Ook eBay, Buy.com, Amazon en CNN doelwit van DoS attacks

ZDNet schrijft dat binnen een periode van 2 dagen vijf van de meest populaire internet sites slachtoffer zijn geworden van een Denial of Service attack. Yahoo! wordt hiermee gevolgd door eBay, Buy.com, Amazon en CNN. Beveiligingsexperts vrezen dat er weinig gedaan kan worden om DoS aanvallen te voorkomen. In het geval van de Buy.com aanval werd de hosting provider van Buy.com geflood met 800Mbit traffic per seconde, meer dan 25 keer zoveel als wat Buy.com onder normale omstandigheden te verwerken krijgt (thanks kAtAnA voor de tip):

eBay, Buy.com and Yahoo! all were targeted by coordinated, distributed denial-of-service attacks -- a technique in which attackers use a great number of compromised servers to flood a target with data. This type of attack takes only limited technical expertise and can be very hard to stop.

"Denial of service is becoming more sophisticated," according to a "white-hat" hacker working for security firm @Stake Inc. who identifies himself as Weld Pond. "The problem is not going away."

[...] While filtering packets can be a defense against most of today's tools designed to conduct a distributed denial-of-service attack, new techniques could bypass such defenses.

Once such tool for attackers, known as Stream.c, sends forged TCP/IP packets, which a typical router will pass to the destination server. The packets can be designed to take up precious computing cycles before the data is determined to be bad.

The bad new is that such packets are hard to detect and filter out. The good news, perhaps, is that -- so far -- only vandals seem interested in using the attacks.