A 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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.0MB)
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.
