Yahoo!
eBay
Amazon.com
CNN
ZDNet
Buy.com
E*Trade
Datek
and the list goes on...

This reads like a who''s-who of the Internet. Amazon''s stock alone has dropped over 5% since the attack, probably due to lack of investor confidence. OME, you are right when you say that all of these sites have survived. You are right if you think that they will all see better days. But you are wrong in thinking that these script kiddies have done nothing, when it''s all over.

What they have done is put a dent in the confidence of a nation, from the home user to the Wall Street investor. It takes a huge event to make the value of a dozen stock exchange heavy hitters to go down almost instantly...and all at the same time! I know it seems like anybody and everybody is on the news lately, but it takes more than a trojan horse to scare up the FBI and the government into making statements about their current investigations into the matter.

The sad truth is that, based on the modus operandi of these attacks, this is the work of one group. Most probably this group is not comprised of 10-year olds...this time. This wave of attacks will end, and these mildly talented people will go away. The next outbreak of attacks will be run by clowns who have gotten ahold of the few programs needed to launch a distributed denial of service attack (to show how easy it is to get this type of software, I was going to include a link right here, but decided not to out of good taste). The guys who started it all will get away clean, and perhaps rightfully so. It has been known that the Internet was vulnerable to denial of service attacks for some time...but nobody cared to listen...they were all too busy basking in their little castles built on e-business and B2B bullshit. The distributed version of these attacks was always present, always feared, but no one actually believed that it would happen...much like a nuclear war.

One must also realize that only the high profile outages make the headlines. There were many other casualties along the way, from a general slowdown of the ''net to the many ISP''s and backbones left to pick up the pieces after inadvertantly acting as the delivery weapons of the attacks. With luck, a group of screwballs will attempt the same thing in the near future, only to get caught and incur the wrath of a beleaguered FBI. This will prevent this stuff from becoming more popular than Quake.

The intent of the attackers does not appear to be to permanently damage the e-business infrastructure, but perhaps to warn the online community that soon these attacks will become commonplace. It is good that the world has finally taken notice: There is no effective defense against distributed denial of service attacks.

Delisk: When they say that the services of many computers were employed to coordinate the attacks, they''re not talking about 5, 10 or 100 computers. It''s much more than that. Mason is right, they have a shitload of hardware. Or rather, they have access to alot of gear. Your own computer could be part of the attack, and you might not even know it. Your system could very well be running a service (i.e. not a task or user thread) that is bombing MSNBC.com with useless, CPU-intensive requests right now...

The worst part about it is that it lowers consumer''s confidence as well in buying online, and everybody trying to sell something online is worse off. And so all the companies suffer, so the consumers suffer... which turns out being bad for everyone.

hackers, crackers... who cares. vanity.

Anyways, The CIA is supposed to get involved because of the national security issue... etc.. non present..

Anyways all this stuff got me to thinking. If something like that happened here in canada... would our little men in the red suits and cowboy hats galop after the criminals while riding atop of their show horses. (RCMP) For those canadian-impaired... Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Our version of the FBI.

Just rambling, no need to comment.

It surprised me how much sympathy Mitnick was getting. Hackers, break laws, hurt businesses and people, and sometimes steal. I really hate this "oh, we''re helping companies by showing they need to beef up security" line they spout out. Most of these losers probably have some decent technical skill but rather than use it for something useful and good they want to instead be vain egomaniacs. Ouch, being rather blunt here, but I think I made my point.

Sieggy

How can somesaid hackes help pepoles by warning them or forcing pepoles to have better security?

If i got and kill 300 person in an airpoert....will you tell i do a good thing by warning pepoles than others pepoles can do just like me...will you said i help, by forcing airline to have better secuity?

This is one of the most pathetic and stupid excuses of all the time!

Hacker never help...if if was not of them we will not be forced to waste money on a so important security, hacking is a crime wich deserve an hrd punishement!

Die hackers....die ba$&*@" !

I just want to clear up any confusion surrounding this issue. I have some good friends who are hacckers and they are some of the brightest most intelligent people I know. They are also some of the best paid people in the world(all of them now being security consultants). I think the reason most people hack is that it gives them a sense of power. I wouldn''t classify the persons behind this attack as hackers and I don''t condone their actions. DDosing is not really cool no matter how much media attention it gets. The jerks are probably very pleased with themselves right now because of all the media attention this is getting.

Now the DDos attacked doesn''t mean that they have alot of computers. To conduct an attack you would look for insecure networks that would be easy to exploit. They then use those computers to do the actual attack. Although there is no effective defense their are steps that system admins can take to prevent their network from becoming a victim. Part of the responibilty falls on the people whose computers were used in the attack. SECURE YOUR NETWORK.

For more info on DOS attacks visit:
http://www.hackernews.com/bufferoverflow/00/dosattack/dosattack.html

Thats all I ahve to say.

I saw the term ''script kiddies'' come up. These are the second most annoying people of the planet (the most annoying people are the makers of my 2_click_hang_and_crash_computer modem, everyone must know: DONT BUY THE BILLION PCI MODEM).
With their stupid programs like netbus, especially annoying in a network environment (at school). You''re busy with something, and BANG, computer shuts down or something like that. You had a genius program named netbuster against this, but now there is netbusterbuster. If this goes on we have netbusterbusterbusterbusterbusterbusterbusterbuster.

These were my 2 cents