As part of the Howard University GEAR UP program (Global Education, Awareness and Research Undergraduate Program) directed by Dr. Lorraine Fleming, Howard and Universidad Santo Tomas (Santiago, Chile), under the mentorship of Wayne Patterson and Sergio Mujica of Universidad Santo Tomas, conducted research in July 2011 building a database of suspected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks worldwide.
This research, led by Howard students Kristina B. Banks, Jeremy M. Blackstone, and Shaterria S. Perry; and UST students Patricio Gonzalez del Valle, Cristian Miranda Aedo, Andrés Morales Sanchez, Juan Pablo Muñoz Andrade, and Jonathan Andrés Rocha Stuardo, studied levels of DDoS attacks in a number of countries and developed an index to rank the level of attack by country.
It is expected that these results will soon be published. However, as an introduction to the results, it was noted that:Belarus was the country seemingly most under attack from such events:
| Country |
Number of Anomalous Events Identified |
Events Identified Per Website |
| Delarus |
74 |
2.47 |
| Bolivia |
45 |
1.50 |
| Philippines |
34 |
1.13 |
| Colombia |
30 |
1.00 |
| Italy |
27 |
0.90 |
| Senegal |
26 |
0.87 |
| Indonesia |
20 |
0.67 |
| Egypt |
16 |
0.53 |
However, it was noted in the analysis that the events observed were from a sample of the 500 most popular websites accessed in each country. But for the most part, in most of these countries, the preponderance of popular websites were outside the country. The exceptions were in the Phiippines and Italy, where over half of the websites examined were domestic.
The GEAR UP program will continue in June and July 2012 and it is expected that further cybersecurity joint research will take place. For information about applying to GEAR UP, see: http://www.howard.edu/newsroom/releases/2011/20110721NewInitiativePreparesEngineerstoSolveGlobalProblems.htm
To see the Howard students on site in Chile, see: http://sites.google.com/site/gearupchile/photo-gallery
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