson noted that there "are numerous motives for DDoS such as revenge, extortion, competitive advantage and protest," but increasingly "many of the commercial DDoS services emphasize competitive advantage with wording devoted to taking down a competitor."
In denial of service attacks, generally a large amount of information is sent to a web server at such high frequency that it overwhelms the processing capacity or causes the system to shut down and reset altogether.
The net effect is that the server can not longer operate correctly and the targeted website is rendered unusable for its primary purposes, such as for customer interface or sales.
Denial of service attacks attacks are generally low-tech, and the majority of web servers are vulnerable to the attack method, which makes the tactic increasingly popular.
The nearly five-dozen DDoS tools Wilson studied ranged from "single user flooding tools, small host booters, shell booters, Remote Access Trojans (RATs) with flooding capabilities, simple DDoS bots, complex DDoS bots and some commercial DDoS services. Many types of threats can be blended into any given tool in order to make the tool more attractive and financially lucrative."
With the growing availability of DDoS services being marketed directly to businesses, enterprises may increasingly find themselves under attack from competitors seeking to gain an advantage in the increasingly lucrative Internet marketplace.
"The DDoS threat to enterprises and network providers is obviously more severe from professionally coded bots with a variety of stealthy attributes and their corresponding commercial flooding services," Wilson said.
Wilson's detailed examination of the full range of DDoS tools can be found here: