The Central Intelligence Agency, PayPal, and hundreds of other organizations
are under an unexplained assault that's bombarding their websites with millions
of compute-intensive requests.
The "massive" flood of requests is made over the websites' SSL, or
secure-sockets layer, port, causing them to consume more resources than normal
connections, according to researchers at Shadowserver Foundation, a volunteer
security collective. The torrent started about a week ago and appears to be
caused by recent changes made to a botnet known as Pushdo.
