Hackers target web advertisers
28 July 2004
Hackers have attempted to shutdown a number of the most highly trafficked sites on the Internet by attacking the company that distributes their advertising.
According to the Washington Post, DoubleClick's Internet servers began to receive a flood of bogus Web page requests, creating a bottleneck that blocked many major sites from displaying ad images.
At the peak of the assault, affected Web pages were available less than 25 per cent of the time, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a Web performance monitoring company in San Mateo, Calif.
DoubleClick spokeswoman Jennifer Blum said the attack targeted the company's domain name servers (DNS) causing "severe service disruptions" for all 900 of its customers.
Blum said that hackers used the firepower of thousands of hijacked computers to flood individual Web sites with so many bogus Web page requests that it rendered the site unavailable to legitimate users.
"Beginning this morning our DNS infrastructure came under a denial-of-service attack from outside sources," Blum said.
"The situation has improved over the last few hours and we continue to take steps to resolve the situation permanently."
According to the Washington Post, the worst hit sites were Nortel Networks, Gateway, MCI, CNN.com and Schwab.com, and the washingtonpost.com.
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