Internet being attacked?

[Josh]

WASHINGTON - 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 for 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.

Experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, but vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were traced to South Korea.

The attacks appeared to target UltraDNS, the company that operates servers managing traffic for Web sites ending in "org" and some other suffixes, experts said. Company officials did not immediately return telephone calls from The Associated Press.

Among the targeted "root" servers that manage global Internet traffic were ones operated by the Defense Department and the Internet's primary oversight body.

"There was what appears to be some form of attack during the night hours here in California and into the morning," said John Crain, chief technical officer for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He said the attack was continuing and so was the hunt for its origin.

"I don't think anybody has the full picture," Crain said. "We're looking at the data."

Crain said Tuesday's attack was less serious than attacks against the same 13 "root" servers in October 2002 because technology innovations in recent years have increasingly distributed their workloads to other computers around the globe.

___

AP Internet Writer Anick Jesdanun contributed to this story from New York.

http://www.comcast.net/news/technology/index.jsp?cat=TECHNOLOGY&fn=/2007/02/06/580115.html&cvqh=itn_hackers

[GhostShip]

Help the sky is falling in ... not.

The only thing of interest for me in this story is how the amount of traffic was generated, sadly thats not mentioned.

[KM]

reporters simply amaze me

gotta love how they think that there are 13 magical servers handle all of the traffic on the internet

good to know there are only 13 ISPs in the world each with only a single server that they connect their customers to

there are 13 IP Addresses used for providing the root zone for DNS resolution (fuck all to do with routing traffic), most of those IP Addresses direct to multiple servers in several countries each with multiple internet connections, only some of them are assigned to only a single computer, losing a couple of them is hardly a problem, as long as 1 of the many systems is online things run perfectly normally.

in the event that all of the servers for all of the IP Addresses are offline, it would be around 2-3 days before there would be any major problem with DNS resolution for users (as all they do is tell recursive resolvers who is in charge of each TLD, and your ISP doesn't need to ask who controls .com 50 times a second - it's not going to change that quickly!)... which is more than enough time for at least 1 to be brought back online

there are no details of what was attacked (just the same so-called news copy/pasted on 193 different "news" websites - exact same wording on every one) but it appears there was a small attack that knocked out 2 of the root servers that aren't managed well (both of the ones claimed to have been knocked out by a few Mbit of traffic, and both manage the IP Address at only a single site with no backups or redundancy)

there is also mention that the attack was actually directed at ultradns who handle the .org TLD, they have fewer servers without the sort of resources of the root servers (the root servers are handled by 13 large organisations, most bigger than ultradns), they may have suffered a partial outage which wouldn't cause a problem, or a full outage - which would cause a problem only for users trying to access .org domain names (i've not noticed anything so doubt that)

[J a M e S]

eh.... dusnt this kind of thing happen anywhere?