contributed by Code Kid
Early reports indicate that Excite may have been hit with a denial of service attack early this morning. Some evidence seems to suggest that AOL has also been hit however neither has yet been confirmed.

More information on the attacks is now becoming available as sites recover from the attacks. After further investigation Yahoo has said that they have been able to determine that they actually suffered four separate attacks prior to the one that took them offline. All the attacks had a large distributed smurf component to them. Other sites have reported single sourced syn-attacks which may indicate copy cat activity. Of the several attacks against Yahoo only the one beginning at 10:30am PST on Monday had any noticeable effect. The massive amount of traffic generated, in excess of 1G bits/sec, took down one router and when it recovered Yahoo lost all routing to their upstream ISP. Due to earlier network hardware problems investigators believed this to be the reason for the outage at first. After completely pulling the plug from their upstream ISP, Yahoo was able to stitch things back together and finally realized that they had been under a widely distributed DoS attack. The attacker(s) seemed to know about the network topology and planned this large scale attack in advance. Global Center, the Yahoo ISP, is now throttling all forms of ICMP until they can determine the best configuration to prevent future attacks.

contributed by Frank
Mixter, based in Germany and the author of Tribal Flood Network, has granted several interviews. He has said that using his tools to create such attacks "is quite easy".

Heise - German
ZD Net

contributed by suthercj
The National Infrastructure Protection Center has reissued its advisory concerning Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The advisory was originally issued in December of 1999.

FBI.gov

contributed by Evil Wench
"We might have to pass some legislation to get even tougher" on computer crime, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orin Hatch, R-Utah, said Wednesday. Hatch intends to hold a hearing sometime in March to determine whether current laws give law enforcers the "tools that they need" to prosecute computer crime offenses.

News Bytes

contributed by Weld Pond
Yesterday HNN published an excellent overview of Denial of Service Attacks in general. In case you missed it we will link to it again.

Have Script, Will Destroy (Lessons in DoS)

David Dittrich has performed an excellent job dissecting some of the various attacks and the tools that enable them in extreme detail. You can find David's analysis of these tools at:

Trinoo

Tribe Flood Network

Stacheldraht

contributed by n
A rather funny political cartoon that pretty much sums up many peoples feeling on this matter has been posted.

Cartoon

contributed by Lady Sharrow
The UK Government came under fire on Thursday from the internet community after it published a Bill to regulate covert surveillance. The critics say the legislation, if passed, could lead to innocent people being sent to jail simply because they have lost their data encryption codes. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill covers the monitoring and the interception of communications by law enforcement and security agencies. It will, for example, lay down the legal rules that must be followed by the police and security services when they tap someone's phone.

BBC

contributed by n
The British and US Governments are to be sued in France after claims that the countries have spied on French companies, diplomats and political officials. Lawyers are planning a class action suit after confirmation last week that a global eavesdropping spy network exists.

The Times UK

contributed by Evil Wench
Not that she ever really went away but the Melissa virus reappeared Thursday afternoon clogging the email systems of Washington's Snohomish County government's e-mail system.

Nando Times

contributed by Anonymous
They are lots of and lots of rumors floating around the internet right now. Most of which can not be confirmed. Some of them are pretty far out/funny/weird etc. Remember these are only rumors and have not been confirmed.

February 8th: The attacks coincide to the day President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law.

A group known as the "Sovereign Anarchist Internet Militia" has claimed responsibility however their story does not match up with actual events.

Many of the attacks where actually perpetrated with the help of an insider at each company.

These attacks are actually the result of a security company trying to drum up business.

Microsoft is behind it all to promote the better security of MS Windows 2000.

The FBI is doing it to get more money from Congress.

Now that Kevin Mitnick is out of jail he must be the culprit.

Remember these are only rumors and have not been confirmed.