Root DNS Servers Survive DDOS Attack
The Washington Post called Monday's Distributed Denial of Service Attack on the 13 root DNS servers "the largest ever attack on the Internet." You could have fooled us, because the story never got close to the front pages of the mainstream media, given all the attention devoted to the sniper who is besieging the Washington, DC area.
Many of us in this country, including the police and newsmedia, are now fairly dependent upon wireless email devices like Blackberry pagers and Handspring Treos. These wireless devices are endpoints that depend upon data being routed to two or three different proxying servers between the time an email reaches your mailbox, and its successful delivery to the client device. If the attack that took place on Monday had been successful, communication to these devices would have been delayed or disrupted.
The media would still have their mobile phones and satellite uplinks. The police would still have their mobile phones and two-way radios. But, we suspect that a wireless email disruption would have had a profound effect on an intense criminal investigation like this one. This is a reason to take the concept behind the National Infrastructure Protection Center more seriously.