Attackers apparently took their best shot at the Internet's
backbone Tuesday, but failed to do any significant damage.
The onslaught briefly bogged down at least three of the 13
computers that help manage global Web traffic in what some experts
believe was the biggest attacks against the Internet in five
years.
Early Tuesday, computer researchers scrambled to push back
massive amounts of data that threatened to overwhelm Domain Name
System (DNS) servers. DNS is used to locate Internet domain names
and translate them into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
The attack appears to have been traced back to South Korea,
though the hackers apparently tried to cover their tracks. The
attack took aim at a company called UltraDNS, which operates
servers that process traffic for Web sites ending in .org and some
other suffixes, experts said.
"There was what appears to be some form of attack during the
night hours here in California and into the morning," John Crain,
chief technical officer for the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers, told The Associated Press (AP). He said an
investigation is underway.
"I don't think anybody has the full picture," Crain said. "We're
looking at the data."
Crain told the AP that Tuesday's attack was less serious than
attacks against the same 13 "root" servers in October 2002 because
technology innovations in recent years have increasingly
distributed their workloads to other computers around the
globe.