Sleepycatz

Help Help I”m Being Attacked — Whatever

I have been somewhat busy; and therefore, unable to attend to the various outrages which have been occuring in the past month or so. Certainly the most irksome fiction of the hoi polloi was the Attack on the Internet of October 21st. According to the popular media, on this date the Internet suffered a major attack which came close to shutting down the global network. BAH!! What actually occured way a pretty standard Distributed Denial of Service attack against the root DNS servers (really only 12 of the 13 were at all effected). DDoS attacks are quite common nowadays, and there are well known measures which can be taken to lessen their effect. Yet, despite the facts that this attack was not paricualrly effective, nor posed any long term threat to the Internet as a whole — in fact all root DNS servers would have to be down for a couple of days before most users would notice — the popular, and industry, media immediatley sounded a panic alert that the Internet had been hacked! What’s most disturbing is that so call experts — like Kim Komando — fed this this media frenzy with their own hyperbole stating that this was a sophisticated attack which could have rendered the global network inoperative. At the same time real experts, like Paul Vixie, were misquoted and ignored in deferance to creating a panic story. Frankly, the UUnet outage of the pervious weeks affected far more users and created far more headaches for network operators then the attack on the root servers did. Yet, the outage was genrally ignored by the media. Leaving one to wonder if the reporting on the DDoS ROOT Server attack was part of a larger journalistic zeitgeist — one designed make us feel as if we are under attack in all areas of our lives. Essentially, this incident has again illustrated that the popular media has no clue as to how the Internet operates, and what compuetr security consists of. In the future, we should all be more suspicious of any news regarding the Internet and of cyber attacks in general.

This entry was posted by steve on Sunday, November 3rd, 2002 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.