Title: Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Reference: 

http://www.opensourcefirewall.com/ddos_whitepaper_copy.html

Helpful slides:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/archive/ripe-41/tutorials/eof-ddos.pdf

Additional material:
http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/ddos/
http://www.ddosworld.com/
http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/backscatter/index.xml
http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0105/savage.html
http://www.blackhat.com/

Three questions (Pick one and answer it as a one-page essay):

(1) Why are DDoS attacks so hard to deal with even though the attack
    tools are so simple?

(2) Last week (specifically Monday, Oct 21) there was an attack
    on the Internet DNS root servers, reported at
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A828-2002Oct22.html.
    Read the article, as well as followup articles about this attack
    (search in news sites and google for them). How severe do you think
    this attack was? Was it real or just hype?

(3) Propose new ideas for DDoS tools. If you were a malicious hacker,
    what would you do to mount an effective attack?