Russian hackers attacked Akamai servers
Date: June 17, 2004Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By:
Websites of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others were taken out by a DDoS attack for 2 hours till these companies relocated their DNS records to their own computers. One expert noted that the sites themselves were still operational - it was only the DNS servers that resolve the word based web addresses of www. to numerical values that were failing.
One respectful Russian security forum states that the malfunction at Akamai DNS servers was incurred by a DDoS attack committed by Russian hackers with the purpose to demonstrate their capabilities to inactivate www.microsoft.com site.
This topic became interesting after someone named DoZ boasted to "pull a Bill Gates' offspring for $80,000". He contended that he would be necessarily caught for that. People at famous security forum were sceptical about that, but they brought up a scientific question "How can anyone block Microsoft, without using millions of hacked computers and then how can he be not caught?"
A certain Dr.X asserts that he had a purely academical idea to affect Akamai DNS to block www.microsoft.com but then he discarded this idea at once hence his favourite search system www.google.com would be down. He does not know who conducted this attack, but he supposes that these people work for a command earning by DoS attacks and they needed this attack to promote their organization.
An Akamai press service denies the fact of their DNS servers’ outage.
According to Internet monitoring company Keynote Systems, the attack on web infrastructure company Akamai Technologies used by Google, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft, drove their sites to 'near zero' availability, according to Keynote's VP of technology and operations, Lloyd Taylor.
Later Akamai said a hacker attack had targetted four of its customers, but the severity of it had knocked out its DNS system and thus affected others.
The sites were back to normal availability by about 2.45pm yesterday.
However, according to some reports, the Domain Name Server problem may have been a result of problems at Akamai, rather than the result of a denial of service attack.
Add comment
Email to a Friend
