http://www.businessweek.com/ap/tech/D8N4IR301.htm 

By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press  
February 6, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 
computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday in one of the 
most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002.

Experts said the unusually powerful attacks lasted as long as 12 hours 
but passed largely unnoticed by most computer users, a testament to the 
resiliency of the Internet. Behind the scenes, computer scientists 
worldwide raced to cope with enormous volumes of data that threatened to 
saturate some of the Internet's most vital pipelines.

The Homeland Security Department confirmed it was monitoring what it 
called "anomalous" Internet traffic.

"There is no credible intelligence to suggest an imminent threat to the 
homeland or our computing systems at this time," the department said in 
a statement.

The motive for the attacks was unclear, said Duane Wessels, a researcher 
at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the San 
Diego Supercomputing Center. "Maybe to show off or just be disruptive; 
it doesn't seem to be extortion or anything like that," Wessels said.

Other experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, but 
vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were traced to South Korea.

The attacks appeared to target UltraDNS, the company that operates 
servers managing traffic for Web sites ending in "org" and some other 
suffixes, experts said. Officials with NeuStar Inc., which owns 
UltraDNS, confirmed only that it had observed an unusual increase in 
traffic.

Among the targeted "root" servers that manage global Internet traffic 
were ones operated by the Defense Department and the Internet's primary 
oversight body.

"There was what appears to be some form of attack during the night hours 
here in California and into the morning," said John Crain, chief 
technical officer for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and 
Numbers. He said the attack was continuing and so was the hunt for its 
origin.

"I don't think anybody has the full picture," Crain said. "We're looking 
at the data."

Crain said Tuesday's attack was less serious than attacks against the 
same 13 "root" servers in October 2002 because technology innovations in 
recent years have increasingly distributed their workloads to other 
computers around the globe.

-==-

AP Internet Writer Anick Jesdanun contributed to this report from 
New York.


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