FoxNews.com disabled by attack

CNET News ^ | June 14, 2002 | By Jim Hu

[Sweet_Sunflower29]

The home page for Fox News was hit by a denial-of-service attack Friday, leaving the site periodically inaccessible, the company has confirmed. As of 11:30 a.m. PST, News Corp.'s FoxNews.com was noticeably altered, with graphics and advertisements missing. Links to news stories still worked, but often the site's home page was inaccessible.

A Fox News representative confirmed that the site was the victim of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack but did not say how long the site had been crippled or what the company is doing to address the problem.

DoS attacks are computerized assaults that weaken a Web site by targeting its network hardware, such as its servers. The most common type of attack occurs when a computer floods a Web site with such an overflow of useless data that the site shuts down because of its inability to process all of the junk requests.

Media sites frequently have been targets of these types of attacks. The worst came in February 2000 when sites such as Yahoo, CNN.com and Amazon.com were taken offline by a widespread attack.

[balrog666]

Practicing for Wall Street? The Whitehouse? The Pentagon? CIA? FBI? All of the above?

[thucydides]

Such attacks are a fundamental assault on democracy, and perpetrators should be treated with the utmost severity.

[katya8]

An hour before that attack, Fox News TV exposed a disgusting Arab television program in which a tiny little child was prodded and manipulated into expressing its hatred for Jews....

[cgk]

Strange. I couldn't access foxnews.com yesterday at all, before this story says it started. I just thought it was AOL acting up again, though I could access everything else I wanted to.

Mrs Kus

[Mediaeval]

Could someone explain what a DoS is? I'm not familiar with the term.

[Cyber Liberty]

Denial of Service.

[Mediaeval]

Got that part. What does it entail?

[egarvue]

Denial of Service attack. In the simplest of terms, basically, an attacker, using hundreds of machines he has hacked or infected, starts having those machines send out a constant stream of requests for the target server, hoping to overwhelm it and cause it to crash or choke up. It would be like having you and a thousand of your best friends all try to get to Foxnews.com at once. And then keep trying.

[Freemeorkillme]

The practice of sending an overwhelming amount of packets of data to a particular location which prevents the target machine from being able to send out any packets of data of its own, denying service of the target machine, effectively "knocking" the target machine "off-line". Quite an easy thing to do, but takes a little know how to cover up the data footprints.

[Mediaeval]

Thanks!

[Wright is right!]

Got an easier way to 'splain it. Local radio station runs a contest to give away a million dollars to the fifth caller. 50,000 people dial all at once - and NO one gets thru.

Except with a Denial Of Service attack, it's one guy with 50,000 telephones calling the station. Translate that to clicking on a website and you've got the picture.

Michael

[RedBloodedAmerican]

TribalFlood3

[strela]

Could someone explain what a DoS is?

There are actually two types of these attacks, DoS (Denial of Service) and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). DoS attacks originate from one source while DDoS attacks originate from multiple locations.

The examples of DoS and DDoS provided by others in this thread are pretty much valid. It is possible to use other people's computers as launching points for DoS and DDoS attacks without them ever knowing it.

[fight_truth_decay]

Hmmm...the Ghost of Gotti?

[B Knotts]

This is an email I got from them earlier today:

Thanks for writing. Unfortunately, FOXNews.com has been under a denial of service (DoS) attack since 8:45am ET Thursday. Our web host has been working to find a solution. The site is partially up now, but with slow response times. We are using our "emergency root" which has less information and less graphics. It is not a redesign, but a way to alleviate load time.

We hope this will be resolved soon.

FOXNews.com

[StopGlobalWhining]

Does anyone know where FoxNews hosts it's websites these days? I used to work at their hosting site in Lowell, MA when they launched the network in Oct 1996, but then they closed down the Lowell site and moved to Exodus in New Jersey somewhere around 1999.

[B Knotts]

Looks like Loudcloud, Inc.

[Mo1]

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[JohnathanRGalt]

Even with DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks it is possible to trace the IP packets back to their source machines. These machines are infected with a trojan program which was placed on the machine at an earlier time by a hacker. The trojan program gives the hacker root privledges and allows them to install an 'evil' program which sends thousands of requests out to the web site they want to bring down. When they have hacked many innocent machines they then log-in (or have the programs go off at a pre-determined time) and start up the attack programs and quickly logoff and destroy the evidence of their breakin in the server logs.

If you have a firewall installed you can see the hackers -- and their IP addresses -- as they attempt to scan your ports and install the trojans. You can also trace the IP address back to the hacker machine through the 'whois' database.

Of course the owners of the machines on the internet are not responsable. It's kind of like having someone steal your car (after you left your key in the ignition) and then running down a crowd of pedestrians. The bastard who stole your car (evil hacker) is the culprit.

So what's the solution?

• Make sure that all cyber-crimes are reported
• Propose making the owners of the machines on the internet used in DoS attacks liable for the damage along with the hackers. When a DoS attack occurs, companies incur measureable monetary damage that will stand up in a court of law. -- of course, if the hacker is captured the hacked company which had to pay damages will be able to get damages from the hacker.
• Propose that the makers of firewall software (McAfee, Symantec,...) provide a central database of all sources of hacking attempts to break into peoples computers around the world so we can know the source of the attacks. Law enforcement and courts in those countries must be forced to prosecute.