Talking about DDoS attacks on ABC TV’s “The Business”

Screenshot from ABC TV's The BusinessA strange thing happened yesterday. A distributed denial service (DDoS) attack, a big one, got reported in the mainstream media as having somehow all but crippled the internet — despite all the journalists presumably continuing to use the internet as usual.

“The internet around the world has been slowed down,” reported the BBC. Um, no.

Now I won’t go through all the details here, because eventually they were properly reported elsewhere and I’m writing it up for Technology Spectator in a piece to be published Tuesday morning. The short version is that a nuanced report on Kaspersky Lab’s Threatpost lost its nuance in the mainstream media, a process helped along by a data-plotting error in early reports. People like Gizmodo hosed down the bulldust.

However I was interviewed by ABC TV’s The Business yesterday, along with Patrick Gray of the Risky Business information security podcast and Ty Miller from penetration testing firm Pure Hacking.

If the embedded video doesn’t work, try the version at the ABC’s website. In both cases the video is ©2013 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

I’ll also be talking about this DDoS attack on ABC News24 tomorrow morning at 1010 AEDT — and after both of those I’ll ponder the way the media handled this whole thing.