HSS Attack (?)

["Michael W. Shaffer" <shaffer () LABS AGILENT COM>]

I have a friend whose personal site is hosted by a company called
US Ware. He sent me an email the other day saying that they have
been down for about a day two times in the last week. He sent me
a link to their homepage where they have some cryptic message
posted claiming that their outages were due to an 'HSS Attack'.
Neither he nor I were able to find anything about what an HSS
Attack might be on various security sites or search engines. My
take was that they might just be making this up to cover up for
some mistake they made that caused the outage. Has anyone on this
list ever heard of an HSS Attack? Here's the text from their
home page:


http://www.usware.net/
--------------------------------------------------------------

US WARE CUSTOMER ANNOUNCEMENT, November 4, 2000.

We did have an HSS attack on the server 66.usware.net,
IP address range 206.25.213.*. The appropriate authorities
have been alerted and are working with us on determining
who is responsible for the attack. HSS attack affected our
hardware settings, and as they are very specific, the
restoration took us little longer than we initially
expected.

Affected may have also been accounts using a nameserver
that resolves to 209.25.213.66-69.

It is our knowledge that the service is now operational
for all the clients. Some of the other restoration works
will continue in the beginning of the next week. We are
very well aware of the affects the downtime had on your
website, and our management will be in touch with all the
clients who were affected. We thank you for your
understanding and patience you have shown during the
terrible moments in the past 24 hours.

US WARE SUPPORT TEAM
US WARE MANAGEMENT

--
Michael W. Shaffer                 email: shaffer () labs agilent com
Research Computing Services        phone: +1 650.485.2955
Agilent Laboratories, Palo Alto    fax:   +1 650.485.5568