Kill This Box: a DDoS challenge

If you happen to be in control of a sizable botnet, and in need of nerdy stuff from the ThinkGeek online store, killthisbox.com has a mission for you. The website's creators offer a fifty dollar gift certificate to anyone who takes the site off the internet, and keeps it offline for fifteen minutes.

Killthisbox.com was created by Ypigsfly -- "a group of seasoned veterans of the Internet network infrastructure business," which was "was born to counteract the nefarious acts of the would be evil doers." With this site, they are testing a new type of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection system.

The rules, as explained by the makers of the site:

1. Register a day and time of your attack along with your Handle and unique password
2. Try and knock this site off the Internet for 15 minutes, anyway you can
3. If you can, email us with your handle and unique password, name and address and we will send you your prize.
4. No we are not trying to find out who you are and send the Authorities to your house, we are just testing a DDOS defense system.

A couple of months ago Chinese hackers brought cnn.com to its knees, and just yesterday mozilla.com crashed and burned under the load of a milion people rushing to download the latest Firefox browser. Malicious or simply incidental, peaking server loads remain a problem for many sites on the web.

Killthisbox.com starts on a self-confident note, and one is left with the impression they do not rely on heavy clustering and expensive hardware; let's hope that more similar solutions are headed our way.