Last month, attackers took down the PlayStation Network for several days, embarrassing Sony and leaving tons and tons of gamers unable to feed their Destiny addictions for almost a week. This is all thanks to what's called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where a person or a group of people send an inflated amount of traffic to a network in hopes of overloading and crippling the servers.
The size of the largest distributed denial-of-service attack was 50 times larger last year than 10 years ago, according to a new survey of Internet service and hosting providers, and attacks are also increasing in numbers and in sophistication.
Microsoft has joined the list of prominent technology companies confirming they have been hit by a recent computer hacking attack. In a blog posting Friday, Microsoft said it had found no evidence that any customer data had been heisted. Microsoft Corp.
A market may, in fact, be emerging for cyber attacks. People may soon be able to go on Ebay to purchase a cyber attack to shut down the website or blog of dissidents or gadflies.
Hackers boasted of thefts from Tesco Bank months before the company reported losing £2.5m in an attack. Cybersecurity company Cyberint said it had discovered posts on a variety of dark web forums whose members had described the lender as being a "cash milking cow" and "easy to cash out".
