Word: attacks
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Hackers slowed Twitter to a standstill early on Aug. 6, frustrating millions of users. For the culprits, all it took to snarl the popular social-networking site was one of the oldest tools in the Internet hacker handbook: the distributed denial-of-service attack (commonly shortened to DDoS), a method that has been used to crash some of the Web's largest sites, including Yahoo...
...DDoS attacks are surprisingly low tech. Using a network of computers (dubbed zombies) controlled by a single master machine, the hacker tries to overwhelm a website's servers. It's a brute-force approach - the network of hacker-controlled computers floods the server with requests for data until the server overloads and comes crashing down. Graham Cluley, a computer security expert, likened the attack to "15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time." The attacks do no lasting damage - user data aren't compromised, and the site isn't down for long. Once...
Adding to the chaos is the fact that the zombie computers often show no signs of being infected. Hackers look for computers with security vulnerabilities and infect them in advance of an attack. When the hackers are ready to launch the assault, the master computer awakens its zombie army, and the attack begins. Because DDoS utilizes multiple computers from multiple locations - and because hackers may use their network for only a single attack - there's no way to protect against a seemingly random array of computers suddenly going rogue. Once the attack begins, websites can try to trace the sudden...
This method of causing computer chaos has been used at least as far back as 1998, when the first software tools were developed to assist in DDoS assaults. But the attacks didn't garner much attention until 2000, when Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and CNN were brought down in a single week by a Canadian teenager. They've been a scourge ever since and have even been employed in cyberwarfare. During the war between Russia and Georgia last year, hackers brought down several Georgian websites using a DDoS attack. And in the aftermath of Iran's tumultuous election in June, several...
...much smaller group of Christians trying to push them back. The police were caught in the middle for some time before they, for reasons that remain unclear, melted away. Some members of the Christian community allege that the police stood by as a group of armed men mounted an attack. Paramilitary forces were dispatched on Sunday, but their arrival came too late, residents...