Hackers take down Internet servers

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 07 February 2007 16:52

Your IT - Home IT

In what has been regarded as the most serious attack on the Internet since 2002, hackers on Tuesday managed to take down three of the 13 root servers that route traffic across the net. According to an Associated Press report, three servers were down for about 12 hours before the problem was fixed.

According to some experts, large volumes of data originating in South Korea were the cause of the problem.

In December 2002, a large scale denial of service attack targeted a company called UltraDNS (now Neustar Inc) which directed traffic for the .info and .org domains, flooding its servers with 2 million packets of data a second.

However, the latest attack was not considered as serious because improved distribution of the Internet workload has minimized the impact of targeted attacks.