Net's Vulnerability Exposed

Cyberterrorism...

"October 28, 2002 (Computerworld) -- Last week's assault on the Internet's core addressing system may not have caused much real damage, but it highlights the Internet's vulnerability to more sophisticated cyberattacks in the future, security analysts warned.


All 13 of the Internet's root Domain Name System servers—three of which are located outside the U.S.—were victims of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack on Oct. 21.


'It was the single most elaborate and focused attack on the DNS network that we have ever seen,' said Tom Ohlsson, vice president of Matrix NetSystems Inc., an Austin, Texas-based Internet performance monitoring company.


The attack appears to have been an attempt to disrupt the Internet by clogging root DNS servers with useless traffic. The root DNS servers provide the vital translation services needed for converting a Web name such as www.computerworld.com into a corresponding numerical IP address. "