Hackers have been hijacking thousands of PCs to spy on users, shake down online businesses, steal identities and send millions of pieces of spam. The latest threats to the Net are autonomous software programs used by the hackers to combine forces to perpetrate mayhem, fraud, and espionage on a global scale. This is the story of how a company called Blue Security fought the Internet mafia and lost. Here is a snippet from Wired:At first, it looked like typical network congestion. So the system administrators weren't too concerned when TypePad blogs and LiveJournal social networks flickered like a light bulb in a faulty socket. But 15 minutes later, at 4 pm on May 2, 2006, the sites went dark, and so did the mood at Six Apart, the company that owns them. In the blink of an eye, 10 million blogs and online communities disappeared. "It looked like the servers had freaked out," CEO Barak Berkowitz recalls. Flash floods of data thundered into one network port, stopped inexplicably, then reappeared to overwhelm another. The engineers pored over logs, desperately looking for a cause. After an agonizing hunt, they found it: a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS. Six Apart's servers had been inundated with so many requests that the machines couldn't possibly process them all. It was the digital equivalent of filling a fish tank with a fire hose.
Read the full article from the following link.
Link: Wired
More interesting reads:
- Washington Post (Invasion of the Computer Snatchers)
- Washington Post (Bringing Botnets Out of the Shadows)
Tags: Hacker | Botnet | Blue Security | Internet | Network
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