Here’s what worked in Estonia to battle the recent denial-of-service attacks:

1. Admitting what’s going on. The Estonian government didn’t deny or try to hide the attacks. Because the attacks were globally sourced, ISPs that provide transit to Estonia could see that something was wrong. The Estonian government was wise not to try to deny the attack as a sign of weakness or cover it up as an embarrassment.

2. Asking for help. The Estonian Computer Emergency Response Team reached out to its peers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the service provider community to help it stop the flood of traffic before it hit their networks.

3. Rapid response. Experts converged upon Estonia to assist government officials and network service providers with attack analysis so they could start blocking traffic farther upstream.

4. ISP cooperation. Service providers worked together to help mitigate the attacks. Using such forums as the North American Network Operators’ Group, ISPs have existing relationships that are useful when denial-of-service and other attacks occur.

5. State-of-the-art network-filtering techniques. Vendors including Arbor Networks and Cisco deployed high-speed gear to filter out selective types of traffic at line rates to minimize the DoS attacks. This gear helped keep targeted Web sites running.

Source: José Nazario, senior security researcher, Arbor Networks

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