Word: attack
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Letalien's e-mail message quoted Driskell's comments to the Globe: "'I think [the impeachment is] a personal attack, and they're just trying to get one of us out of office. Racism at Harvard is a very subtle thing...
Remember, this attack on Bow Street isn't a random blow dealt by an anonymous member of corporate America. This comes from our little piece of corporate America; let's claim our ownership, once...
Luckily, the attacks did not involve any control of the e-commerce giants' computer networks. In these "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...
Given that such an attack is normally executed from a variety of compromised agent computers, it is exceedingly difficult to defend against. With the malicious traffic coming from many different sources, possibly sent with forged return addresses, the systems under attack are unable simply to screen out the attackers and continue business as usual. Indeed, even the best protections can sometimes be overcome by the brute force of thousands of network requests. The implications of such defenselessness are twofold...
Second, this defenselessness shows how vulnerable the newly networked world is to electronic attack. Although the attacks last week were against mostly consumer-oriented websites and did not rise to the level of threats to national security, one can only imagine the types of services--commerce, communications, the operations of government--that would be susceptible to attack in a year or five-years' time, when the Internet will be even more ubiquitous. If these attacks were accomplished by a few disaffected "script kiddies" or the proverbial 15-year-old in his parents' basement, one can only imagine what could...