[j_tull]

FR seemed a little slow yesterday, now I know why.

[Dog Gone]

I would certainly favor the development of technology that would counterattack, melting the offender's computer into a dripping puddle of molten metal, or preferably exploding into shrapnel.

[Arkinsaw]

No idea where it came from. How is that?

[hispanarepublicana]

But most Internet users didn't notice because the attack only lasted one hour.

Every FReeper that was screaming for FReepadone noticed....including me!

[Samwise]

Service was restored after experts enacted defensive measures and the attack suddenly stopped.

Testing...testing...testing

[flamefront]

That explains why my ISP lost its DNS and Gateway connections at about that time for the first time in two years.

[Chad Fairbanks]

All your root are belong to us...

[austingirl]

So that's what happened - and this user sure noticed.

[aristeides]

Is this what you were talking about?

[aristeides]

Office of Homeland Security and the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.

Hmmm, I didn't see in this article where the attacks came from. But I can guess.

[RightWhale]

Our GCI Internet connection to the outside world was down for 6 hours today. No explanation given so far.

[philetus]

I think the statement: The origin of the attack was not known., is BS.They don't want us to know.

[unixfox]

I was in Cozumel, Mexico when it happened. Slow is the norm there so I noticed nothing. Even the dogs are slow.

[dwollmann]

For those of you wondering how the source of the attack can remain an unknown: There are several known attacks that permit the attacker to send packets with "spoofed" source IP addresses; an attacker could easily plug your IP address into the source IP field so that from the victim's perspective, the attack would appear to be coming from your machine. Some attacks cause innocent third parties' servers to send unsolicited SYN/ACK packets to the victim's host. This is done in such a way that the machines being used to send the SYN/ACK packets each send only a trickle of them, barely noticeable to an admin who isn't looking for them, but in concert with hundreds or thousands of other machines the effect is a flood of traffic at the victim's end.

Counterattacking the IP address contained in the incoming packets would almost certainly be a bad idea because there's a high probability that the source IP is false, thus you'd be attacking a server that may not even exist or at worst is totally innocent, or belongs to a server that is simply doing what it is designed to do (as in the case of the unsolicited SYN/ACK attack).

[Arthur McGowan]

I had a mysterious non-response from hotmail yesterday. Nothing like it ever before.

[RCW2001]

I felt that... Wonder if it was a 'trial run'?

[Havoc]

The reason Microsoft stuff should never be put on internet servers. I wouldn't lay bets on what's running those backbone servers; but, can anyone who runs MS at work or home imagine the damage that could occur by using an MS based web server knowing it's not only junkware but also the prime target for virii(misery loves company btw)?

[edwin hubble]

j_tull... I meant to send reply #48 to you...

[Spiff]

Here's my personal, gut feeling (and I'm in the computer security industry). This was a test. The real thing is going down on 26 October - the date selected for nationwide anti-war rallies.

Mind you, I've been wrong before and this is purely a gut feeling. But the hacker community seems to be in lockstep against "Dubya's war for oil to avenge his daddy" and they've been itching to find an excuse to use their Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) zombie farms for a common hacktivist cause. 26 October marks the biggest anti-war event yet.

[isthisnickcool]

The article said this was on Monday. It was also happening Sunday evening for a period of time.