Thursday, May 04, 2006

Cyberattack knocks millions of blogs offline

CNET News.com: "About 10 million LiveJournal and TypePad blogs were offline or barely reachable for several hours Tuesday as the result of a massive denial-of-service attack.
The attack started around 4 p.m. PDT, targeting the popular blogging services and the corporate Web site of their provider Six Apart, company vice president Anil Dash said in an interview Wednesday. Service was back to normal at midnight, according to Six Apart's Web site.
'Any large service tends to have a pretty constant level of attacks, but this was on a scale that I don't think anybody could have anticipated,' Dash said. 'I think it is of a scale that would have impacted any large site on the Web.'
In a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack the target is overloaded with requests for information. The requests come from a large number of hosts, typically compromised computers. As a result, legitimate users can no longer access the site. "

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