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It's 1 a.m., Do You Know Where Your
Script-Kiddie Is?
By Ahmed Hussain
Islam Online, Washington
In the dizzying nanosecond world of cyberspace, network security is increasingly becoming a highly prized and rare commodity. Cyberninja hackers are constantly refining and updating their skills in their pursuit of virtual anarchy. The most recent list of victims includes Internet giants Amazon.com, eBay, E*Trade, Excite, CNN.com, ZDNet and Yahoo.
The hackers utilized a relatively complex means of blocking access to servers that host the Internet giants. DoS or Denial of Service attacks are brute force methods of shutting down a system because they overload victim servers with millions of requests for information in a single instant. In some occasions, DoS attacks utilize a great number of bad data packets that a victim server must use system resources to analyze. When enough of these bad data packets are being sent to a victim server, system resources are depleted and the server locks up.
Yahoo network engineer Jan B. Koum apparently sent a report Thursday to the CERT coordination center security task force at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh describing the attack from Yahoo's perspective, saying the perpetrator was not "your average script kiddie." A "script kiddie" is a derisive term frequently used by hackers themselves to describe a would-be hacker whose only skill is the ability to lay his or her hands on software pre-programmed for some malicious stunt.
Last week's attack increased lag over the Internet by a whopping 25%, according to Keynote Systems, a company that measures Internet traffic almost 300 times a day. Excite.com, for example, was hit especially hard, as its capacity was reduced to less than 40% of normal.
This recent act of Internet terrorism prompted a response from Pennsylvania Avenue as President Bill Clinton vowed for a tougher stance on "script kiddies" and cyberninjas alike. "That's what's going to happen here. This will be an ongoing effort to try to make sure we get all the benefits of the Internet, all the benefits of the computer revolution, but we [must] develop better defenses and better defenders," the president stated at an unrelated event on February 14
Science & Technology
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