Posted in
Main on January 19th, 2011 by Pingdom
As you may have seen in our “Internet 2010 in numbers” recap, the amount of email spam on the Internet is mind-boggling. Approximately 89% of all emails are spam, resulting in an estimated 260 billion spam emails sent every single day.
We thought it might be interesting to dig a bit deeper into the facts and figures around spam, so we’ve gone through a massive 66-page report from Symantec about spam and malware in 2010 to get you a ton of interesting little nuggets of information.
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Posted in
Main on April 14th, 2009 by Pingdom
Spam. Those pointless, highly annoying junk messages that keep showing up in your inbox. Sadly enough, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting rid of spam anytime soon, so in the meantime, here are some interesting facts you probably didn’t know about those pesky electronic messages everyone loves to hate.
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Posted in
Main on March 10th, 2009 by Pingdom
Last week the BitTorrent site Mininova was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack that caused a total of 14 hours of downtime. Regardless of what you think about torrent sites, this was an interesting example of how a website can be incapacitated by a DDoS attack.
We chose this example to illustrate the effect of a DDoS attack because Mininova shared some relevant information about the attack, especially a very telling traffic graph from their Internet connection. This coupled with some Pingdom monitoring data gave us a chance to look closely at the effects of a DDoS attack.
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Posted in
Main on November 12th, 2008 by Pingdom
Sometimes disagreements and conflicts spill over from real life to online, and sometimes people go completely overboard and launch cyber attacks on services or websites they dislike, doing their best to sabotage them and often causing some serious downtime.
This sabotage is often done using distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) which send such extreme amounts of traffic to a website that it is effectively disabled.
This article takes a look at some high-profile examples of cyber attacks, how the attacked website was affected and why it was attacked (where this information is available). We also take a quick look at how these attacks are usually launched, what the long arm of the law is doing about it and how bad the punishment can actually get.
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