On Wed, 09 February 2000, Declan McCullagh wrote:
From my perspective, corporations are filtering information through clueless PR flacks to a (relatively clueless) media. I can't buy that sites hit by an attack 48 hours ago "have no idea what is going on." If that's the case, some people need to be fired real quick.
I'm not too concerned about clueless media and PR flacks.
But at NANOG I spoke with several people I thought would know, who didn't. I didn't talk to any GlobalCenter folks because I couldn't find any. They disappeared on Monday. But I did speak with several security people with other providers, and they hadn't heard any confirmed technical details. Just speculation about what had happened. In particular, everyone was wondering what made the attack so hard to detect as a DoS.
I ran into half a dozen GC folks while I was there both Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, of course, most of them get paged back to the office to deal with the problem and later spent time writing up incident reports. However, as expected so soon after such an event, they did not desire very much information to be let loose since they had not yet finished correlating everything and had not yet finished their discussions with yahoo on what occured. As for now, well, I too would be interested in learning exactly what happened (which attack, roughly how many relays, secondary effects, etc) but the chances of learning that are slim just because of the fear of PR problems it might create. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wayne Bouchard [Immagine Your ] web@typo.org [Company Name Here] Network Engineer ----------------------------------------------------------------------