Lately, we've seen a trend toward major security-related websites becoming the victim of targeted attacks. Assaults on the sites of Trend Micro, CA, and the volunteer-led security community, CastleCops, are all recent examples of this malicious behavior by hackers.

Today, we learned that the well-known DSL Reports online security forum has been taken down by a botnet distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, another reminder of the serious effect botnets can have on the Internet. Their website reports that the attack - which effected the entire web community, Broadband Reports - began this morning, only a few hours ago.

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This type of attack is launched by cyber criminals in order to cripple the site and make it unavailable to its users. The popular Broadband Reports web community has been online since 1999 and operates over 200 forums. While the community has other focuses besides online security, the DSL Reports security forum is one of the largest of the available forums.

For those interested in botnet research, DSL Reports has a partial list of client IP addresses that make up this botnet.

Update: DSL Reports is now up and running again - check their site for more updates.