Part I

At the beginning of June this year, the SecuMail^® servers – as well as presumably all smarter spam filters – fell victim to a DDOS attack.
Although the damage caused in the SecuMail^® case was limited to only a few hours with a greatly delayed delivery time, it is still an interesting case worth mentioning.

Because I don’t want to ask you too much material at once, the whole story is divided into three entries in the “Networked World Cast”. This is the first part.

What is a DDOS attack anyway?
In a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (to german: distributed denial of service attack), a service on the Internet is loaded with so many requests that have to be processed in such a timely manner by a large number of other computers distributed in the network that it can no longer handle their processing and thus inevitably regular requests can no longer be answered. In this way, evil hackers can temporarily take almost any web presence or web service offline. There is no simple protection.

This is exactly what has been attempted with our antispam service SecuMail^® .

In the next two parts, I will describe the functionality and motivation of the attack and the impact and countermeasures.

Best regards
and see you soon

Hannes Wilhelm