IST started the DDoS Education Project to close the knowledge gap for global resources and institutional knowledge specific to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The ideas behind this initiative, as with all other projects under our broader Combating DDoS initiative, were identified in conversation with partners. This effort stems from the identified need to institutionalize the significant historical and technical knowledge amassed by network and security engineers that have worked to combat DDoS attacks for decades.

IST believes that DDoS education should be a public good accessible to as many practitioners and citizens as possible, in order to educate the international community and a new generation of problem solvers. We have compiled a Virtual Library of DDoS education material, and are working to translate these resources into several languages and build a webpage for the public to freely consume and educate themselves. 

To efficiently scale the translation of the technical documents in our virtual library, we are building a custom machine translation model. This model has already had some initial success in translation from English to Mandarin. Future work on this project will involve developing new models for other languages, such as Japanese, Malay, Russian, Thai, and Hindi.

Closing the knowledge gap also requires going beyond traditional methods and resources. It is critical to ensure that professionals across industry and government remain up to date on the latest DDoS and related cybersecurity threats. Therefore, IST runs Cybersecurity Table-Top Exercises (CTTXs) designed to help professionals in the field build new networks of cooperation and anticipate known and unknown threats.

There is still much work to be done. Our in-house translations often require quality control from multilingual speakers and readers to ensure the high quality of translations. As always, we work with the broader community to provide these resources – and welcome your help via support for quality control. Get in touch and give us your feedback: [email protected]. We are also in the process of exploring how to conduct virtual TTXs so that we can continue to help professionals learn by doing.