Last Tuesday, June 15th, I came in the office at about 8:45 am to look up some information about viruses for one of our consulting customers. I surfed over to the Symantec Web site only to find that it was inaccessible. I then tried the Microsoft Web site for some information. Microsoft’s site was also down, as was Apple’s Web site. I found that Google’s Web site was intermittently off and on.
Four of the world’s biggest Web sites, all high-tech companies, were having severe Web accessibility problems at the same time. This was surely no coincidence. I correctly suspected the cause -- cyber terrorism. Later that day, Netcraft, an Internet services company, also reported Web site performance issues during the same time for Yahoo!, McAfee, TrendMicro, Bell South, General Motors, Coca Cola, and Verizon.
As network administrators scurried to find the cause of the outages, they discovered that the problem was with the servers at Akamai Technologies Inc., a Cambridge company. Akamai runs a content distribution network for many world class Web sites. They use more than 15,000 servers scattered around the world to cache (store) and distribute information for over 1,100 Web customers, many of which are high profile, high-traffic Web sites. This distribution of content alleviates the load on the Web companies’ servers and allows the Web pages to be served up more quickly.
The outages were repaired in just a few hours, but the incident left company officials trembling. It also left me shivering and should have all Internet users quacking in their boots.
This was a sophisticated, large-scale attack. Hacker-controlled “botnets” were used to create a Denial of Service attack on the Akamai servers. Such an attack is a common tool used by hackers in which they bombard the server with electronic requests to overwhelm the server. A botnet is a network of “zombie” computers that are used in such an attack. Computers infected by Trojan viruses and those attacked by hackers can become like zombies, being used for such attacks without the computer owner’s knowledge. The extent of this attack shows that hackers have taken control of a very large number of other people’s computers and can create a bot network extensive enough to cause serious damage to the Internet. With all the viruses, hackers, and terrorists in our world today, this incident is a very bad omen.
Help keep the Internet safe. Make sure your computer is virus-free.
