Posted on 02/06/2007 2:21:49 PM PST by kiriath_jearim
WASHINGTON -- Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002.
Experts said the unusually powerful attacks lasted for hours but passed largely unnoticed by most computer users, a testament to the resiliency of the Internet. Behind the scenes, computer scientists worldwide raced to cope with enormous volumes of data that threatened to saturate some of the Internet's most vital pipelines.
Experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, but vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were traced to South Korea.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
The Internet: the greatest and most resilient series of tubes ever created.
Don't they have mirror sites?
Al Gore - get busy and fix your invention.
They probably attacked the root DNS servers.
This would slow down rendering on many sites, unless you are running a caching nameserver locally.
China using S. Korea as proxy
For those who see disruption of others' lives as "sport", the consequence should be long-term disruption of theirs.....
We've been having lots of random connection failures and general weirdness today.
Was wondering why our proxy was going nuts today. Been offline 3 times so far.
The fact that I understood this sentence makes me very sad ... I gotta get out more.
This would slow down rendering on many sites, unless you are running a caching nameserver locally.
They did. I had to switch two domains to a backup host this morning.
Again, this is the reason certain pestholes around the world need to be disconnected.
..Or possibly a US Only Intranet created.
I'd be on it like flies on honey, just to avoid all the hacks, exploits, unsecured relays, phishes from .ru gangs, etc..etc.
Why do you say that?
Setting up a caching nameserver on your local subnet is about the simplest thing you can do if you want to fool around with DNS.
Personally I prefer Sharia law for Hackers. Cut their hands off so that the next time they hack, it will be with a pencil in their teeth.
Interesting. This is a DOS attack on the root servers? That's gotta take just an unfathomable amount of traffic.
I looked at my monitoring tools, and nothing looks too wacky, at least for now.
Sounds like a plan!
Seems to be working fine again now, but it was pretty maddening this morning - had to keep releasing and renewing my ipconfig, and even rebooted the modem a couple times. Luckily I didn't have any time-sensitive work that needed done.
I have often wondered when the root DNS servers were going to get nailed. I have for many years thoguht there should be more delegation of DNS queries to the point where load balancing, redundancy etc. should have been implemented. I have thought this for not just resilancy to maliciousness but for failures caused by earthquakes, nukes, etc. The theory is it's easier to have a catastrophy on 13 boxes/(clusters of boxes) as opposed 13,000 clusters of boxes. I know there are not just 13 boxes doing this but the load could be distributed more and it would make the name resolution more fault tolerant.
CT
Actually, there's attacks on the root servers all the time. Most of them go unnoticed though. The DNS system *is* pretty thoroughly delegated to the millions of downstream boxes that actually carry most of the day to day DNS load, and the 13 root servers are geographically separated around the world.
One problem with having too many root servers is that the more there are, the longer it takes for any changes to be synchronized around the net. So, I suppose it's a balance thing and they've settled on 13.
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