Re: Recent Attacks

[Ryan Russell <ryan () securityfocus com>]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2000 hnd () asu edu wrote:

> I was just wondering that The latest attacks on the popular web sites had only
> one objective behind it: to bring the web sites and render it useless for the
> period of attack. If these hacker really do want to create massive scale
> problems why not hack the root servers?!!!!!!!  This will bring down the whole
> internet.

One has to assume they didn't want to do that.  Assuming all the attacks
that got lumped together were the same attacker or group of attackers,
they seemed to have a pretty specific class of sites in mind.  I'm of the
opinion that this was just a demonstration of capabilities.  Had the
attacks been designed to do more than get publicity, the attackers would
have spent the time to compromise huge numbers of relay machines (more
than they did, based on estimates) and set them to flood a single site of
their choice permanently.

I expect to see ransom demands (either the real attackers or just
opportunists) become announced to the press any time now.

                                                Ryan