Network World-Traditional news companies and other websites covering this year's presidential election are preparing for a flood of Web traffic over the coming months,and not just from political junkies.Politically motivated hactivist attacks have become a top concern among companies providing election coverage online.
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Bill Wheaton,senior vice president and general manager of Akamai's media division,says the 2012 election could generate roughly four to five times as much Web traffic as it did in 2008.At peak hours,he estimates that as many as 4 million people could be streaming coverage of the election simultaneously,as a result of the increase in devices and social networks facilitating access to streamed content.
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"If you look at the coverage that the cable news networks are going to be providing online,they're going to allow you to cut to a lot of live feeds for different types of debates,and events and speeches and so on,much more than they could ever put on television,"Wheaton says."So the amount of content that they're going to make available is going to go up exponentially."
Naturally,news companies and other websites providing live streaming of election-related events have a lot on the line this year.As a content delivery network,Akamai works directly with such news sites as CNN,Fox News and Turner Broadcasting to ensure their Web broadcasts aren't interrupted.Coverage of this year's election has made for the first instance in which content providers are expressing concerns about hactivists launching distributed denial-of-service(DDoS)attacks,Wheaton says.
"They're looking out for all sorts of hackers,"Wheaton says."As you've seen,the activists move online in a much more aggressive way,and so news organizations have been attacked,as have presidential candidates.And obviously governmental sites have been attacked and that's been in the news quite a bit."
Indeed,hactivist targets of the past have included CNN's website,Fox News political correspondent Bill O'Reilly,and even the websites of the Department of Justice and the FBI.Through the first half of 2012,DDoS attacks increased 70%compared to the same period in 2011,according to research that website defense provider Prolexic provided to USA Today last month.A separate survey of Internet service providers released by Arbor Networks earlier this year concluded that"ideologically motivated'hacktivism'and vandalism are the most readily identified DDoS attack motivations."A
Content providers have been familiar with DDoS attacks for years.What's so concerning now is how much more severe the attacks have become,says Tom Hughes,managing director of nonprofit hosting provider VirtualRoad.org.Hughes,who works with independent news sites in such countries as Iran and Myanmar,and has seen DDoS attacks launched by state-sponsored entities as a form of media censorship,says more media companies may be concerned about DDoS now simply because the attacks have become far more severe.