What If A Hacker Attacked And No One Noticed?

The Internet sufferred what's being called the largest attack ever against its infrastructure--and very few people even noticed. On Oct. 21, a distributed denial-of-service attack, designed to flood the Internet's 13 root servers with too much traffic, lasted one to four hours but failed to cripple the Net. According to Matrix NetSystems Inc., which tracks Internet performance, several of the root servers kept working throughout the attack. Says Gartner security analyst John Pescatore, "The failure of this attack shows the Internet is a lot more resilient than many people give credit. Hackers aren't going to crash the Internet in 15 minutes."