Online attackers have briefly disrupted service on at least two of the 13 “root” servers that are used to direct traffic on the Internet.

The attack, which began Tuesday at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, was the most significant attack against the root servers since an October 2002 distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack…

“Two of the root servers suffered badly, although they did not completely crash; some of the others also saw heavy traffic,” said John Crain, chief technical officer with ICANN.

The two hardest-hit servers are maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense and ICANN, he added.

Crain ventured a guess as to the attack’s effect, however. “I suspect that the largest effect of the DNS traffic was to deprive some engineers of sleep and generate press,” he wrote.

The same sort of creepy babies who threw their bottle out of the crib — to gain attention.



  1. C. Flowers says:

    I guess they did it just to say they can. Waste of time though! I wish they’d do something constructive rather than destructive.

  2. Janky says:

    Maybe it’s some ferrin’ government trying to bring down the western world. I think terrorists are involved.

  3. Mac Guy says:

    Somewhere, in some dark corner of Wisconsin, some granny is clicking her mouse as fast as she can on her OC3 line while the lights dim.

    “Granny, stop it! You’re killing the Internets!”

  4. Big A says:

    I noticed something going on yesterday. The volume of bad email went up 50% yesterday, and today is on track to way surpass that. The “attack” if you can call it that, was mainly a dictionary attack. Thank God for my Barracuda Spam Firewall. I wish I didn’t get spam like JCD.

  5. Justin says:

    Did you know that no one company/agency controls all 13 root servers? cooh eh? 🙂

  6. Danijel says:

    That’s what you get for using DNS… People should learn to use IP addresses instead!


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