Three DNS Root Servers Taken Down By DoS Attack

According to recent new updates on InformationWeek, a moderate sized Denial of Service (DoS) attack which in all probability originated in South Kora, nearly took down 3 of the 13 Root Nameservers that collaborate and manage the internet traffic worldwide. When a single company is the target of a DoS, it hurts only that particular company. However, a DoS attack on the root servers mean attacking the very core of the internet infrastructure and can take down the substantial parts of the net in one go.

Fortunately for us, those three servers were heavily strained, but managed to withhold from being snubbed out completely. According to Ben Petro, a senior vice president of NeuStar (one of the companies which manages one of the root servers), the servers had almost reached their "pivotal point".

The main attack hit the roots at 5:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, and reached its maximum sustained traffic at 7 a.m. It started to subside around 10:30 that morning and was still going on -- though rather weakly -- at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

What saved the day, according to Petro were the warning signs which came early on Monday night, between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. in form of a small-scale denial of service attack. Most likely the attackers were testing out their targets.

 

 

"It looked like a precursor," says Petro. "It wasn't the strength of an attack of substance but it had the intensity level of someone who had spent the time to engineer a real attack.... We were bracing ourselves. Generally, when we see that type of attack, we hold our breath for 24 to 48 hours because very often large-scale attacks are foreshadowed by smaller ones that test the target."

 

 

o , its so good that the servers were saved at last , just recently on thread was started at Xisto like what would happen once the entire internet falls , isn't this thing have to be made more and more secure ,there are thousands of companies in u.s. and other parts of world which would go bankrupt if something happens to the internet ,lets just hope that no such things occur to internet and the security engineers always remain ahead of these hackers ,whose only aim is to destroy things, may be they dont know what satisfaction creativity is rather than destruction

Hehe )

It was a pleasure to do^^ O. 13 enjoyed shutting them down hehe Next we plan to knock out 6 of the root servers.

So if all of the 13 servers got knocked down then we wouldn't be able to access any domain names? Is that right?That is one step to breaking the Internet. Getting rid of the DNS servers and HTTP backbone.The servers must be really strong to withstand such a strong threshold, however it must be a huge powerful connection for this DDoS attack to make it worthwhile.

I have read a few articles about this, seems the wording varies on how 'techie' the reader base is. All computing sites say it was intense, but national news pages talked more about how its distributed and is designed to weather these kind of attacks. Probably just trying not to scare anyone.

Check out what is looks like on a graph, interesting: HERE

-Jordan

Honestly, I don't know why we let these "hacker nations" or "untrustworthy nations" even have Internet access! We could open up some IPs on the net if we took countries that abuse the Internet and don't do anything about spam, viruses, hackers, etc. offline.I really don't get the point of trying to take the Internet down. Yes, you'd be famous but the FBI, CIA, and other government organizations, and a few billion people would try to kill the person succeeding. If people want to go back to the stone age, let them. I for one FUNCTION off the Internet. Without technology, I do not have a job.Anyways, thanks to these things called load balancers, they can launch multiple servers and keep traffic loads light off of each individual server. Lets see you hack the net now...[N]F