Internet Changes Everything

Major Internet sites attacked

This story smacks of "keeping things quiet". My home page "my yahoo" was down longer than indicated here. I suspect this was a very big deal.

TheStar.com - Major Internet sites attacked

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Several major Web sites, including Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, were inaccessible at times early yesterday due to what the company that distributes them online called an attack.

The problem began about 9 a.m. Eastern and lasted less than two hours, said Jeff Young, a spokesperson for Akamai Technologies Inc., whose network of servers mirror some of the Web's top destinations to improve their performance.

Young called it a "large scale, international attack on Internet infrastructure." However, there was no evidence that non-Akamai infrastructure was affected.

Amit Yoran, head of the U.S. department of homeland security's cyber security division, declined to comment on the alleged attack and its scope, deferring questions to Akamai. The government-funded CERT network emergency response team did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Keynote Systems Inc., a Web performance measurement service, said the only sites where it saw trouble yesterday were those served by Akamai.

Young said he had no immediate information on the nature of the alleged attack, nor did he know where it originated or other Internet infrastructure companies that might have been targeted. Keynote said the availability of the top 40 sites it monitors dropped from 100 per cent to just over 80 per cent during the outage.

associated press

June 16, 2004 at 07:56 AM in @ My Views @, Security | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home