In the spirit of Halloween, we’ve compiled a few chilling tales of the most ghoulish cyber attacks on some of the largest corporations in the world. We only hope that after you finish reading our stories, you live to tell the tale of the most horrifying distributed-denial of service (DDoS) attacks in history.

An unknown siege: For three days in July 2009, the websites of an Asian country’s largest daily newspaper, a large-scale online auction house, a bank, the country’s president, and many websites of the country’s North American ally came under DDoS attack. Upwards of 166,000 computers in a botnet unleashed wave after wave of a data-powered onslaught. Some believed operatives at a neighboring country’s telecommunications ministry were to blame, using a backdoor for the infamous Mydoom worm of 2004, but this has never been proven. We may never know the true cause of this horrifying attack and whether or not it is still lurking in the shadows today…

When zombies attack: Since 2009, a popular gaming platform has become a frequent target for DDoS attacks. Time and time again, a flood of data was generated by a group of hijacked computers—zombies of the Internet—and a malicious hacking group took control of the network. The culmination of attacks have cost the gaming company and associated financial institutions approximately $2 billion—a number that would give any organization quite a fright!

Double, double toil and trouble: In November of 2008, a large European news organization’s website was attacked. The site fell under the spell of a hacker for an hour and a half—marking the longest time the site had been offline during 2008. Although the witch behind the spell was never identified, we have a feeling an eye of newt and toe of frog were main ingredients in this dastardly plot.

Possessions: If there’s one word that causes shudders in Internet security circles, it’s Conficker. Beginning in late 2008, the Conficker worm exploited vulnerabilities in numerous Microsoft operating systems. It takes over an infected machine and links unwilling computers together into a massive botnet that even the most ritualistic of exorcisms cannot dismember.

The first major DDoS responsible for crippling some of the Internet’s most popular websites was executed by the hands of a North American citizen not yet old enough to drive. There’s no proof to date as to whether or not the boy was possessed, but at the time, the power of his sorcery was well beyond his years.

For more information on infamous DDoS attacks peak through the resources on our DDoS Resource Center.