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NFR Wizards Archive: RE: Denial of service

RE: Denial of service

Ted Doty (tediss.net)
Thu, 20 Aug 1998 07:28:13 -0400

At 03:01 PM 8/19/98 -0400, David C Niemi wrote:

>Nowadays a lot of companies have mission-critical applications which
>*depend on* the Internet. And for good business reasons, like making or
>saving a lot of money. Does this mean they expect to have 100% uptime for
>these applications? Does this mean you should gratuitously rely on the
>Internet for critical communications? Of course not. But they do want
>their availability to be high, and disconnecting from the Internet makes no
>economic sense.

Probably the only example of a mission critical application that depends on
the Internet is Internet-based electronic commerce. Leaving asside the
tautological aspect of this as an example, I have never heard of an
sizeable business plan that depended solely on Internet ecommerce getting
funded by venture capital - the technology is too new for the risks of this
strategy to be well understood.

ECommerce is great as a new area that augments existing revenue streams.
However, the fact remains that a sufficiently clever attacker could disrupt
your system for days, and possibly weeks. That'd probably would get the
law enforcement community involved, but heck, people blow up embassies.

- Ted

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