ZGram - 10/24/2002 - "Cyber war! Like in the olden days!"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

October 24, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Deja vu!  Remember the "denial of service" attack on the Zundelsite 
on December 15/16, 1996?  Why do I remember the date so easily? 
Because it was my grandmother's birthday...

At the rate of 200 "denial of service" e-mail shot into my California 
server, the attack lasted some 40 hours and totaled some 28.8 million 
hits.  It crippled 3000 websites during the most important shopping 
weekend of that year.  The loss to business must have been in the 
millions!

The criminal attack was never officially solved, but of course we 
have a good idea who was behind it then - and who might be behind it 
now, given the same modus operandi.

So here we go again?!

[START]

Attack cripples majority of key Internet computers

Ted Bridis

Associated Press

Published Oct 23, 2002

WASHINGTON -- An unusually powerful electronic attack briefly 
crippled nine of the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet 
traffic this week, officials disclosed Tuesday. But most Internet 
users didn't notice because the attack only lasted one hour.

The FBI and White House were investigating. One official described 
the attack Monday as the most sophisticated and large-scale assault 
against these crucial computers in the history of the Internet. The 
origin of the attack was not known.

Seven of the 13 servers failed to respond to legitimate network 
traffic and two others failed intermittently during the attack, 
officials confirmed.

The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center was ``aware of 
the denial of service attack and is addressing this matter,'' 
spokesman Steven Berry said.

Service was restored after experts enacted defensive measures and the 
attack suddenly stopped.

The 13 computers are spread geographically across the globe as 
precaution against physical disasters and operated by U.S. government 
agencies, universities, corporations and private organizations.

"As best we can tell, no user noticed and the attack was dealt with 
and life goes on,'' said Louis Touton, vice president for the 
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's 
key governing body.

Brian O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman for VeriSign Inc., which operates 
two of the 13 computers in northern Virginia, said ``these sorts of 
attacks will happen.''

"We were prepared, we responded quickly,'' O'Shaughnessy said. "We 
proactively cooperated with our fellow root server operators and the 
appropriate authorities.''

Computer experts who manage some of the affected computers, speaking 
on condition of anonymity, said they were cooperating with the White 
House through its Office of Homeland Security and the President's 
Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.

Richard Clarke, President Bush's top cyber-security adviser and head 
of the protection board, has warned for months that an attack against 
the Internet's 13 so-called root server computers could be 
dramatically disruptive.

These experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT 
Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times 
normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have 
disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.

Monday's attack wasn't more disruptive because many Internet 
providers and large corporations and organizations routinely store, 
or "cache,'' popular Web directory information for better performance.

"The Internet was designed to be able to take outages, but when you 
take the root servers out, you don't know how long you can work 
without them,'' said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS 
Institute, a security organization based in Bethesda, Md.

Although the Internet theoretically can operate with only a single 
root server, its performance would slow if more than four root 
servers failed for any appreciable length of time.

In August 2000, four of the 13 root servers failed for a brief period 
because of a technical glitch.

A more serious problem involving root servers occurred in July 1997 
after experts transferred a garbled directory list to seven root 
servers and failed to correct the problem for four hours. Traffic on 
much of the Internet ground to a halt.

[END]

(Source:  http://startribune.com/stories/789/3382505.html )