Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Blackout hits major Web sites

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 21:12:51 -0400

Blackout hits major Web sites
Jim Hu, Special to ZDNet Australia
June 16, 2004

URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/0,39023166,39150649,00.htm

A domain name outage Tuesday morning that left many popular Web sites
such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft.com and Apple.com temporarily
inaccessible was the result of an Internet attack, according to Web
infrastructure company Akamai.
The attack caused problems for more than two hours--from 5:30 a.m. to
7:45 a.m. PDT. Many of the world's most popular sites suffered from
widespread outages, according to Keynote Systems, which compiles
statistics related to Web surfing. On a typical day, the top 40 sites
measured by Keynote rarely dip below 99 percent availability. On
Tuesday, however, Keynote saw availability drop to 81 percent.

Where the attack struck first has yet to be determined, and the affected
companies are pointing to others, not themselves. An attack on Akamai
could have rippled out to Google and the other sites, or those sites
might have been individually targeted, which in turn could have put
pressure on a key Internet service that Akamai runs.

An Akamai spokesman said it noticed an attack against four unnamed
"customers" that rendered their sites inaccessible. Akamai said that the
strike against those customers in turn caused a failure of its own
domain name server (DNS) system, which translates word-based URLs into
numeric Web addresses to link surfers to company sites.

"We do know that attack was against four sites that happened to be
Akamai customers," said company spokesman Jeff Young. "But I don't know
if the intent was to go after Akamai or go after Web properties that
happened to be customers of ours."
Other parties may not agree with that assessment. Keynote earlier
Tuesday reported the Akamai DNS system outage and speculated that
Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai was the target of a denial-of-service
attack, which then caused the Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple sites
to fail.

Dug Song, security architect for network security company Arbor
Networks, said that the outage appeared to be an Akamai problem. During
the outage, Song noticed that sites such as Google were still
functional, but someone typing www.google.com couldn't get to that site
because the address would not translate into its numeric Internet
Protocol code.

"It was definitely some sort of Akamai issue," Song said in an
interview. "Their name service for all these major sites stopped
working. You couldn't reach these sites even though the sites were up.
You just couldn't get to them because the name resolution wasn't
working."

Furthermore, Song noticed that Web-wide traffic during the outage
actually declined, making it unlikely that Google and the other sites
were the victims of a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which
thousands of unknowing PC "slaves" would have flooded their servers with
useless data or requests for data.

In a recent incident, the Netsky virus used such a technique to target
Kazaa and other file-sharing networks, disrupting service at some.
Earlier in the year, the main Web site of the SCO Group was crippled
after attacks from computers infected by the MyDoom virus.

On Tuesday, David Krane, a spokesman for Google, confirmed that the
search site was "affected for a short period of time earlier today" and
that all systems have been restored. Krane said Google was not the
target of a denial-of-service attack.
With the sites back up, it appears that the DNS issue has been resolved.
But Yahoo's new Web-based e-mail service, launched Tuesday, continues to
have problems.

Since early Tuesday morning, users have been reporting glitches with
Yahoo Mail, such as site
inaccessibility, slow page loads and inoperable buttons on the site. A
Yahoo spokeswoman said the
company is "investigating the potenti

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