Internet Outages..

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     We've experienced a number of brief internet outages today (about four
total).  These are not Y2K related, they are people with no lives related.

     They are the result of packet flood denial of service attacks which
saturate the network links.  They've recently developed tools that generate
packets that make it past filters in Cisco because they look like something
other than UDP, and since every major backbone provider right now uses Cisco
it is presently a pretty indefensible attack.

     To further complicate things, there is also a new type of denial of
service attack called a distributed denial of service attack that uses a number
of machines they've hacked controlled by a central machine in order to flood a
site from a variety of sources. 

     Because these low-lifes know a lot of people were convinced the world was
going to come to an end on January 1, 2000, they are playing on those fears by
launching these attacks with greater than normal frequency today. 

     Hopefully we'll have a few more examples like the recent Seattle hacker
that was jailed and these people will get the hint.  This is really no
different than arson or other forms of vandelism.