Hackers Attack Root Servers and Slow Internet Key Traffic

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Well at least it shows the Internet is not very susceptible to such attacks due to its distributed nature, even if the root nameservers are down, the DNS system still functions.

This was a pretty heavy attack though and the most significant in the past 5 years or so, someone testing their ego I guess.

I CAN H4XOR YOUR INTERWEBNETS!

The attack, which began Tuesday at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, was the most significant attack against the root servers since an October 2002 distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, said Ben Petro, senior vice president of services with Internet service provider Neustar. Root servers manage the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), used to translate Web addresses such as Amazon.com into the numerical IP addresses used by machines.

Thankfully the Internet didn’t crash, if it did I’d be very sad!

“Two of the root servers suffered badly, although they did not completely crash; some of the others also saw heavy traffic,” said John Crain, chief technical officer with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in an e-mail interview

The two hardest-hit servers are maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense and ICANN, he added.

The botnet briefly overwhelmed these servers with useless requests, causing them to occasionally hang, but did not disrupt Internet service, Petro said. By 10:30 a.m., Internet service providers were able to filter enough of the traffic from the botnet machines that traffic to and from the root servers was essentially back to normal.

It seems the attack wasn’t that strong and they managed to filter it out, it was in terms of MB rather than GB frequently seen in modern DDoS attacks.

It was just very focused, targeting only the root servers.

Source: Network World