The Internet Defender

Visiting Professor at SMU School of Information Systems Virgil Gligor is leading the fight against online troublemakers, notably in the area of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. In these attacks, an adversary tries to overwhelm and crash important services such as government websites, bank servers and credit card payment gateways by flooding them with messages that originate from thousands of different Internal Protocol (IP) addresses. Prof Gligor noted that besides their potential to disrupt important services, there may also be a more insidious side to these attacks. He explained that the use of DDoS as a threat to extort payments from companies is on the rise, and there is evidence that some countries have launched politically-motivated attacks against services in other nation states. He is working to anticipate and discover new classes of DDoS attacks that could potentially target vulnerable spots on the Internet. “In order to look for defences against new problems, you have to find the new problems,” Prof Gligor said.