said by Link Logger:The deal is more bots, and more bots with fatter pipes equals better DDOS attack, so the first issue here isn't that they attacked and dropped banks, the first issue is this bot crew was able to comprise and add to their bot army sites with bigger pipes which tends to indicate their initial attacks have gotten better as they are owning more commercial/active sites sites. Toss in some aspects around smarter proxy usage and bingo better and more difficult to stop DDOS attacks.
Yeah, since many of these higher end servers are running Linux or another Unix variant, sometimes the admins get complacent with security. The truth is, you don't need root access to utilize the box for a DDOS. All you need to do is compromise the server software (Apache) or some other unprivileged process. From there you just put your bot code in userspace and you're good to go.
This is why I think MAC systems should be mandatory on a server, especially a high value server. If you are a Linux server admin and aren't running SELinux or AppArmor you're stupid. These days it is not about getting root, thus you have to secure userspace too.