eWeek: Root Server Attack Fizzles
An attack, apparently intended to get the attention of the security community, failed in its attempt to bring down, or even slow down, the Internet, analysts say.
According to the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the attack was aimed at one of its root servers—the top-level servers that translate requests for names into IP addresses so computers can retrieve the data on the Internet that users need.
The attack, which took place early the morning of Feb. 6, was described as a distributed denial of service attack, and was apparently intended to so overwhelm the target servers that Internet users would be unable to resolve names, and therefore not be able to reach some Web sites.
Unfortunately for the perpetrators, their efforts went largely unnoticed. In fact, at Verizon, which operates metropolitan area networks including MAE East and MAE West, was unaffected. [More]