If you’re a TechStuff listener, you’ve heard Chris and me talk about how it can be difficult to track down the origin of a cyber attack. If the attackers have just a few basic skills, they can route an attack through a series of servers that can make it a challenge for investigators to backtrack. Even if you track the attack back to a geographic location, there’s no guarantee the person committing the attack was doing so on any kind of official basis. It may have just been a lone malicious hacker (commonly known as a cracker) stirring up trouble.

You may have heard the news that Web servers in the United States and South Korea were hit by distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) last week. To perform a DDoS, a cracker must first trick innocent victims into downloading malware designed to exploit security vulnerabilities in the victim’s computer. Once the cracker has access to an army of computers — otherwise known as a botnet or zombie computer army — he or she can command the computers to send thousands or millions of electronic requests to a target server. The goal is to overwhelm the target server so that it shuts down.