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By: Roxanne
Date: 2/10/00 10:19:30 AM
# Replies: 13
I saw on the news about amazon(dot)com and ebay and even cnn's website getting attacked and brought down by some strange hacker trick. The reports were a bit foggy about what exactly was done to crash the sites. Do y'all know?
Response #1
By: Gowan McGland
Date: 2/10/00 11:38:38 AM
They're called "denial-of-service" attacks.
There's several ways to do it, but the one that's being used now is basically they're getting computers to send tons of junk data at the web sites and the web sites end up not processing anything except the junk data and no one can get on.
Here's part of a news story describing same:
Dick said the week's vandalism was accomplished using
``distributed denial of service'' tools.
In such attacks, a hacker hides these tools, known as daemons
,on hundreds or even thousands of innocent third-party computers.
The daemons can be triggered later from a remote location to launch
simultaneous attacks on a single target, such as Yahoo! or eBay.
The attacking daemons give false addresses so they are harder to
trace.
The volume of attacks overwhelms the target and causes it to
cease operations, much the same way that a very heavy volume of
telephone calls can tie up a phone system and leave most users with
no dial tone or a busy signal, Dick said.
Many tools for such an attack exist on Internet Web sites, and
anyone can download them, he said. ``They do not take much
technical expertise to use,'' Dick said. ``A 15-year-old kid could
launch these attacks. This is not something that it takes a great
deal of sophistication to do.''
Response #2
By: Da Sissop
Date: 2/10/00 12:28:47 PM
I also read an interesting article on the zdnet website regarding how these hack attacks may become BRANDING opportunities for web sites.
I'm not sure where or how to go about issuing a press release, but it is my firm belief that the reason things have been kinda slow on the board lately is because Webnuns 2000 has been the victim of repeated Denial-of-Service attacks.
Response #3
By: sooz
Date: 2/10/00 2:41:03 PM
I thought "denial of service" meant that certain husbands and wives weren't doing their "marital duties."
Response #4
By: Roxanne
Date: 2/10/00 5:05:29 PM
Good guess, sooz, but I thought that "denial of service" was what blacks encounter when they go to Denny's or Cracker Barrel.
I am still unclear on exactly what the hackers did; but probably the less I know the better. I just wish they could trace it back to some inherent AOL programming problem that will necessitate the deletion of all of AOL. (No offense, AOL users)
Response #5
By: Gowan McGland
Date: 2/10/00 9:29:12 PM
Okay..."blacks" and "Cracker Barrel".
Insert joke here.
Response #6
By: Homer The Brave
Date: 2/11/00 1:24:40 AM
Rox, the bad guys used assorted computers around the internet to flood amazon and other web sites with so much information that they couldn't keep up. Since the web sites were too busy dealing with the info-flood, service was denied to actual users, hence the name, denial-of-service.
At Cracker Barrel. To blacks.
Response #7
By: Roxanne
Date: 2/11/00 11:29:46 AM
No kidding! Cracker Barrel was involved in a discrimination lawsuit very similar to the Denny's one a while back.
So is there any evidence that the denial-of-service attacks on the big websites was racially motivated?
Response #8
By: Ralf
Date: 2/11/00 2:00:19 PM
It *might* be a coordinated info-war assault by the Chinese government, disguised as simple hacker-attacks.
Given you buy that, and given that a nation of non-asians is being attacked by a nation of asians, then yes you might consider it racially motivated.
Response #9
By: Homer The Brave
Date: 2/11/00 6:40:27 PM
Yah, the Chinese government wants to make it hard for people to buy books at Amazon.
Likely.
Response #10
By: Roxanne
Date: 2/11/00 11:40:50 PM
So, Homer, you are saying it was maybe "Amazons" who did the hacking?
Response #11
By: Ralf
Date: 2/12/00 10:06:36 AM
That's what I heard him say.
Response #12
By: sooz
Date: 2/12/00 12:49:57 PM
It's all that jungle music the Amazons are listening too. Satan is taking over through rock n roll.
Response #13
By: Homer The Brave
Date: 2/12/00 6:48:51 PM
This is all I've got to say on the matter.