"This is the first major attack of a kind that I believe to be the final Internet security problem," says a Lucent Technologies Internet security expert, who says he "has been waiting" for just such an event. This and similair "ping" floods are somewhat common. We have seen 2 incidents in the past 6 months. Both times hackers used our system to initial ping floods against other ISP's, effectivly shutting down thier T1 connections. We did not see the floods since our 10Mb connection absorbed the attack as normal traffic stats. Alex Rosen was quoted in the Washington Post that this was not the publicity he wanted to have, but believed such incidents needed to be exposed. /stb --- Stephen Balbach "Driving the Internet To Work" VP, ClarkNet due to the high volume of mail I receive please quote info@clark.net the full original message in your reply. On Thu, 12 Sep 1996, Paul Ferguson wrote:
FYI: Edupage excerpt of a WSJ article.
- paul
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 17:18:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Edupage Editors <educom@elanor.oit.unc.edu> To: "EDUCOM Edupage Mailing List" <edupage@elanor.oit.unc.edu> Subject: Edupage, 12 September 1996
CRACKER ATTACK PARALYZES PANIX Repeated attacks by a computer cracker have virtually shut down New York's Public Access Networks Corp., better known as Panix. The attacks have overwhelmed the computers' capacity to respond to requests for an "electronic handshake" by sending as many as 150 bogus requests a second. "This is the first major attack of a kind that I believe to be the final Internet security problem," says a Lucent Technologies Internet security expert, who says he "has been waiting" for just such an event. Internet computers have no quick way of distinguishing these bogus requests from real ones, and even when security software is upgraded to ease the problem, the crackers could respond with even more intense assaults. "There's going to be the usual arms race," predicts the Lucent security expert, between improved security measures and crackers' ability to disable them. (Wall Street Journal 12 Sep B1)