This isn't so much some news, as something that I thought was worth reading. You will no doubt recall the well publicised "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks " on the Internet's Root Name Servers recently? If not, try reading this.

Anyway, you may be wondering just what on Earth a "Distributed Denial of Service Attack" actually is... Well, I've just finished a fascinating read here which pretty much breaks down the situation into digestable chunks....

"The DoS concept is easily applied to the networked world. Routers and servers can handle a finite amount of traffic at any given time based on factors such as hardware performance, memory and bandwidth. If this limit or rate is surpassed, new requests will be rejected. As a result, legitimate traffic will be ignored and the object's users will be denied access. So, an attacker who wishes to disrupt a specific service or device can do so by simply overwhelming the target with packets designed to consume all available resources.... A DDoS can be thought of as an advanced form of a traditional DoS attack. Instead of one attacker flooding a target with traffic, numerous machines are used in a "master-slave", multi-tiered configuration....."

A really good read here from Security Focus Online which will answer a lot of your questions about DDoS.

Wanna discuss the article or anything about DDoS attacks? Post a comment here. Just don't ask how to do them because we are not telling you.

Gibson Research Corporation has a similar page right here which explains the classical (DDOS) attack, and also a page here which explains a more complex attack DOS attack type...

Have these attacks been attributed to any hacker groups ?

It sounds a bit too sophisticated to be simple script-kiddies trying to look cool.

Didou, this sort of stuff goes on all the time. I personally know about 5 people that have quite a system running. It can be deduced to a script kiddie here and there, but most of the time is is some pretty advanced computer users that are doing this.

These are not things to mess around with, I might add. I had a friend get threatened quite bad due to a stupid move on his part.

And most of the groups are people that run distributing channels on IRC, at least that is what I have found. Mostly used for getting back at each other for ddosing their servers or something.

its a black art....

those nutters targetting the root DNS servers was a bit of a mistake, though. The internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war. The original idea behind Internet technology was that it was a way for governments to communicate if we did push the red button.....

that said.... I did post this...... its hard to know what to believe but I think that something that can destroy the internet takes some bombs, not some DDoS attacks...

I was gonna post that link...

I fear to know what bandwidth the root DNS servers have available...must be like OC768 or something.

I don't think you can trace a specific DDoS attack down to a certain person, as there are tens of thousands of individual computers taking part in it all at once. Mostly website hacks are attributed to hacker groups.

I don't get why any hacker would want to attack the root DNS servers, because if they succeeded the internet would be just as bad for them as it is for us

Some people are just bad and that's just that. they have no g/f and feel the need to take it out on the rest of us....

Hmm, that would be me then

you don't know the power of the dark side....

The Dark Side is P66's girlfriend now...