How I became the first person to describe the advent of a new class of computer network attack tools.

20 Years of DDoS

Part 0: The Build Up to Distributed Denial of Service

Photo by Taskin Ashiq on Unsplash

I was inspired to start a series of articles on the early history of DDoS by a few recent events. Rik Farrow interviewed me for a forthcoming issue (Fall 2019 Vol. 44, No. 3) of Usenix ;login: magazine while I was also writing up a history of the early days of the Honeynet Project, which refreshed my memory on a number of events in 1999-2000. I also read this MIT Technology Review article on the 20th anniversary of the “first DDoS attack” on the University of Minnesota:

The first DDoS attack was 20 years ago. This is what we've learned since.

It took me a little while to remember that July 22 was not the first of the three days that the University of Minnesota spent off-line from persistent flooding. That happened almost a month later. Nor was July 22 even the start of the build up to that event. Now seemed like a good time to clarify this history.