 |
Al-Jazeera DNS Downed Two Days by DoS AttackDoS attack set up to overcome corrective actionsMarch 25, 2003 - Al-Jazeera, the well-known Middle Eastern news network, was hit by a powerful Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The DoS attack targeted the Domain Name Service (DNS) servers. When the DoS attack hit, the news company had just launched a new English language website and also posted some photos with captured US soldiers. Al-Jazeera provides a different perspective on the war in Iraq. Many people disagreed with the news network putting their DNS at risk for hacker activity such as DoS attacks. The news network's DNS suffered an Internet Relay Channel (IRC) bot attack. In the case of an IRC DoS bot attack, IRC channels are used by bots to send commands to networks of enslaved computers all over the world. When given the order, all computers send requests to the targeted DNS servers. Due to the huge number of requests, the DNS servers quickly become flooded with data, and the whole website goes down. When the DoS attack began the bogus traffic spiked at 150Mbps. To evade the attack, Al-Jazeera purchased more bandwidth. The DoS hackers scaled their attack too meet the new bandwidth and by the following day the websites were receiving 200 to 300Mbps of constant traffic. It seems that the DNS attack used between 1000 and 5000 computers. DataPipe, the company that hosted the site could no longer provide services to Al-Jazeera because the attack affected many of its clients, so it ended the hosting. This attack is a clear example of how a few hackers can launch a DoS that can breach DNS security and silence even biggest news networks. Source: ZDNet.co.uk About Secure64 Software Corporation
|
|
|