from the what’s-to-blame dept.
Despite the headlines, the big denial of service attack may not have slowed the Internet after all. The argument against the original claim include the fact that reports of Internet users seeing slowdowns came not from service providers, but the DDoS mitigation service CloudFlare, which signed up Spamhaus as a customer last week. Also, multiple service providers and Internet watchers have now publicly stated that while the DDoS attacks against Spamhaus could theoretically have led to slowdowns, they’ve seen no evidence that this occurred for general Internet users. And while some users may have noticed a slowdown, the undersea cable cuts discovered by Egyptian sailors had more of an impact than the DDoS.
Short answer, No… not at all. However DDoS is still a common problem that has only increased in capability. Meanwhile no solution is in sight yet to actually stop this type of attack. For the big players, DDoSing is survivable or even manageable. However for the rest of us, a DDoSing is extremely costly, and can kill a small site.
