Re: Al Qaeda cyber attack ..... how real is the threat?
IMO some wannabe group might have the patience to build a zombie network or pay for the use of one to launch a DDoS attack. This is not particularly sophisticated, although the media would make you believe it's Martian technology. Most large, and most certainly critical infrastructure will have protection against these kind of attacks. A few products on the market, including Cisco where packets using heuristics likely to be from DDoS are rejected. Some other methods relying on multi path redundancy to allow known users access only through some clever routing. From my knowledge a large UK payment gateway now does not even bother with extortion requests. They simply dont work if you plan properly.