Politech mailing list archives
FC: New York Post: "Cyber brats wreak havoc!"
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 12:07:58 -0500
http://www.nypost.com/news/1038.htm cover story CYBER-BRATS WREAK HAVOC BY JAMMING UP THE LINES By PAUL THARP High-tech hooligans who jam up Web sites do their dirty work by stealing a forgotten tool once used by the scientists who first built the Internet. What the techno-thugs are doing is the same as having 100 million people pick up their phone receivers at the same time to crash the phone system from sheer overload. The trick is getting all those millions to execute their phone prank in unison, which is nearly impossible. But Web vandals have managed to bypass using real people as conspirators and instead have hijacked hundreds of computers to launch jamming attacks on Web sites. Favorite places to kidnap PCs are universities, where students tend to be careless about leaving "open doors" on their PCs and because universities have large, direct pipelines to the Web instead of commercial providers. To jam up the works, hijackers use a pinging device that was devised nearly two decades ago by Internet founders as a way of conducting tests and communicating with each others' computers. "That was when the Internet was a gentlemen's club of scientists and there was a lot of trust," said Declan McCullagh, the Washington correspondent for Wired magazine. Times have changed and so has the technology -- for both good and evil. [...] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe: send a message to majordomo () vorlon mit edu with this text: subscribe politech More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current thread:
- FC: New York Post: "Cyber brats wreak havoc!" Declan McCullagh (Feb 10)