This is a good article. Here's one along the lines describing how Gibson Research was DDoS-attacked using bots: http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm I found particularly educational the part about FBI involvement in the case. J.D.
Yep, there's a lot of scary stuff out there. According to the article you mentioned, it only takes hackers 10 minutes on average to locate and penetrate an unpatched and unprotected box. Makes me think of all these cases when my ISP would try to troubleshoot a problem and ask me to connect the machine directly to the modem "just for a minute or so"... J.D.
From this BBC News article: Guess the competitor needs to hire a 'tiger team' Seriously, it's interesting to see this kind of thing going on - I've always been fascinated by "cybercrime", usually the worst vulnerabilities are through social engineering though (phishing is an advanced form of this), a DDoS attack while scary in a way is only temporary and doesn't do lasting damage like, e.g., accidentally leaking thousands of your customers' credit card numbers through a security flaw...