Blackout hits major Web sites

A domain name outage Tuesday morning left many popular Web sites such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft.com and Apple.com temporarily inaccessible, according to a Web research company.

An outage or perhaps a test?

"Though Keynote did not have solid confirmation of the source of the issue, one executive there speculated that Akamai may have suffered a denial-of-service attack. DoS attacks flood a company's servers with millions of simultaneous requests for data. The attacks often overwhelm and shut down servers"

Can you imagine the number of computers needed to DoS the Akamai domain name server?

What do you think would be mostly affected by the WHOLE Internet going down? Electronic transfers? Communications?
Wpuld the repurcussions be fast or slow in spreading? Would it be worth taking the Internet down?


zdnet.com.com...


[edit on 15-6-2004 by NetStorm]

I've been trying to get some dirt on this problem since this morning, but details are slow in coming to light. Speculation as to exactly what kind of attack ranges from a mass surge of traffic from a small army of "Zombies" to a more directed attack at some flaw iin Akamai's infrastructure. A DDoS attack big enough to take down one of the big guys would take thousands of machines, but with worms like "Phatbot" infecting millions of machines worldwide, the capability is there.

The customers that used Akanai for DNS recovered by switching to their own DNS servers or ones run by companies other than Akamai.

Other than Yahoo mail which was down for a while, we never saw anything more than a performance hit on Google from here.

more links:
maccentral.macworld.com...
www.infoworld.com...

A bit of an update and a *bump* here...

It is probably a coincidence, but my ISP's DNS servers (the 4 that I tested) stopped replying to DNS requests. They were ping-able, but failed to respond to queries. I switched over to my work's DNS and was back in action. My normal DNS seems to be back up now. I know that it would be a waste of time to call and ask what happened, but I am very curious!

Edit: and I can't get on Yahoo Mail now using either set of DNS or a third from a dial-up account. 19:00hr GMT-5

[edit on 15-6-2004 by Spectre]

Just a thought, could this be the start of terriosts attacking America where it hurts-$? They have probably learned that there is no safe place to hide (ask Iraq and Afganistan) if they attack the US and we find where they are from.

[edit on 16-6-2004 by mrmonsoon]

I was frusterated today....TRYING to send NetStorm an Email....and my yahooy was kaploohee.
(yet ANOTHER reason to save up points enough for an ATS webmail addy)
NOW I understand WHY.........
it had a boo boo today I guess. It seams kissed and all better now though...

I dont understand HOW the internet being down would qualify as terrorism......I am NOT THAT ADDICTED TO ATS!
(yes I am)
(No I am not)
(yes I AM)
ahhhhhhhhh you get the picture.
How would the internet going completely down truly effect us in a way that could be considered terrorism?
Somebody please enlighten me?

[edit on 15-6-2004 by theRiverGoddess]

LOL Itz skynet the machines are gonna take over!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My opinion is that this was initiated by the Government as a simulated terror attack on the Internet. I believe they are preparing to shut down and minimize the influence of the Internet in the future. Who knows?

Why do I say this. You can check out this thread.

www.abovetopsecret.com...