Although hackers launched an unusually powerful attack on the Internet that lasted as long as 12 hours on Tuesday, the hacker attack seems to have gone unnoticed by most Internet users. Experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, although vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were traced to South Korea.
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 as long as 12 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.
The motive for the attacks was unclear, said Duane Wessels, a researcher at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. "Maybe to show off or just be disruptive; it doesn't seem to be extortion or anything like that," Wessels said.
News source: Newsfactor
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 as long as 12 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.
The motive for the attacks was unclear, said Duane Wessels, a researcher at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. "Maybe to show off or just be disruptive; it doesn't seem to be extortion or anything like that," Wessels said.
News source: Newsfactor
They sound cut it out and find something better to do with their time. If they like scripting things to make the internet go slower why don't they turn their talents to doing the stuff software and hardware testing.
They sound cut it out and find something better to do with their time. If they like scripting things to make the internet go slower why don't they turn their talents to doing the stuff software and hardware testing.
We'll never know the reason they did it because we simply dont have the same thought process as them. Some people can be dumb or brilliant but for unknown reasons simply behave outside the normal bound of society. They're born destructive instead of creative. Its the insanity plea for murder.... think about it, to really commit murder in the real sense of the term you'd have to be insane in the first place. Its the same for these people, they do it because they're insane, and because of that, we'll never full understand there reasoning. The same as misguided youths not being able to devote their time to constructive purposes. They can be both INTELLIGENT and MISGUIDED at the same time. The two, as shown by this are no mutually exclusive.
I have thought about this quite a bit... and i have come to the simplest of conclusions.
There are two types of people in the world, those who build sandcastles as children, and those who knock them down.
The worse part is, that featuring them in international news only encourages it.
Yeah that makes perfect sense. But still one wonders how they have come to have this reasoning, because I somehow doubt its a hardwired genetic thing.
From what I see, they didn't affect the load distributed international root servers though, and I don't quite see why not all of them are by now.
Here's the affected root servers:
http://www.glowfoto.com/viewimage.php?img=...07&srv=img3
And what/where each of these correspond to:
http://www.root-servers.org/
The ones suffering were G (US DoD) and L (ICANN), neither of which distributed by Anycast...
I can at least understand why the South Korean (?) hackers try to disguise the origin. :p
Last edited by Jugalator on 07 Feb 2007 - 11:45
Seriously though, im more and more proud of the internet ever passing year. It went from science, to porn, to business, and finally its become quite the community orrientated information shareing network it should have been all along. Not to mention how awesome the raw technology behind it.
To end ill say this...
If the internet connection in new orleans can survive total disaster, then these hackers dont really have a chance.
Lets all just hope that as the internet grows there is a continued trend towards it being not just a network of centralised computers, but a decentralised computer system itself. Black Hats would have a very difficult time damaging it seriously then...
The attack lasted 12 hours. That is a good deal of effort.
The attack overwhelmed 3 of the 13 internet root servers. 3 down out of 13 is "significant".
The fact that the rest of the infrastructure held up attests more to the robustness of the internet's structure and organization than it does to whether the attack was "significant".
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.