HACKER attacks designed to bring down websites for days or weeks on end may have met their match, if an idea being patented by IBM can be made to work.
In what is called a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the hacker infects a large number of PCs with a virus that at a given moment tries to contact the target website. This synchronised bombardment ties up the website and effectively forces it offline.
DDoS attacks exploit the internet’s “three-way handshake”. When working normally, a browser trying to contact a site begins by sending a page request. The site…
