Last weekend, users experienced difficulties logging into several major sites like America Online, MySpace.com, and EarthLink, raising suspicions of a large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
The web services provided by these sites were largely unavailable for an extended period, primarily affecting login processes, homepage access, and user email account sign-ins.
While large services often experience glitches, the simultaneous occurrence of these issues prompted attention from multiple security firms. However, as of now, there has been no confirmation of any specific attack. AOL managed to resolve the issue within a few hours, while MySpace and EarthLink took longer to restore their services.
A spokesperson from Symantec reported on July 28 that they had detected a backdoor worm targeting MSN Messenger, but it was not severe. Furthermore, the security firm did not note any additional attack incidents related to the widespread outages.
