Word: networked
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...tsunami on the virtual horizon last Monday, Alan Hannan was looking for nothing more dangerous than soda and cookies in a San Jose, Calif., hotel lobby. Like hundreds of techies who help keep the backbone of the Internet properly aligned, Hannan had spent the morning at the North American Network Operators' Group conference listening to a talk on something called denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. "I thought I knew about them well enough," says Hannan. "I didn't pay much attention. I wish...
Even more surprising than Wall Street's reaction was how much the hackers had done with so little. The kind of software used for the attack is practically public property. You can download it in the form of programs, or scripts, like Trin00, Tribal Flood Network or the nightmarish-sounding Stacheldraht (German for barbed wire). Each program can accept a kind of plug-in to make it even more adaptable, with names like Stream, Spank or Raped. "These tools have been out there for years," says Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of the hacker journal 2600. "Hackers have known about these...
...terms of my release permitted me to do so, I'd tell the people running the sites that were hit three things, all of which they may have done by now: 1) use a network-monitoring tool to analyze the packets being sent to determine their source, purpose and destination; 2) place your machines on different subnetworks of the larger network in order to present multiple defenses; and 3) install software tools that use packet filtering on the router or fire wall to reject any packets from known sources of denial-of-service traffic...
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...
...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...