RE: Recent Attacks

[John Ross <jross () gta com>]

The security community has been aware of DDoS for some time.  It was 
actually the topic of discussion at a recent ICSA meeting.  Because of the 
nature of the web, this type of attack is difficult to prevent.  When a 
user requests a web page, the server responds with the data.  They simply 
overloaded the websites with requests.

The only way to protect websites from this type of attack would be to 
protect networks against being vulnerable to having the client installed on 
the "zombie" machines that are the ones who are physically sending the 
false requests.

Not that it is impossible to protect machines against having these clients 
installed, but it will take a massive worldwide collective to ensure that 
systems are protected against this.

-John

At 09:35 AM 2/15/00 -0800, you wrote:
> I don't believe that this was the total objective.  I believe (and this is
> only conjecture) that their point was the actual vulnerability itself.  The
> DoS and the newly created DDos attacks are VERY simple to use and widely
> available.  I think the point was "Hey, check out this great piece of code
> that is really easy to use and the MAJOR players on the internet are still
> vulnerable."  I am hopeing it was more of a wake up call than it was
> malicious, but who knows.
>
> -Kyle
> Information Security
> MSDW Online
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: hnd () asu edu [mailto:hnd () asu edu]
> Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2000 3:03 PM
> To: firewall-wizards () nfr net
> Subject: Recent Attacks
>
>
> hi,
>
> 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.
>
> Hoshil



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