Distributed denial of service attacks are very difficult to deal with (I have dealt with—read: suffered through—several each year for the past ten years on and off.) Often there is little to nothing you can do within your network to improve the situation.

It's an issue of raw volume, once the attacker(s) exceed your capacity you're saturated and dead in the water. At this point, the techniques that will help must be applied at a point where the pipe has greater capacity than the attack, and depend on the exact nature of the attack and so vary in effectiveness.

That isn't to say the situation couldn't be improved, but I think widespread infrastructural changes would be needed and isn't the kind of thing MIT folks could just work out and apply to their current situation.

I know the mechanics of DDOS. I was around when some of the first distributed attacks were being directed at best.com (et al: http://www.pentics.net/), my ISP at the time.

I was using understatement to mock both MIT's reputation for innovation and intelligence and their role in the events that appear to have spurred the attack, so maybe they could put their vaunted brainpower to work solving that problem instead of killing downloaders, so to speak.

Oh sorry. The way you spoke of MIT was probably meant to be the tell but I hope you don't blame me for missing it.

(I do know some disturbingly brilliant people from MIT... I also have had occasion to meet some people who are disturbingly not brilliant, but no worries, they had ample levels of the Dunning-Kruger effect to make up for it.)