I came across this advisory today, which i believe is the result of the DDoS attacks that were launched against a number of online games platforms such as Steam and the Playstation Network over the Christmas break.

Team Cymru have s secure NTP template available for Cisco, Juniper and Unix systems, the Canadians have more information available here and CERT have some information; including how to verify if you're vulnerable; here.

This was sent to me by a friend is an interesting read about a recent massive DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that was aimed at Spamhaus.
The attack was a type of DNS-recursion amplification attack [pdf] that uses bogus queries to DNS servers to massively amplify the amount of bandwidth consumed by the attackers to over 300Gbps at times.
Cloudflare have another great explanation of this type of attack here.

The website at http://openresolverproject.org/ can be used to help you identify if you have DNS servers configured to allow recursion, and provides some configuration suggestions (such as rate limiting)
.

The great Wikileaks scandal that is currently occupying the media's attention has brought to light some interesting food for thought beyond the actual leaked documents and the ultimate insider threat scenario.

Wikileaks has been under denial of service attack for a number of days now, allegedly caused by a 'hacktivist' called 'th3j35t3r' (The jester). The attack has ramped up from the 2-4Gbps that forced the site from it's original host to the Amazon EC2 Cloud Service, where it intensified to a 10Gbps+ attack. Amazon then subsequently dropped hosting of the site, succumbing to both political pressure along with the ongoing DDOS attack.

Does this add an extra wrinkle to the 'put it all in the cloud' future promoted by some organizations or individuals? It does bring up concerns about how a cloud provider would react if your organization came under sustained denial of service attack. The allegations that the attacks were the actions of a single hacker using new software called XerXes that requires no zombie network or botnet to be effective is also extremely concerning.