[LINK] Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever

[Roger Clarke]

"Josh Rowe" <josh@email.nu>:
>Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A828-2002Oct22.html>>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A828-2002Oct22.html
>"The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated
attack ever, starting late Monday, according to officials at key online
backbone organizations.
>Around 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, a "distributed denial of service" (DDOS)
attack struck the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for
almost all Internet communications. Despite the scale of the attack, which
lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected,
experts said.  ..."

I've just yesterday finished a set of slides for a presentation on 
Friday on Internet Governance (trying to convince lawyers to learn 
enough about the Internet before they start discussing how to 
strangle it with laws):
     Internet Architecture and Operation:
         'Supra-National' Rather Than 'International' Governance
     http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IGCLPC02.html
(Constructively negative comments much appreciated, as always)

The thought struck me during this and other recent discussions re DNS 
that the volume of traffic at the root servers would generally be 
very low.  That would be because the relatively small number of 
domains for which the root servers are (equal) authoritative 
name-servers are pretty stable, and hence the entries are cached all 
over the place, and hence there don't need to be many enquiries to 
them.  They're effectively the reboot-mechanism of last resort.

If that analysis is correct (and I certainly don't vouch for it!), 
then, if the DDoS attack was intended to be nasty, it was 
poorly-targetted.

If, on the other hand, the attack was intended to send a fairly 
harmless but highly symbolic warning-signal to the world that 
Internet infrastructure is fragile, then it was extremely 
*well*-targetted.

-- 
Roger Clarke              http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
			            
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Visiting Professor, Uni of Hong Kong, Dept of Comp Sci and Info Sys
Visiting Fellow, Australian National University, Dept of Comp Sci
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