Forwarded from: William Knowles <wkat_private> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,55380,00.html Sunday, June 16, 2002 Foxnews.com and a number of other leading Web sites this week came under an apparent denial of service cyberattack, which disrupted service to hundreds of thousands of Internet users. The attacks at Foxnews.com began on Thursday and caused intermittent outages and slowdowns on the site before normal service was restored Friday evening. The source of the attack on Foxnews.com and the others sites was not clear, but officials were actively investigating. Among the other sites affected by the attack were theweatherchannel.com, espn.com and ABCNEWS.com. Cyber-security experts at the sites involved were examining the possibility a so-called "syn" attack was responsible for the problems. In such an attack, a hacker or hackers use hundreds or even thousands of computers to bombard requests to a target's servers. In just a matter of minutes, the requests can completely overwhelm a target's server, blocking out legitimate users and rendering the site completely or partly inaccessible. Such attacks are illegal. Foxnews.com and the other affected sites have notified federal law enforcement officials of the situation. Officials at the CERT Coordination Center, an Internet watchdog group, are also looking into matter. In 2000, some of the world's largest news, information and e-commerce sites came under a sustained and coordinated denial of service attack that was eventually traced to a Canadian teen-ager. Cyber-security officials have since instituted a series of measures designed to stem such incidents, but concede there is no guarantee all such attacks can be prevented in the future. *==============================================================* "Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ================================================================ C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org *==============================================================* - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Jun 17 2002 - 05:24:09 PDT