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Yahoo! becomes the latest victim of Net vandals

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE: Yahoo!, the second most frequented Web site, was the target of Net vandals early this week when they inflicted the site with what is called as distributed coordinated attacks. Yahoo! users were denied access to the site for three hours on Monday as a result of the attack.

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American security agencies have expressed concern over the growing incidences of such attacks in the recent past. The main issue is that the attackers in almost all cases get away without getting detected.

Also called the denial of service attack, it involves the attackers bombarding the site with mock traffic, thereby barring the genuine user from entering the site. It uses a single server to attempt to tie up a network’s connection, denying its users access to or from the Internet. The distributed coordinated attacks, however, uses thousands of servers. Because so many servers are used in a distributed coordinated attack, each attack can be camouflaged as a legitimate connection attempt -- making it difficult for the victim's intrusion software to identify that it is under attack and impossible to identify just who is attacking, points our ZDNet on its site.

American agency CERT/CC has already warned of software "tools" that allow any semi-knowledgeable vandal with a computer and Internet access to set up "agents" that flood the target servers with traffic, preventing legitimate users from accessing the server. The three best-known programs are Trinoo, Tribe and Stacheldraht, which one CERT member reported had attacked using more than 100 servers, reports ZDNet.

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