Word: yahoo!
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Before he could finish his Coke, Hannan's cell phone buzzed. It was David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo and one of Hannan's clients. "It looks like we're having some problems with the site," Filo said. Could Hannan take a look...
Although neither man knew it yet, the Web's most popular portal was being bombarded with enough confusing information to cause the digital equivalent of a nervous breakdown. Normally, Yahoo absorbs a couple hundred million bits of data each second, meaning it can handle millions of Yahoo users asking simultaneously for, say, the lowdown on Ricky Martin without breaking much of a sweat. But now Yahoo's Internet service provider, Global Crossing--Hannan's company--was clogging up with as many as 1 billion bits a second...
...type of information that did the most damage. This was no Ricky Martin request. It was millions of phantom users suddenly screaming "Yes, I heard you!"--which was very unusual since Yahoo hadn't said anything. Worse, the phantoms had all given Yahoo fake return addresses. Yahoo got so hung up trying to get back to them all, it couldn't get around to dishing up those Ricky links to regular users. Service, in other words, was denied. Visitors to Yahoo saw an empty screen...
Choosing the right networks took time. About 50 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...
...distributed denial-of-service" attacks, the attackers found unprotected computers anywhere on the Internet and installed software on them to make them agents, doing the dirty work of the attack. When the time for the attack came, each of the captured agent computers flooded the intended targets, (such as Yahoo) with network requests, making their computers too busy to do anything but respond. The type of attack does not so much resemble breaking into a bank as running in circles inside the revolving door and preventing anyone else from getting...