Distributed Denial of Service Attacks have recently emerged as one of the most newsworthy, if not the greatest, weaknesses of the Internet. Overview Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a relatively new development; reports of the first DDoS attacks surfaced in mid-1999, with the highest-profile attacks coming in early 2000 against sites like Amazon.com, CNN.com, eBay and E-Trade. Clearly, the challenge these attacks present is a serious one. While you alone can't do much to protect yourself, as a community we can improve the situation. The victims were unreachable for several hours each. A brief note on usage: the network where these attacks are taking place is called the ``Internet'', with a capital ``I''; it is the public network shared by people all over the world. An ``internet'', with a lower-case ``i'', is a collection of networks interconnected; many organizations have private internets. The Internet is the result of inter-connecting a gigantic number of private internets.

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