Foxnews.com, Other Sites Attacked

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,55380,00.html

Sunday, June 16, 2002

Foxnews.com and a number of other leading Web sites this week came
under an apparent denial of service cyberattack, which disrupted
service to hundreds of thousands of Internet users.

The attacks at Foxnews.com began on Thursday and caused intermittent
outages and slowdowns on the site before normal service was restored
Friday evening.

The source of the attack on Foxnews.com and the others sites was not
clear, but officials were actively investigating.

Among the other sites affected by the attack were
theweatherchannel.com, espn.com and ABCNEWS.com.

Cyber-security experts at the sites involved were examining the
possibility a so-called "syn" attack was responsible for the problems.  
In such an attack, a hacker or hackers use hundreds or even thousands
of computers to bombard requests to a target's servers.

In just a matter of minutes, the requests can completely overwhelm a
target's server, blocking out legitimate users and rendering the site
completely or partly inaccessible. Such attacks are illegal.

Foxnews.com and the other affected sites have notified federal law
enforcement officials of the situation. Officials at the CERT
Coordination Center, an Internet watchdog group, are also looking into
matter.

In 2000, some of the world's largest news, information and e-commerce
sites came under a sustained and coordinated denial of service attack
that was eventually traced to a Canadian teen-ager. Cyber-security
officials have since instituted a series of measures designed to stem
such incidents, but concede there is no guarantee all such attacks can
be prevented in the future.


 
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