The Invisible (Digital) War

Every day, an invisible war is waged across the planet. Hundreds of gigabits of data bombard servers every second in nonstop digital warfare targeting the free flow of information. These digital disruptions are known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The flood of incoming traffic aims to exceed the total bandwidth of connections that a server can handle, thus bringing it down and denying visitors access to any information it holds. An enterprising attacker can infect millions of machines, creating a “botnet” to launch these attacks -- marshaling the resources of computers across the globe and making the origin of his assault almost impossible to trace. There are thousands of DDoS attacks worldwide every day, accounting for roughly one-third of web server downtime.

Outbreaks of DDoS attacks mirror political turmoil in the real world. The Digital Attack Map, a project designed by Google Ideas and the network security firm Arbor Networks, tracks the assaults: DDoS attacks in Ukraine and Russia spiked from almost nothing to as large as 60 gigabits per second during the Ukrainian anti-government protests and Moscow’s subsequent annexation of Crimea in 2013 and 2014. Attacks similarly surged in Israel during 2014’s war in Gaza, with assaults emanating from everywhere from Iran to the United States. Even law-abiding Sweden was hit with a large 80 gigabit per second attack on Dec. 15, 2013, after a group of neo-Nazis attacked an anti-racism rally in the capital of Stockholm.