Scottish law firm MacRoberts has improved its online security after suffering a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The attack at the end of 2006 took the company’s entire inbound and outbound emails out of service for two days.

‘Things ground to a halt very quickly,’ said David Murphy, director of IT at MacRoberts.

‘Mail was trickling in and out and we were getting bombarded with thousands of spam emails.

‘We tried to kick our old security vendor into action but they could not do anything.’

Since the breach, MacRoberts has installed a switched security system from vendor Postini which filters all mail before it reaches the law firm, dramatically reducing the chance of being affected by further attacks.

‘The new system can filter out these attacks as they happen,’ said Murphy.

‘We have suffered attacks since and been fine – all we know of it is a report from Postini saying they have occurred,’ he said.

Previously the firm’s IT staff needed to check thousands of spam emails to ensure genuine messages had not been blocked. The new system has freed up half a day’s work every day.

Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum, says a DDoS attack is a result of many factors.

‘Attacks could be motivated by a competitor looking for advantage, or more likely out of malice towards the law firm,’ he said.