Cyber criminals have stepped up their abuse of one part of the net infrastructure – the Domain Name System (DNS).  This acts like a phone book and translates the website names people use into the numeric equivalents that computers are happy with.  So when you type bbc.co.uk, DNS translates that into 212.58.244.18 so your browser can find the page.  “DNS underlies everything you do on the internet,” said Neil Cook, chief technology officer at security firm Cloudmark. It is used billions of times a day to make sure you reach the site you are looking for.

Source: BBC Technology

Date: August 26th, 2015

Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31603930

Discussion

1) “There are a lot of ways to exploit DNS to do bad things.”  Most often  it is used to carry out Distributed Denial of Service attacks that sought to knock a site offline by overwhelming it with data.  Can you describe a Distributed Denial of Service attack in simple non-tech terms?

2) How might a company like Amazon tell the difference between a DDoS attack and simply a lot of people shopping?