“Denial of service attacks are a part of life on the Internet.
They are generally speaking the easiest attacks to commit since
they require minimal skill, only a minimum of knowledge about your
intended victim’s network, and can be done relatively
anonymously.”
“Businesses and their customers are beginning to rely on the
availability of corporate web servers to conduct basic business
tasks… As people rely more heavily on these services, they will
become an attractive target for malicious people…”
“SSL provides authentication mechanisms for the proving of
identity as well as encryption services for data… flooding an
HTTPS (SSL enabled) webserver with 20 requests per second can
quickly bring [a Web server] to it’s knees… Even with hardware
crypto accelerators for SSL, a determined attacker can still flood
a server into the great beyond.”
“Probably the best thing you as an administrator can do,
right now, is to make sure your firewall rules prevent
spoofing.”