By Ben King, 26 January 2001 18:15
NEWS Hackers bombarded Microsoft servers, bringing the Microsoft.com and MSN.com to their knees for two hours on Thursday morning US time. The attack followed hot on the heels of two days of downtime which was caused by human error. Petur Petursson, CEO of domain name server (DNS) experts Men and Mice, said: "The first incident was an accident, but the accident revealed the vulnerability of the whole system. On Thursday, someone took advantage of that vulnerability to bring the system down again." Petursson added that the set-up of Microsoft's domain name servers, which translate numerical IP addresses into URLs like www.silicon.com, were vulnerable to attack as all the company's DNS servers were all connected to the same sub-network. It's believed that they were connected by a single router to the main network. When that router was affected by the denial of service (DoS) attack, the DNS servers, and therefore the sites, became unavailable. It is unusual for a DoS attack to target a router rather than a server. The hackers' attack was similar to the one that brought down Amazon, eBay and Yahoo! last February. DoS attacks normally involve a hacker bombarding a web server with fake requests for information, leaving it incapable of serving genuine users. Microsoft notified the FBI as soon as the attack had taken affect. The company said in a statement that it was "completely separate" from the technical glitches which took their sites offline on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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