Imperva's Application Defense Centre has been tracking the Anonymous DDoS tool, LOIC, and the number of downloads. Below is a media alert that discusses the fact that LOIC downloads, which, as of 22 April this year, hit the cumulative number of downloads for all of 2011.
The DDoS tool, Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC), has hit a milestone this week: cumulative downloads for 2012 have surpassed cumulative downloads for 2011. In 2011, there were 381,976 total downloads. This week, total LOIC downloads exceeded the total downloads from last year. It only took four months or, more precisely, 112 days.
The actual break even date was 22 April (Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, incidentally). What does this mean?
• There were about 3,432 downloads per day.
• 142 downloads per hour.
• 2.3 downloads per minute.
There was a large burst of downloads early in the year driven by attacks on the FBI and other government agencies (for graph click here).
Downloads have dropped off significantly since then, likely due to the conversion of LOIC into a Javascript version that requires no download (and was used to great effect in Anonymous Brazil attacks on banks).
Another interesting trend? The change from year to year in downloads by country. The US, France and Brazil were the respective gold, silver and bronze medalists. However, France has caught up significantly. Germany saw the biggest drop, moving from 3rd place to 6th. France was up more than 35% and Brazil saw the biggest jump with a 60% increase in downloads. For all countries, please visit http://imperva.typepad.com/.a/6a01156f8c7ad8970c016766154166970b-pi.