Several of London’s largest banks are looking to stockpile bitcoins in order to pay off cyber criminals who threaten to bring down their critical IT systems. DDoS attacks involve inundating computer servers with so much data traffic that they cannot cope. “The police will concede that they don’t have the resources available to deal with this because of the significant growth in the number of attacks,” Moores said. “Everybody’s overexposed.”RISE OF THE HACKERThe evolution of DDoS attacksFebruary 2000“Mafiaboy”, a 15-year-old Canadian called Michael Calce, launches the first big distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), crippling popular websites. At its peak the attack was being conducted at a rate of 330 gigabits a second, around five times the average DDoS attack.

Source: The Guardian October 22, 2016 21:22 UTC