The date was Monday, February 8, 1999. It would go down in history as the beginning of arguably the greatest cyber-attack of all time. Greatest not in terms of money required to pull it off. Greatest not in terms of technical knowledge required to pull it off. It would not even be greatest in terms of the amount of resources required to pull it off. What was so great about the cyber-attack that took place that Monday morning (Pacific Time) was the target: Yahoo!
Ask someone to name a web site they visited recently and almost invariably they will respond "Yahoo!" To many Yahoo! is the Internet. So when the greatest website in the world went dead for 5 full hours, the rest of cyberspace shuddered. If the mighty Yahoo! with almost 9 million daily visitors (at the time) could be brought to its knees, the rest of the Internet was sitting targets too, they reasoned. Worst fears were soon realized, as other big name dot-coms became the next victims. Over the next three days Buy.com, eBay, CNN.com, Amazon.com, ZDNet, E*Trade, and several other popular Internet sites would all be struck. The technique used was simple.
It was called a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (or DDOS for short). Hundreds of computers were infected with a cleverly written Trojan horse program. Once infected, these machines became "zombies," totally subservient to their master. And so when their master, a teenager no less, ordered these zombies to bombard Yahoo! with phony Internet traffic, they promptly complied. Yahoo! was flooded and clogged up with so much phony traffic, real visitors had no way of connecting with the website.
Because DDOS attacks do not require too many resources or a very strong technical background, and since they have a high profile impact, many experts believe that they would be the most likely kind of attack used should terrorists turn to cyberspace in their war against America. In fact just this past Tuesday there were reports that the New York Times was under exactly this type of attack. To start comparing cyber-terror attacks with real life terror attacks seems a bit inappropriate. For one thing disrupting Internet traffic to the New York Times did not involve any loss of life. Furthermore, unless perpetrated by highly skilled professionals, DDOS attacks historically haven't lasted longer than several hours to a week, at most. The point is that in cyberspace the effects are only temporary.
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