Some things in IT journalism seem so passé, so last decade dahlink – think the millennium bug impending-meltdown-and-world-chaos stories of '99, for example. Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks have also seemingly gone off our radar a little in recent months, but their menace has not been diminished, in fact, those crafter DDOS-ers are thinking up new and ingenious ways to make the most of the botnets at their disposal and to avoid detection. All this according to DDOS prevention specialist Prolexic, by the way.

The firm’s president Keith Laslop was in London this week and warned me, with a look of impending doom in his eyes….ish….that this year would almost certainly see the first DDOS attack by cyber-terrorists, likely targeted at financial institutions or other organisations whose web downtime would likely create mass panic, or at least inconvenience, and publicity. He also said that DDOS as a means of industrial sabotage is on the increase, as are co-ordinated attacks involving DDOS and phishing emails, in an attempt to dupe victims into giving away their details.

Think about it; if a banking site has been taken down by an attack and you receive an email to the effect that your bank’s web site is indeed experiencing problems and would you mind clicking on this second link to reach an alternative, emergency site, it looks more convincing. Crafty devils.

Social networking sites were also on Keith’s hitlist. I’ve mentioned a few times how their failure to vet content being uploaded has led to an increasing number of so-called “passive attacks”, where those unluky to navigate to a page containing malicious code are infected. Well, for the very same reason these sites could also be a cause of many of the zombie PCs that are perpetuating the spam and DDOS problems many firms are facing, according to Keith. The problem is being greatly underestimated because traditional honeypots can’t discover this type of infection.