In order to curb the ever growing threat to the accessibility of the Internet, governments may need to bring into force new laws that require home PC users to install and maintain anti-virus software on their computers.
The Internet a.k.a. the World Wide Web is rapidly becoming the Wild Wild West whose access is controlled by a plague of viruses residing on the PC’s of Home Users.
Whilst most Home PC users have heard of computer viruses, the majority think that if their PC becomes infected by one, they will know about it, because the virus will start to play havoc with their computer.
Whilst that is certainly true of many viruses, an ever growing breed of viruses, more commonly known as Trojan viruses can reside quite happily on a PC without the user ever being aware it has installed and replicated itself.
An innocent question might arise, well if this sort of Trojan virus does not affect a Home PC users enjoyment of his/her PC should they care.
Let’s assume the Home PC user is not aware that the Trojan virus sits quietly mailing spam email to those people in his/her email address book. Well we have all come to live with receiving SPAM - it’s an irritation to many people and a major headache for some.
But what if the Home PC user has the sort of Trojan virus installed on their PC that sits quietly receiving commands whilst the user is connected to the Internet that instruct a virus to launch attacks on other users computers.
If you are reading this and think this is fiction, unfortunately it’s not and it’s an ever increasing problem on the Internet. The computers so frequently the subject of attack by Trojan viruses are those that host the very fabric of the Internet itself.
I am talking about the computers used by web hosts that provide the home for all the web sites we visit. These web hosts often have to devote significant resources to combat what they call DDOS attacks or Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
So what exactly is a DDOS attack and should the average Home PC user care about them anyway ?
After all it’s not the Home PC use’s machine that’s under attack by the virus.
Tony Simpson
Web Page Add Ons
Making Your Website Work for You
Legislation to Force Home PC Users to Install Anti-Virus Software - Pt 1 ( Continued )
A DDOS attack generally starts when the controller of the Trojan virus that could be sitting quietly on 10’s or 100’s of thousands of Home PC’s around the world, decides to make it active.
The fact that the DOS attack comes from PC’s located all over the world makes this a distributed attack or a DDOS.
The Trojan controller may decide that he/she wants to deny service to one or more web sites. Denying service means that you or I will not be able to get any pages from that site loaded into our browser. That is when we click a link or type the www of that web site into our browser.
The Trojan controller can stop us from accessing any web site they choose simply by bombarding the web site and the web host with thousands of requests in short succession to supply pages.
It’s like turning a fire hose onto a target, it just gets swamped and bogus requests for pages stop legitimate users like you or I, from viewing the pages we have requested using our web browser.
The web site is just overwhelmed and stops responding or becomes very slow to requests for web pages to be sent to web browsers.
Well is all this anything more than just an inconvenience ?
Should we care if some web sites become unreachable ?
Well I would argue that we should all care. What if your favourite web sites become unreachable at any time for weeks or even months.
Can it happen - Does it happen ? ………… Yes it does.
What if you can no longer access the web site at which you do your online-banking.
What if you run a web business and can not access your own web site.
Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating how serious this situation can be or could become. Perhaps you think web hosts have measures in place to combat such attacks and restore normal service, so we don’t have to worry.
It’s true, web hosts do have measures to combat such attacks, but these measures create there own problems. I don’t propose to go into the exact details of everything they do, because that would be another topic altogether.
But one of the measures they use to combat DDOS attacks is to identify where these attacks are coming from by the IP address.
An IP address is the Internet equivalent of your physical mailing address. When any of us connect to the Internet we have an IP address.
To stop the DDOS attack on a web site one measure used is to block requests for web pages from a range of IP addresses where the repeated high number of page requests are coming from.
Without getting into the details of IP addresses, let’s assume an IP address ranged from 1 to 1000. If a DDOS attack is coming from IP addresses in the range 100 to 200 then the web host could block any requests from people with PC’s connected to the Internet using IP addresses 100 to 200.
That means if you are a legitimate user trying to access a web site with this web host and your IP address happens to be in the 100 to 200 range you will not be able to reach that web site.
How long these DDOS attacks can last depends on the Trojan virus controller and the extent of the resources ( other peoples Home PC’s ) that they control.
These Trojan virus controllers can weld great power and are capable of shutting down and putting out of business companies operating on the Internet …. and they have done.
If you surf the Internet, have a web site or operate a web business you will be affected by this problem at some time, even if you don’t know this is what the problem is.
How often have you clicked on a link or typed a web site address into your web browser only to find the web page never loads ?
You stare at a white screen the page loading indicator makes slow progress, but still the page never appears, you give up and move on. Perhaps you think the web site is down, or it’s busy, or your Internet connection is slow.
How often do you think the problem is the web host is under attack and your IP address has a block put on it ?
To Be Continued in Part 2 !
Tony Simpson
Web Page Add Ons
Making Your Website Work for You
