A Note on Analysing the Attacker Aims Behind DDoS Attacks

Abstract

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the availability of online resources. In this paper, we analyse the attacker aims for the use of DDoS attacks. We propose a model that can be used to evaluate news articles for determining probable aims of attackers. Thereafter, we apply this model to evaluate 27 distinct attack events from 2016. We make use of a DDoS specific longitudinal news database to select these attack events. We find the proposed model useful in analysing attack aims. We also find that in some cases attackers might target a web infrastructure just because it is virtually invincible.