Word: dos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hannan and his team zipped back to Global Crossing's HQ. In an hour they figured out they were under a DOS attack. It took another couple hours of monitoring their $500,000 routing machines to figure out which one was being attacked and to install the kind of filters that would scare the phantoms away. It wasn't brain surgery. Kids make DOS attacks all the time. But when the engineers saw the size of the barrage--10 times as large as anything ever recorded--they gasped. "We all agreed," says Hannan, "that we had a very formidable opponent...
...going to brag about it? Some saw an economic motive or a Quixotic tilt at the commercialization of the Internet. After all, our phantom had managed to interrupt one of Wall Street's sacred rituals: the dotcom IPO of Buy.com which was hit by a DOS attack on Tuesday afternoon, before the end of its first day as a publicly traded company. The stock had reached a peak of $30.25, then closed at an unspectacular $25.12. Just when Buy.com chief executive Gregory Hawkins should have been popping champagne corks, he was hunkering down in an emergency session with his techies...
...were used for the Yahoo attack; more were employed in later hits. But once they were selected, activation was simply a matter of uploading bits of code called daemons, similar to viruses, which bided their time in dark corners of these remote networks until the hacker decided it was DOS Day. The attacks appeared to come from them, not him (attacks from multiple sites are hard to pin down in any case). When the "master" activates his daemons, his hands remain unseen. Technically, "the Amazons and Yahoos were not hacked into," notes Simon Perry of security software firm Computer Associates...
Case in point: John Vranesevich, founder of hacker-watch website AntiOnline.com seen by many hackers as something of a Benedict Arnold. So loathed is he that AntiOnline is an almost constant target for DOS attacks (in one of its more entertaining features, the site lets you see who's attacking it, and how, in real time). While the Feds were still holding press conferences, AntiOnline had already compiled a perp-profile sheet. The attacks, it says, were committed by a cell of three to six hackers--most likely teenagers, most likely male. "All DOS attacks have been perpetrated by more...
That may sound a little alarmist, on the basis of three days of DOS attacks on a handful of commercial websites. The danger is real. But as with many terrorist strikes, the fear caused by a faceless attacker has, so far, turned out to be more potent than the attack itself...