ITinfo: DDoS Attacks Get Really Wild

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E-Commerce Sites Beware

Crackers get new tools to ply their trade

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DDoS Attacks Get Really Wild

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

A new cracking tool, Mstream, is making its way around the darker corners of the net. Mstream joins Trinoo, TNF2K, Stacheldragt, Shaft, and other software tools used by crackers looking to bring down high-profile e-commerce sites. Previous generation tools were used in February to crash Yahoo! and other sites.

The new tool, Mstream, is a much more powerful app for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites.

DDoS crackers embed their software of choice into thousands of computers using the same methods employed by worm creators. Worms are often grouped as computer viruses.

At a designated time or on command, the thousands of embedded software programs begin to send bogus messages to the targeted site. The volume of electronic traffic quickly overwhelms even the most powerful website computers. The site becomes overloaded and unavailable to other Internet users.

The Mstream program poses a special concern for computer security authorities because it can coordinate a DDoS attack using fewer computers than the other cracker programs, possibly using only a handful of systems.

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References

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DDOS Outages Cost $1.2 Billion
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Hit the Net

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updated May 1, 2000