Yahoo's Sunnyvale, Calif., Web hosting company, Global Center, worked closely with Yahoo once the Internet portal realized it was being hit. Staff from Yahoo and Global Center spent half an hour diagnosing the routers and at first thought there were interoperability problems between the Yahoo and Global Center routers. All the traffic had stopped, and packets were being dropped. Another network service provider also called to report problems. Global Center managed to get the situation under control by implementing a rate-limit filter in the routers to stop the ICMP bombardment.
Universities acknowledge there's plenty of opportunity for it.
This is the first time students get exposed to that much bandwidth. It's almost like electronic crack. If the attackers are clever and are masquerading who they are, they're probably using other systems they've broken into, and it can be very difficult. Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan also contributed to this report. Other recent articles by Pappalardo eToys attacks show need for strong Web defenses Article discusses distributed DoS attacks and possible ways to defend against them.