Netcraft, apart from having really cool uptime graphs, have of late had some great news posts about denial of service attacks on SCO and Microsoft. I'm in the UK and its 4AM at the moment, which means Microsoft.com is starting (and has already endured a few hours) to be attacked by machines infected with Mydoom.B that are east of the UK. Seems to be holding up just fine.
"In anticipation of the MyDoom.B payload striking www.microsoft.com tomorrow, Microsoft have shortened the TTL [time to live] on the www.microsoft.com DNS entry to 60 seconds. Yesterday the TTL was set to just under an hour. Essentially, Microsoft is accepting the significantly higher load on its name servers [outsourced to Akamai] as the premium of an insurance policy in the event that it wants to move www.microsoft.com very quickly.
In this regard Microsoft is being very circumspect towards the potential payload of MyDoom B virus, which anti-virus companies have tended to belittle. Of course, this may simply reflect the fact that Microsoft is directly at risk from the payload, while the anti-virus companies are merely informed bystanders, rather than Microsoft's view of the likely traffic levels being significantly different to the anti-virus companies' expectations.
Our expectation is that Microsoft will defend the payload from its own network, at least initially. If Microsoft does decide to deploy Akamai's http caching, this should not necessarily be read as an admission that its in-house infrastructure could not cope; it is more likely to be motivated by a public spirited desire to keep the traffic off the Internet's main arteries by absorbing the payload as close to the sources of the attacks as possible. "
View: Netcraft News Post
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