Last month, without much fanfare, Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center released a white paper on current trends in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. While much of the report merely chronicles the alerts and warnings the organization has published over the last two . . .
Last month, without much fanfare, Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center released a white paper on current trends in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. While much of the report merely chronicles the alerts and warnings the organization has published over the last two years, a few pages toward the end--where the authors point out new tactics taken by malicious users--are downright troubling.

For those of you who don't know, a DoS attack is an event that prevents users from accessing a Web site. It is often the result of hundreds of computers overwhelming that site with bogus traffic.

THE WHITE PAPER, written by CERT's Kevin J. Houle and George M. Weaver, as well as Neil Long and Rob Thomas, found that the means necessary to enlist computers (commonly known as "zombies") in this sort of attack has changed. Whereas DoS attacks used to result from the manual insertion of code via a Trojan horse into the targeted computer, now they are the result of autonomous network worms.

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