From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Wed May 30 2001 - 12:54:24 MDT
New Breed of Attack Zombies Lurk
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,43697,00.html
A brand new generation of zombies is lying in wait in the dark corners and
unused basements of some computer networks, waiting to be released so that
they can eat the brains of the Internet.
Three new types of denial-of-service attacks have been identified by
technicians from Asta Networks during a six-month period the company spent
monitoring the Internet2 Abilene backbone, an experimental high-speed optical
network that connects 180 universities across the United States.
Editor's Summary
http://searchsystemsmanagement.techtarget.com/newsItem/0,289139,sid20_gci55177
3,00.html
Asta Networks, which spends its days monitoring the Internet2 Abilene backbone
for potential denial-of-service attacks, has identified three new breeds of
DoS attacks: pulsing zombies that that direct short bursts of attack traffic
at an intended target; a degradation-of-service attack that does not overwhelm
a server but stuns it with significant amounts of network activity over a
period of time that eats up bandwidth and money; and dress DoS rehearsals,
where hackers in control of zombie computers practice smaller-scale DoS
attacks on a target for a short period of time, typically a day or so before
the full-scale attack is launched.
''Pulsing Zombies'' Among the Identified Trends
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:K4-FQVMsot4:www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/az/Bw
a-asta-networks.R9NS_By9.html+%22pulsing+zombies%22&hl=en&lr=lang_en
Asta Networks has noticed several new trends regarding zombies, the innocent
machines that hackers compromise to launch attacks. The latest generation of
zombies includes "Pulsing Zombies," which send pulses of attack traffic at the
intended target. The discontinuous nature of these attacks makes detection and
location of these zombies far more difficult. In addition, Asta Networks has
seen that zombies are now being tuned before attacks. In a recent attack
attempt, the hackers conducted a dress rehearsal for their assault, during
which attack traffic was directed at the target for a short period of time
before the full-scale attack was launched.
τΏτ
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
Useless hypotheses:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism
"In a world without fences and walls,
who needs Gates and Windows?"
--Charles Kendall
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