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Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been getting more polished, in what, who, and how they target their victims. Threatpost has an article looking at some of the changes over the recent years regarding new techniques, new targets, and a new class of attackers.
Several new themes are emerging in the 2018 distributed denial of service (DDoS) threat landscape, including a shift in tactics to reach new heights in volumetric campaigns, attacks that rely on a sheer wall of large amounts of packet traffic to overwhelm the capacity of a website and take it town.
However, while these traditional, opportunistic brute-force DDoS attacks remain a menace has emerged. These DDoS threats are more sophisticated and micro-targeted attacks. They take aim at, say, a specific application rather than a whole website. These type DDoS attacks are a rapidly growing threat, as are “low and slow” stealthier offensives. At the same time, bot herders are working on expanding their largely IoT-based botnet creations, by any means possible, often to accommodate demand from the DDoS-as-a-service offerings that have created a flood of new participants in the DDoS scene. Those new entrants are all competing for attack resources, creating a demand that criminals are all too happy to fulfill.
[...] One of the most notable evolutions in the DDoS landscape is the growth in the peak size of volumetric attacks. Attackers continue to use reflection/amplification techniques to exploit vulnerabilities in DNS, NTP, SSDP, CLDAP, Chargen and other protocols to maximize the scale of their attacks. Notably however, in February the world saw a 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack against GitHub—setting a record for volume (it was twice the size of the previous largest attack on record) and demonstrating that new amplification techniques can give unprecedented power to cybercriminals. Just five days later, an even larger attack launched, reaching 1.7 Tbps. These showed that DDoS attackers are more than able to keep up with the growing size of bandwidth pipes being used by businesses.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @06:21PM
You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case.
If you are wrong, that there definitely isn't some inherit genetic behavioral bias influencing job choice, than the bias is happening before students finish highschool.
I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory because of far lower female graduation and entry level application rates to CS jobs. If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. That means that the overall point of the your manifesto, that programs designed to specifically increase the ratio of female engineers are unfair, is true.
We need to do something about the low number of women going into tech fields in school. Punishing companies for not hiring women when the vast majority of candidates are men is a perverse incentive that is biased against men and doesn't fix the real problem.
It's like punishing someone for taking more yellow onions at the market when there's 3 times as many nice looking ones as white onions. The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase. Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude.
Fixing this at the education level would mean owning up to a mistake. It's much easier to just fine everyone to make it look like you're fixing a "problem" caused by inadequate regulations.