I generally give little thought to how the Internet works, as long as it does work. Well, on Monday, 9 of the 13 "root servers" that manage traffic on the Internet were hit with a denial of service attack for about an hour. You can see the spike in traffic on one of the servers in this graph. All this made me think about the fragility of the Internet and what I would do with myself if the Internet got knocked out, say, for a matter of days. Maybe I would finally learn to cook something besides pasta... What would you do?
posted on Oct 23, 2002 - View this thread

Germany Plans Infowar Against Websites? So, Wired News reports that German Interior Minister Otto Schily has said publicly that Germany should stage denial-of-service attacks on right-wing websites housed in other countries. AOL versus Germany as WWWIII/InfoWar I?
posted on Apr 9, 2001 - View this thread

They bagged the kid who was responsible for all those Denial-of-Service attacks a couple of months ago. He's Canadian.

Here's an interesting legal question: could the US extradite him? The crimes were committed in the US, but he was in Canada at the time he did it, since he worked through the Internet. Whose laws apply?

(By the way, I've seen no indication that the US is considering extradition; I was just curious whether they could extradite him.)
posted on Apr 19, 2000 - View this thread

DoS Attacks for Fun and Profit - It looks like the list has expanded quite a bit this week... enough that the FBI is going to hold a press conference today at 11 PST. This is almost enough to argue against unlimited bandwidth for the average consumer. I hope they track the bastards down; not only does this impact the future success of eCommerce ventures, but it lends to stereotyping the technically elite as potential closet-evildoers.
posted on Feb 9, 2000 - View this thread

Add Buy.Com to the list of sites getting hit by Denial Of Sevice Attacks lately. The site went down just as they were getting extra traffic because they just released their IPO, good timing...or I should say bad timing.
posted on Feb 8, 2000 - View this thread

Do you, a, have problems getting to Yahoo? Yahoo was unreachable for much of the morning, and it turns out that it was apparently due to hackers. I saw estimates that the loss of 3 hours worth of traffic meant about 58 million lost page views. How many dollars is that?
posted on Feb 7, 2000 - View this thread