海角大神

When cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs exposes internet crime rings or digital fraudsters, retaliation often follows. And it's not for the faint of heart.

Mr. Krebs's adversaries have threatened him physically, assaulted his blog with cyberattacks, , and even聽faked an emergency at his home address so that heavily armed police 聽The former Washington Post reporter has made so many enemies that he reportedly writes with a loaded shotgun by his side.

But what happened this month after he reported on an Israeli operation that carries out online attacks for a fee sent shockwaves across the internet.

Last week, Krebs's site was hit with a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack bigger than anything the internet has seen. The attack was so big even Akamai Technologies, which handles DDoS mitigation for some of the largest companies on the internet, unhitched him from its network.

DDoS attacks direct so much traffic toward an internet address that legitimate visitors can't reach the website.聽In such attacks, adversaries commandeer networks of thousands of previously compromised computers, or botnets, to dispatch malicious traffic.

While the scope of the online assault was enough to knock Krebs's blog offline for several days, it also revealed the growing strength of DDoS attacks and the relative ease with which anyone can unleash these digital weapons to censor journalists, activists, and critics.

Now that more and more devices are connected to the internet, attackers have access to millions of ordinary objects 鈥撀爃ome routers or connected digital video records 鈥� that have with poor or nonexistent security measures.聽

"On the internet, anyone with an axe to grind and the willingness to learn a bit about the technology can become an instant, self-appointed global censor," 聽"I sincerely hope we can address this problem before it鈥檚 too late."

Krebs did find a solution that enabled him to keep publishing on the web. Earlier this year,聽Jigsaw, the advanced research outfit created by Google,聽opened a service known as Project Shield to聽news organizations, human rights groups, and investigative reporters that need protection from DDoS attacks.

Project Shield was quick to come to Krebs's aid and bring it under its umbrella of DDoS protections. The project currently protects more than 100 sites operated by journalists, activists, and political groups, according to a

"When we talk about organizing the world's information and making it available and useful ...聽you have to make sure that once people have access to the information, it doesn鈥檛 get DDoS attacked, it doesn鈥檛 get compromised, it doesn鈥檛 get censored in a politically motivated way,"聽Jigsaw president Jared Cohen

Many larger news sites and commercial websites have DDoS protection, such as what Akamai provided Krebs as a pro bono service. But smaller blogs or activist websites around the world can't afford such services that can cost聽between $150,000 and $200,000 per year.

"Ask yourself how many independent journalists could possibly afford that kind of protection money?" Krebs recently wrote.

Krebs says he believes the recent attack on his site was in retaliation for his coverage of the Israeli DDoS provider. He says聽the service has been responsible for a majority of the DDoS assaults聽launched over the past several years, according to Krebs.聽After his聽, Israeli police arrested two men connected with the operation.聽Both of them are presently free on a $10,000 bond.

"This attack was the largest against a single targeted entity that we鈥檝e seen," said聽Andy Ellis, chief security officer at Akamai. In light of its scale, he says, other organizations should consider the Krebs attack as a new baseline for future DDoS assaults.

Average DDoS attacks involve traffic volumes of less than 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps). This one, he says, hit聽600 Gbps a second.

"Generally, attacks of this size require a large infrastructure," Mr. Ellis said. "This adversary has certainly demonstrated a greater capacity than previous adversaries."