ITinfo: Largest Internet Attack To Date

DNS Servers Attacked

Most of the net's addressing system crashed

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Largest Internet Attack To Date

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Late Monday, two days ago, the Internet came under a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. All 13 root servers that exercise control over the routing of Internet communications were attacked; 9 of them were crashed for up to an hour.

Starting at about 5:00p.m. EDT, unknown assailants attacked the root servers of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS translates the domain names, such as itrain.org, into numeric Internet addresses (i.e. 10.10.250.2). These numeric addresses, called Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Each connection on the Internet has a unique IP address, including each Web server. Unless the DNS functions properly, domain names can't be converted to their IP addresses, and the net becomes a mishmash of unaddressable sites.

Because not all servers succumbed to the attack, the functioning servers were able to pick up the load, and most users didn't notice a disruption in their ability to reach Internet sites. However, Matrix NetSystems Inc., a tracking service for Internet traffic, reports the DDOS attack lasted for as long as six hours and may have slowed down Web traffic and the delivery of e-mail for some users well into Monday night.

Dave's Opinion

This was the largest DDOS attack on the Internet to date. Had all root servers failed, the results could have been significant. It's ironic, but at the time the attack was occurring I was teaching a university class about computers and information processing. We were discussing the requirement to respect data privacy -- sort of an ethics in computing lecture. It's ironic that I was helping twenty-some students think about technical ethics at the same time that someone else was trying to crash the entire Internet.

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References

Matrix NetSystems, Inc.
Message Center

DDoS Attack Against CERT
DDoS Attacks Get Really Wild

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updated October 23, 2002
http://dgl.com/itinfo/2002/it021023.html