Al-Jazeera, DDoS, and bandwidth utilization

On the same day that stories are running about Al-Jazeera being the victim of DDoS attacks, LinuxJournal runs a piece on how to stop them. 

From a technical standpoint, the most interesting thing in the story is that the Al-Jazeera sites typically receive traffic "in the range of 50 or 60 Mbps."   If you skimmed over those numbers, you shouldn't.  Ladies and gentleman, that is some serious traffic, and I say that having watched the MRTG graphs at some pretty big media web sites.  If you ever wondered if Al-Jazeera was for real or not, there's your answer.