Security experts have issued a collective warning about an unusual surge in Internet attacks that could potentially overwhelm the most popular websites and disrupt global email traffic.
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Source: Security |
The type of attack, first detected at the end of last year, specifically targets crucial servers in the “global Internet traffic” infrastructure. These attacks bombard these servers with massive amounts of meaningless data that even the most powerful computers struggle to withstand. In the most recent incident, attackers gained control of an Internet name server in South Africa and wiped all its content without restraint.
Name servers are specialized servers responsible for directing Internet traffic accurately to its intended destination.
Subsequently, hackers send spoofed requests to the “slave” directory computers. From here, a torrent of meaningless data is “unleashed” to flood any target the attackers desire.
Security experts have tracked at least 1,500 targeted attacks of this nature, with the common denominator being that commercial websites, major ISPs, and leading Internet infrastructure companies were taken down for at least a week. The precision of these attacks is such that most Internet users remain completely unaware.
Ken Silva, the security director of VeriSign, compared the scale of this attack to the damage and losses experienced during the severe attack in October 2002. At that time, 9 out of the 13 “root” servers that manage global Internet traffic were incapacitated. VeriSign operates 2 of these 13 root servers, but their systems were unaffected.
However, Silva noted that this current attack is significantly larger in scale compared to 2002, both in intensity and impact. He mentioned that attacks early this year managed to flood the target network with just 6% of the over 1 million name servers across the Internet. Many instances exceeded a staggering speed of 8GB/second, a figure that can be considered “horrifying.”
“This can truly be called the Katrina of the Internet,” Silva stated.
The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team has warned network engineers since December to quickly reconfigure name servers to prevent hackers from exploiting them in attacks.
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