CYBERSPACE — The mean streets of the information highway were just a little bit meaner recently – and naturally, the ugliness had to take place in a so-called “red light” zone. Alas for the stability of the internet, plenty of its denizens still think of it as a wild frontier where clever technical warfare doesn’t just prove who’s left – but also who’s right.
At issue is a spat between two adult websites whose owners chose not to resolve their difference peacefully. Instead, they decided to go bad ass on one other with code wars.
According to IDG News Service, one of the enraged site owners uncovered a previously undiscovered Internet Domain Name System (DNS) glitch and took full advantage of it, via a DNS Amplification attack.
The assault might have gone largely unnoticed had it not affected ISPrime, a small New York ISP that hosted one of the warring sites. Phil Rosenthal, the company’s chief technical officer explained to IDG that that attack began on the morning of January 18th and lasted about a day. While that in itself is not necessarily noteworthy, Rosenthal contends that the fact such a small number of PCs could produce such an enormous surge in traffic on the network is.
The following day, another distributed denial of service (DDOS) volley was launched, this time lasting three days and clogging as much as 5GB/second of the ISP’s bandwidth.
Although Rosenthal and his staff were eventually able to filter the invading traffic out of the general stream, he contends that the situation “represents a disturbing trend in the sophistication of denial of service attacks.”
Other experts echo Rosenthal’s observation and warn that DNS Amplification attacks will likely increase, pointing to the fact botnet operators have boosted their arsenal of cracking tools to include them.
While it’s easy to brush off a spat between two porn sites, those observing the rise in DNS Amplification assaults caution that it’s only a matter of time before they’re launched against higher profile nameservers. Given how difficult it can be to protect against such an attack, their higher profile has once again called the security of the entire DNS system into question.
